管理老板

Yes, you read the title correctly. It’s possible for us to manage our boss. Not only it’s possible, it’s almost necessary because your boss is the single person who has the most influence over your job. First, I want to tell a story to demonstrate why it’s important to manage your boss, and then I will point you to somereading on managing your boss.

Several years ago, I managed a bright young analyst, Z, who is an Asian immigrant. One Monday morning, I wanted a piece of information for a presentation I was preparing. I asked Z to pull the relevant data from the database. Z said no problem and he would take care of it by the next day.

At about 11:25 PM the next day, Z sent me an e-mail with a 3.5 megabytes spreadsheet attached to it. I opened the spreadsheet and found a very detailed data pull of all the possible information related to my request, but they were not summarized to the level I requested. After spending 15 minutes to summarize the information into a pivot table myself, I realized that Z used an assumption that was different from what I intended.

The next morning, I dropped by Z’s cubicle and told him about the wrong assumption. Z apologized for his error and told me he would send me the correct information that night. I told him that I would not need the information before the weekend so he could take his time, but it’d be nice if he could also summarize the information to the right level for me.

On Thursday afternoon, a manager from another department stopped by my office. She was waiting for an important report from Z, but Z told her the report would have to wait because he was working on my request. I was shocked to hear it took Z that much time to work on my request because I thought it was a very simple query. Also, I thought the report he needed to produce was way more important than my request. If I had had to prioritize the two, I would’ve easily picked the report over my request.

From a boss’ perspective, I believe that Z had at least two opportunities where he could improve on how he managed his boss.

The first opportunity is to push back. When I made my request, I had no idea that it was a very busy week for Z. He had two more deadlines to meet on top of that important report. However, like many Asian immigrants would probably do under this situation, Z took the request automatically and promised delivering it much sooner than I needed. Because of the Asian tradition of respecting authorities, Z thought any request coming from the boss must have been important. It would have been a much better choice for him to tell me his schedule and ask me directly to prioritize my request against other things on his plate.

The second opportunity is to clarify. Z did not clarify with me exactly what I requested and made a wrong assumption the first time around. The fact that I had to go back to him again made his already busy schedule even worse. Not only that, had Z taken the time to clarify his understanding of my request, it would have given me chance to know that what I thought was a very simple request turned out very complex and time consuming. I would have discussed with him to find out if there were any other alternative way I could get a rough estimate instead of the full blown data pull he ended up doing ... ...

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