Bruce Tulgan, Founder, RainmakerThinking Inc., New Haven | How to manage up

Q. You recently had a book published called “It’s Okay To Manage Your Boss.” What was your inspiration for writing the book?

A. This book is written for people who want to be high-performers. In order to be a high performer in today’s workplace, you need to create high-engaged relationships with every boss-whether that boss is great, awful, or somewhere in between.

In my training seminars, when I start talking about these hard realities, participants start listening carefully. When I tell them that I don’t have any easy answers because easy answers work only in fantasyland, they start nodding. Then I promise them that I do have lots of very hard solutions that will take lots of guts, skill, time, and discipline to implement. All I do in my seminars is teach frustrated individuals to copy what the most effective “boss-managers” are actually doing every day. 

I’ve trained thousands of employees on applying these steps to build and maintain strong, highly-engaged working relationships with their managers. What really makes this book different is that it is a systematic approach to taking control of your own conduct in order to optimize your working relationship with every boss a based on the best practices of highly consistent superstar-performers.

If you follow these steps consistently and you still can’t get what you need from your boss, then maybe your boss is truly a “jerk boss.” I actually wrote a whole chapter on how to do deal with the most common jerk-boss scenarios. 

Q. What are some of the basic tenets of the book?

First and foremost: You need to take responsibility for your role and your conduct in every relationship with every boss you answer to for any work for any period of time. Taking control of your role and your conduct in every relationship with every boss is the number one thing you can do to advance yourself and your success in your career no matter where you work or what you do.

So… No matter who your boss may be on any given day, no matter what her style and preferences may be, there are four basics that you absolutely must take responsibility for getting from that boss:

1. Clearly spelled out and reasonable expectations, including specific guidelines and a concrete timetable.

2. The skills, tools, and resources necessary to meet those expectations or else an acknowledgement that you are being asked to meet those expectations without them.

3. Accurate and honest feedback about your performance as well as course-correcting direction when necessary.

4. The fair quid pro quo — recognition and rewards — in exchange for your performance.

I’ve broken my approach to real-world boss-managing into seven concrete steps. I call them the seven steps back to the basics of managing your boss:

STEP ONE. The first person you have to manage every day is yourself;

STEP TWO. Get in the habit of managing your boss every day;

STEP THREE. Take it one boss at a time, one day at a time;

STEP FOUR. Get clear expectations from your boss every step of the way;

STEP FIVE. Get your hands on the resources you need to succeed;

STEP SIX. Track your performance every step of the way;

STEP SEVEN. Go the extra mile to earn credit and more rewards.

Q. Why don’t you want to come across as a complainer? After all, as the cliché points out, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

 A. You need to engage in a regular ongoing one-on-one dialogue with every boss about the work you are doing for/with that boss. What is the mission? The long-term goal, intermediate-term goals, short-term goals? What are your concrete goals and deadlines? What is up to you and what is not? What can you do to go the extra mile? What do you need to do to be really really valuable? And then, maybe, just maybe, only during some down time, when it feels appropriate, you might work to get clarity on exactly what quid pro quos you should expect in exchange for the value you are delivering every step of the way.

Don’t get me wrong. You need to have an ongoing dialogue with every boss. And that dialogue needs to be as deep and rigorous as necessary to set you up to get lots of work done very well very fast all day long and succeed and go the extra mile and then some.

On the other hand, you should be very careful about wasting even one minute of your bosses’ time…or anybody’s time for that matter. Your bosses have their own tasks, responsibilities and projects besides their management obligations to you and their other direct-reports. Your boss is busy. You are busy. Nobody has a minute to waste.

Q. Let’s look at the flip side. When is it NOT okay to manage your boss?

First, remember, choose your moments. You don’t want to have a lengthy learning conversation with a wise experienced boss every day. There probably isn’t time for that. But you want to have that learning conversation some time. At a good time… Not when the building is on fire. Not in the middle of an emergency or just before an urgent deadline. But you want to have that learning conversation sometime.

Mostly the conversations you want to have are routine, brief, straight, simple conversations to make sure you are focusing on the right priorities and back-burnering the things that can wait; to make sure you are going in the right direction; following best practices; identifying optimal resources; anticipating and planning to avoid unnecessary problems; and so on.

Of course, all managers would prefer to manage self-starting high-performers who do tons of work, very well, very fast without any guidance or support, who make no mistakes, and who have very few needs and expectations. I promise you, if given their druthers, just about all managers would opt for this type of employee. The only problem is that this type of employee doesn’t exist. Only the very worst managers actually manage as if this fantasyland could possibly be true. They want you to do everything on your own. The only problem is that when you do everything on your own, you are not likely to have anywhere near as much success as you would with the guidance, support, and engagement of a boss who is experienced, knowledgeable, and effective.

You only have two choices when working with such managers. You can avoid them and hope they find another employee to entangle and ignore. Or whenever possible you can manage that boss so closely that she either learns to engage with you effectively or else decides she would rather deal with someone else who will be content to operate blindly in a sink-or-swim environment. Good riddance.

Q. Your firm has also released findings about key differences between high and low performers. What were your findings and how can this help in managing employees?

A. What we found was that there were huge differences between high performers and low performers when it came to their opinions and behaviors in relation to their bosses.

For example, low performers tend by wide margins to believe statements like these:  “It is my boss’s responsibility to make sure I know exactly what I’m supposed to be doing and exactly how I’m supposed to be doing it.”  “My boss should take primary responsibility for making our working relationship successful.”  “If my boss doesn’t give me what I need to be successful, then he/she can’t expect me to do a great job.” 

In contrast, high performers tend by wide margins to believe statements like these: “It is my responsibility to make sure I know exactly what I’m supposed to be doing and exactly how I’m supposed to be doing it.” “It is my responsibility to maintain a successful working relationship with my boss.”  “It is my responsibility to help my boss help me do a great job.”  “If you really want to be creative at work, the first thing you need to know is exactly what is and what is not up to you.”

The differences are even more dramatic when it comes to behaviors. High performers tend by wide margins to have regularly scheduled one-on-one conversations with their immediate boss in which they discuss the details of their work; prepare in advance in writing for both one-on-one meetings and group meetings; ask managers for concrete time-budgets, schedules, and deadlines; and ask managers repeatedly for “negative feedback,” including “what could I have done better?” and other questions soliciting constructive criticism. Low performers are very unlikely to do any of these things on a regular basis.