Managing up, part 3: Dealing with an authoritarian boss

Let’s say you have a manager who makes all the decisions. Now let’s say you don’t find your job particularly rewarding. But (with apologies to Mark Twain), I repeat myself.

Now say you’d like to improve the situation through the art of managing up. Some background on organizational decision-making will help:

As with everything else that has to get done, decisions are subject to the six dimensions of optimization: Fixed cost, incremental cost, cycle time, throughput, quality, and excellence.

Authoritarian decisions have low fixed and incremental costs, short cycle times, and high throughput. That’s all good. Their quality, however, is spotty, and with them, excellence (the catch-all category for positive attributes like flexibility and creativity that aren’t easily measured), is in short supply. Excellence is where broad commitment and buy-in would be categorized, and with authoritarian decisions there’s none of it.

Unlike consensus, where this form of excellence is the major saving grace.

The accompanying table summarizes the comparison between authoritarian decision-making and the other available decision styles (note that delegation’s attributes depend on the decision style chosen by the assignee).

Why do many managers prefer authoritarian decision-making? It might be the aforementioned endorphin rush, but more likely it’s due to:

• Simple impatience: All other forms of decision-making take more time and attention.

• Cost and time: Even a patient person might not choose to invest significant amounts of staff time and attention to the decisions that have to get made.

• The company they keep: Hear “We aren’t going to hold hands singing Kumbaya,” enough times and anyone, your boss included, will think twice about entertaining anyone else’s thoughts before making a decision.

• Lack of awareness: They don’t realize there are alternatives other than authoritarianism and consensus.

So there you are, working for someone who excludes your entire team from all decisions. How do you get them to spread the joy?

The odds-on, risk-free course of action: You don’t. Most authoritarian decision-makers used this mode throughout their career. And as thus far they’ve done better in their career than the people who report to them have done in theirs (by definition), they have little reason to change.

Also … the problem is that they aren’t interested in your opinion, right? If they aren’t, they certainly aren’t interested in your opinion about the value of asking your opinion.

Odds are you won’t be able to do anything about it. So trying to change things means sticking your neck out –lot of chance for downside and not much for improvement.

Sorry.

But if you insist, here are two alternatives that might have at least some impact:

Open-door policy: Yes, most open-door policies have more in common with pressure-relief valves than with drive train components, but unless you think your boss’s boss is incapable of basic discretion (unlikely, as indiscretion is a career-limiting character trait), the only risk is your manager seeing you walking through the open door and asking you what that was all about. Have an unthreatening generic explanation ready, just in case.

The basic rules for using the open door are to (1) be calm and confident; and (2) make a business case, not a personal case.

Calm and confident matters. Sound upset and emotional and it’s about you, not your manager. You want to sound like you’re your manager’s social and business equal, where your roles could easily be reversed and nothing untoward would come of it.

As for making a business case rather than a personal case, this means focusing on how much better your manager’s decisions would be if the experts he/she hired were in a position to influence them (and be prepared with some examples). Don’t focus on exclusion’s impact on morale. This is business. The unimportant schmucks at the bottom have hurt feelings and morale that depends on managerial feel-good behavior. You don’t want to sound like one of them.

Confidant/protégé: Even the most autocratic managers have employees they confide in and (sometimes) help in their careers. There are so many reasons to want this role that using it to suggest more staff inclusion in decision-making is almost a waste.

If you can achieve confidant-hood or protégé-dom, you can use it to suggest more inclusion. But on the other hand: If you’re in this position, your manager already includes you in decisions. Are you sure you want to be so altruistic as to try to spread the wealth?

Suggestion: Don’t, other than suggesting something like, “You know, Jim, Angela knows a lot about this subject. Why not just delegate the decision to her?” if the opportunity presents itself.

That’s enough. It might even make the point.