“My boss micromanages me. What can I do about it?”

It’s a common complaint. If you’re algebraically inclined:

“My boss does x(i) and I don’t like it. What can I do?” where x is the set of all managerial behaviors, and x(i) is a specific member of the set.

It really doesn’t matter very much what x(i) stands for. The same short answer usually works, just as it does for the negative form, “My boss doesn’t do x(i) and I don’t like it. What can I do?”

The answer, for x(i=1 to infinity) is, find a different boss, and if you can’t, learn to live with the one you have.

There are, of course, a few exceptions. If your boss is creating a threatening or harassing environment, or your co-workers are creating one and your boss refuses to do anything about it, document everything and contact HR. If that doesn’t work, contact a lawyer. And, at the same time, find a better boss. But don’t just learn to live with the one you have. There are some things up with which you must not put.

But a boss who micromanages? Or is demeaning? Or overly critical? Or never gives you a compliment or thank-you?

Find a boss whose style is more compatible. Or, learn to live with it. Or, I guess, hope your boss gets promoted, demoted, fired, transferred, or hired away… and, learn to live with the situation until that happens.

In the case of micromanagement, I do have one additional suggestion to try first: Determine whether your boss is a micromanager, or is micromanaging you. There’s a big difference.

If a boss is a micromanager, that’s a personal style. It’s about the manager. A manager who is micromanaging an employee — just that one employee, that is, or maybe just two or three — doesn’t trust that employee to get the job done otherwise. That’s about the employee, and what it’s going to take to be a better one.

If that’s what’s going on in your work world, ask. Don’t use the word “micromanage” when you do, either. Ask, “I’ve noticed you’re supervising me more closely them most of the other employees. I’m guessing I need to do something differently. What is it?”

That’s if it’s just you, or just you and one or two others. Otherwise, find a different boss, or learn to live with the one you have.

Why is this? Why wouldn’t your boss want to know how to be more motivating, get more out of employees, be better liked, or what-have you?

Why? Because whatever it is about your boss you find disagreeable is part of your boss’s formula for success, that’s why. It’s part of what he or she has done throughout his or her career to become your boss.

It’s worked. If what you want to suggest would have worked, you’d be the boss instead, or at least that’s how the world looks when viewed through your boss’s corneas.

Think you’re going to change that through the magic of an epiphany-inducing conversation?

Think again.

Actually, when the complaint is micromanagement, what you’d be asking of your boss is even tougher. To understand why, go back to the two golden rules of delegation:

• If you know how to do a job better than your employees, only delegate it if you’re willing to accept the risk of failure.

• If your employees know how to do it better than you do, always delegate it unless you’re willing to accept the risk of failure.

Micromanagers feel, rightly or wrongly, they have the superior skills, so when they have to delegate … and every responsibility listed in a job description constitutes delegation just as much as a special assignment … it’s going to be grudging and closely watched by any manager who’s uncomfortable with the idea of deliberately risking failure.

It’s like the advice columnists say in the context of interpersonal relationships.

If your goal is to get the other person to change, the best thing for you to do is to find a different goal.

Assuming, that is, you want something useful to happen. If your goal is to have something to complain about, on the other hand, by all means go ahead and have a heartfelt conversation with your boss.

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Eighteen years ago, in KJR’s predecessor, InfoWorld’s “IS Survival Guide,” I published my first piece on bad metrics, but far from the last.

And if I hadn’t published the column about corporate xenophobia and what to do about it fifteen years ago, I could publish it next week and it would be just as current. Check it out.

Sales-pitch alert! This is a plug. There is a tie-in to IT management, but it’s thin. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. – Bob

I’ve always thought someone should stage the climax of a thriller at Disney World, in the “It’s a Small, Small World” ride. Imagine Jason Stratham and some equally lethal opponent, splashing around the boats and cutsey exhibits, exhausting their supply of bullets until, finally, they resort to hand-to-hand combat, all with the exhibit’s impossible-to-get-out-of-your-head theme song playing in the background.

Irresistible!

It is a small world, as my wife Sharon and I discovered while having dinner with my friend and client, Dave Kaiser and his wife Jean. That’s when a chance comment revealed that Dave and Sharon both grew up in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin.

Then Dave asked a consequential question: Had Sharon heard of the elephant murder? Turns out, some years back a Wisconsin Rapids woman had been killed by an elephant under suspicious circumstances (as if there might have been any other kind).

Dave’s father found the body, close to the backyard of his good friend, Kissy Knuteson — the man with the irresistible name, and also, as it turns out, someone with whom one of Sharon’s uncles used to build houses.

Very small world. Also, an irresistible premise for an “inspired by a true story” novel, or so Dave and I concluded.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Actually, it isn’t history at all. It’s pure fiction, with deep meaning only if you measure depth in millimeters and not many of them.

Yes, this is a thinly disguised plug for our new book, The Moral Hazard of Lime Daiquiris (by Bob Lewis and Dave Kaiser). Through the end of the year you can buy it for a mere $3.99, exclusively for the Kindle platform.

Should you buy this bit of mayhem, for yourself or for friends as (ahem) a seasonal gift (assuming you have any friends, that is, and assuming you don’t care that they might then become former friends after reading it, perhaps because, hypothetically, they have actual taste) … anyway, Dave and I would appreciate a review, too.

Not a good review, necessarily. We aren’t trying to pack the house. If you think it’s awful, say “this book is awful!” If you like it, that’s even better.

But even bad reviews beat being ignored. Thanks.

So … how do a CIO and IT management consultant go about co-authoring a piece of fiction? Answer: We started by defining our process, of course.

We started by taking stock of the fiction we both enjoy, and concluded (none of this is profound):

The stories we like the best have engaging characters. They have plots moved along by action and not just internal dialog. They don’t waste a lot of space with endless detailed descriptions of the scenery, either.

They have a strategy, too — an order to telling the story.

Very important (and this week’s alleged point): The characters have to be plausible — we figured people do things for reasons that make sense to themselves, which meant we needed to know our characters’ biographies and personalities.

I promised there’d be something this week that has some actual value to you as an IT leader. Here’s what it is: It isn’t just fictional characters who have to be plausible. The real men and women you work with have to be plausible too.

See, no matter how much each of us tries to deal with people as they are, the best we can actually do is to deal with our mental model of who they are … our inferences regarding how they were raised, what they’ve experienced, their biases, the hidden assumptions they make … how they think about the world and how they’re likely to respond to it.

Many managers just aren’t very good at this; some don’t even understand why it’s important.

It’s important because if you want to lead them, which means if you want them to follow you, understanding them as individuals is superior to understanding them as generic members of a class. Whether the class is “millennials,” “boomers,” “geeks,” “bureaucrats,” “bean counters,” “empty suits,” or “horrible human beings,” for every employee some stereotype helps you understand there will be at least two where it misleads you.

In baseball, batting .333 is quite good. In leadership, if that’s the best you can do when assessing the people you work with you have three choices: get better at it, get out of management, or buy yourself a copy of Moral Hazard.

No, Moral Hazard won’t make you a better leader. But it might take your mind off your inadequacies.

Not a bad ROI for four bucks.

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Nearly forgot. If you like it, tell your friends. We’ve always wanted to go viral.