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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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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Last week’s column introduced Michelle McQuaid’s “Bad Boss Study,” which seems to show bad bosses in the United States outnumber good ones two to one, although given how few details of the study are available, the title might actually mean it’s a bad study about bosses.

It would have to be awfully bad, though, to completely invalidate the results. While the ratio might not be two to one, we can safely conclude there are a lot of bad bosses out there.

The question: What can executives do to prevent bad bosses in their organizations? It’s a question with two complementary answers. The first: Develop their organizational listening skills. The second: Don’t wait for bad.

Organizational Listening

Organizational listening is the art of Knowing What’s Going On Out There. This isn’t as easy as it might seem.

Many executives and middle managers rely, as a matter of habit, courtesy, and efficiency, on their chain of command. They all will, eventually, end up with bad bosses in their organizations, and they’ll never know.

That’s because (this really ought to be too obvious to require explanation), they’re relying on the bad managers to reveal themselves. That isn’t going to happen. Worse, if one bad manager has a second one further down in the chain, the first will conceal the second. Even those managers who aren’t bad personally will, if they rely on their chains of command, inadvertently conceal bad managers who are lower down in the hierarchy.

Early in their careers, most managers learn that they’re supposed to “respect the chain of command.” They take this to mean they should rely on it for all employee interactions. They take it wrong.

Respecting the chain of command means only assigning work through it … a practice that’s essential for maintaining a healthy organization. Executives and middle managers who fail to respect the chain of command in this way end up with overworked employees — and the better an employee is, the more overworked he or she will be. The best employees gain visibility because of how good they are. They’ll already be the go-to people for their direct manager; because they’re visible they’ll also be the go-to employees for the manager to whom their manager reports, and so on, and so on, and so on.

But assigning work has little to do with Knowing What’s Going On Out There. So establish, with everyone in management, that listening to everyone who has information to share is an important use of a business leader’s time and attention.

Starting with you, and starting with a redefinition of the old open door policy.

Not that an open door policy is a bad idea. It’s just that when an employee makes use of it, other employees, and their manager, can see them making use of it. All that’s needed is an employee’s manager asking, in a kidding sort of way, “Hey, I saw you talking with Jane. It wasn’t about me, I hope!” and it’s game over, because it takes a good poker player to avoid giving away the subject, and the contents, of the conversation.

So expand your open door policy to an open-door-or-meet-offsite-for-beverages policy. That will protect employees who have something to say and a concern about what will happen it their manager finds out they said it.

Don’t wait for bad

Bad is a bad word. Avoid it. Few bosses are simply “good” or “bad.”

At least, not at first. By the time a manager becomes a truly bad boss, their boss has missed a lot of salvage opportunities.

Every manager is better at some dimensions of management and leadership than others. None are so good that no further improvement anywhere is possible; few have so little aptitude for the sport that they can’t improve in some ways.

Your goal: Help all of your managers be better at leading and managing tomorrow than they were yesterday. You will, on occasion, have to demote or terminate the few who are hopeless, but that isn’t your goal. In a very real way it’s an admission of failure.

Set that tone with employees who take advantage of your new, expanded open door policy. If one says, “I report to a bad manager,” ask, “Where does she most need to improve?”

The answer will be more informative than just allowing the employee to vent. Even better, you’ll hear something you can do something about.

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