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“Managing up” takes more than just flattering toadyism and “personal branding.”

There is, for example, the art of teaching your manager her (or his) job without her realizing that this is what you’re up to.

Last week’s missive provided some techniques for helping your manager delegate better, disguised as techniques for receiving assignments better. Where else might your desire to be an excellent employee collide with your manager’s less-than-complete eptitude?

Here’s one that drives many employees crazy: An inability to get decisions made quickly and effectively. If you sometimes feel like screaming, “Just make a decision! Any decision! It doesn’t matter what it is, so long as we know which way ‘forward’ is!” here’s how to handle the situation:

Start by understanding the different ways leaders make decisions, and what each of them is good for. Here’s the short version (for the long version, read Chapter 4 of Leading IT: <Still> The Toughest Job in the World, by yours truly, 2011):

  • Authoritarian: “I’m the boss. This is the decision.” It’s the right answer for a crisis, when any decision right now beats a great decision made long after the battle is over. It’s cheap and quick. Like most everything that’s made cheaply and quickly, quality suffers. Also, there’s no buy-in.
  • Consensus: “I don’t agree with it, but I do agree to it.” Consensus is authoritarianism’s polar opposite — slow and expensive, and with high buy-in. Also, consensus decisions involve compromise, so at best, quality is decent. Consensus is for the big decisions, when buy-in matters more than anything else.
  • Consultative: “I want everyone to tell me what they think. Then I’ll decide.” It’s the manager’s workhorse, with enough involvement for buy-in and enough information for quality, without the compromises that degrade consensus decisions and without the endless discussions that delay them.
  • Delegated: “You know more about this than I do, so you make the decision. Step one: Decide which decision style you plan to use.” Usually, the right answer to step one is for the assignee to make it consultatively.
  • Democratic (aka voting): Don’t do it! Democratic decision-making is the right answer for choosing delegates and representatives. It’s the only possible fallback when nobody has authority and a group can’t reach consensus. But it’s awful, with poor quality and mediocre buy-in.

How does this knowledge help you?

If your manager is stuck in consensus, it’s probably out of either fear or ignorance — fear that without a consensus process you and your colleagues won’t buy in; ignorance that there are alternatives. (If your manager is stuck in authoritarianism you have a very different problem, which we’ll take on next week.)

So depending on the decision that isn’t getting made, here are two tactics you can use that will get it made, while making you look good and without embarrassing your manager. Call them the “It’s okay to lead, Fred” tactic and the “I volunteer Jane” ploy, Fred being your manager; Jane being a colleague.

Use the “It’s okay to lead, Fred” tactic when your manager should be making a consultative decision. It works like this: You say, “May I make a suggestion? We seem to be spinning our wheels here. Speaking just for myself, I’m willing to go with whatever decision you make, Fred. And so long as I feel like you heard what I have to say about it first, I’ll even be happy with it. How about the rest of you?”

The “It’s okay to lead, Fred” tactic accomplishes three goals at once: (1) It forces your manager to choose the optimal decision style (consultation). (2) It stiffens your manager’s spine. And (3) it puts everyone else in a box — after all, who is going to be say, out loud, that no, they won’t go along with the manager’s decision, once you’ve said you will?

Use the “I volunteer Jane” ploy when one person in the room knows a lot more about the subject than anyone else — when delegation is the right style. Which is all you have to say: “I have a suggestion, Fred. Jane is our expert in this subject. Why are we all getting an equal say in it? I say, delegate the decision to Jane and let’s move on. What do the rest of you think?”

Once again, you’ve forced your manager into the optimal decision style, and you’ve put everyone else in a box.

Meanwhile, Jane will either love you for this or hate you intensely, depending on how much work it promises to be and how risky the decision is.

But hey, you can’t have everything.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Time for another re-run. This time, it’s in response to some correspondence I received from a mid-twenties employee who got into trouble for failing an assignment.

His take on the subject: His manager did a bad job of delegating. The result — he was in over his head and didn’t get the help he needed.

The real problem: His manager did a bad job of delegating and my correspondent did a bad job of “reverse delegation.” Read on.

– Bob

Business bookshelves are filled with techniques for managing and leading better. Help for employees whose bosses don’t read this advice … and would blow it off as unimportant if they did … is harder to find.

There are, for example, lots of sources of information on how to delegate well. As delegation is the responsibility that defines management, you’d expect every manager in the world to be pretty good at it. You’d expect wrong.

How it’s supposed to happen: Your manager is clear about the assignment, and its deliverables. Your deadline and time budget come from a plan you develop and your manager reviews.

And, you meet every week to discuss progress, any issues that arise, and any help you might need.

How it often does happen: A manager sends his/her victim a one-to-two sentence email.

That’s it. No clarity, no approved plan, no support. It’s assign-and-ignore delegation. Oh, and these managers are the ones who chew out employees whose results miss the undefined deadline, target, or both.

So imagine your manager tells you, via email, to “Write a BYOD policy for us.”

Close your eyes and imagine a sandy beach. No, not your happy place. Guadalcanal. As pleasant as the expanse of sand and ocean looks, it has lots and lots of landmines.

To avoid them, take charge. Just because your manager doesn’t know how to delegate, it doesn’t mean you don’t know how to get delegated to.

Step 1: Force a meeting. Use your company’s calendar system to schedule a half-hour meeting. No more. A half hour is hard to turn down.

You actually reserve two half-hour time slots, by the way — the second one a week after the first. We’ll get to why in a minute.

(If your manager turns down your meeting request, you’ll have to handle what follows by email. Document your understandings, adding the phrase, “Unless I hear otherwise from you by <date>, I’ll operate under this understanding:” followed by your assumptions. Yes, it’s a CYK (cover your keister) play. Sometimes that’s what you have to do.

Most managers, though, will meet at least once if you force the issue and don’t ask for too much time. Make the most of it.

Step 2: Run the meeting. Minor point: Don’t bring a printed agenda. A bad delegator will probably interpret one as a sure sign you’re a plodding bureaucrat. Plan the meeting, sure. But don’t print the plan.

Start by clarifying scope. In our BYOD example, that mostly means listing the technologies it’s to include and exclude: Smartphones? Yes. Tablets? Yes. Laptops? No — no employee laptops. How about software and apps? Yes. Services like web conferencing? Uh … I guess. Consumer cloud-based storage and information sharing? How’s that again? Dropbox and Skydrive. Oh. What do you think?

Turning a blank sheet of paper into a multiple-choice and true/false test makes defining the assignment clearly much easier, and it enhances your image as someone who can bring clarity out of chaos.

You have one more scope topic: Your work product. Here, use the pro-active scope creep ploy.

To use the ploy, try adding a second deliverable to the obvious one (the written policy).

You might, for example, ask if you’re also supposed to prepare a presentation to explaining the policy. Whether your boss says yes or no, you’ve successfully fixed the list of work products, preventing your boss adding another one the day before the deadline.

Step 3: Stall

By now, your half hour should be over. You want it to be over. That lets you propose taking a week to put a plan together, to be reviewed in that second half-hour meeting you had the foresight to schedule.

Step 4: Get approval for your plan. In the second meeting, sketch out your approach, your time budget, and the due date you can commit to. And, recommend ways for dealing with the other work that won’t get done because you can’t just add this assignment to your already heavy workload and do a decent job.

And, ask for ten minutes each week to review your progress and make any course corrections that turn out to be necessary. Weekly review meetings make the difference between an assignment tossed over a cubicle wall and actual, responsible delegation.

Congratulations. Some employees with unskilled managers are victims. Not you. Even better, you’ve done what every great employee learns to do: You’ve made your boss a better manager.

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