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This topic comes up all the time in one form or another, so I thought I would put some structure around it, and give you some ideas, if you are dealing with a bad boss.

There are 4 categories of bad bosses

I’ve listed them in order of how
personally damaging they are to work for:

1. Useless
2. The Good Menace
3. Asshole
4. Irrational Abusive

(I am going to use “he” and “his” in this discussion just because it is easier, not because I believe there are no bad female bosses”!)

1. The Useless Boss

Here is a guy that is either in over his head or just doesn’t care.  He can’t make a decision. He doesn’t have a strategy. He can’t fire people who are not performing.  He’ll take the credit, but not do the hard work.  When the biggest challenges are heating up, he is on the golf course.

Reality: Not Harmful
As bad bosses go, these are the most benign and can present you with great opportunities to step up.

You won’t get paid the big bucks, and you probably won’t even get the credit, but you can use the situation to your advantage to get higher level experience that will have a big payoff when you go to interview for a bigger job later.

Strategy: Step up
Pick the elements of his job for which it will benefit you to get experience, and do them.  Don’t speak badly of him to others — this doesn’t benefit you.  It doesn’t make you look smart, and you never win against your boss.   Just focus on getting high value work done, with or without his help or involvement.

2. The Good Menace

These are generally good, well-meaning bosses who are very committed and engaged, but not in a helpful way.  In fact, quite the opposite.

This is the boss who micro-manages, who second guesses you, who goes around you to your people causing frustration and confusion.  It’s the boss who says things casually that cause aftershocks of worry and work for you to recover from.

This is the boss who changes his mind all the time, can’t stick to a strategy, is the source of fire drills, chaos, extra work and re-work.  This is the boss who keeps you busy with stupid stuff when you could be adding way more value.

Reality: You can’t blame your failure on the fact that your boss is stupid.
You need to find a way to be successful in spite of your boss.  This is probably the most common type of bad boss.

Strategy #1. Give them what they ask for.
You either need to “check the boxes” or negotiate it away.  Just not doing it because it is stupid doesn’t work.  Only after you’ve given him what he needs, or talked him out of it, can you get back to the higher value work.

Strategy #2. Give your boss feedback.
Give your boss feedback that gets you both focused on the outcome and the specific behaviors that are causing issues.  Don’t make it a conversation like, “you don’t trust me”, or “you don’t support what I am doing”.  Make it a conversation about “when you say or do this specific thing” that results in this specific challenge — the impact of that is a problem for the business.”

(I will write another post soon with more about how to give feedback to your boss.)

3. The Asshole

I distinguish this third category from the fourth category for one reason – they can behave better if they choose to.

The Asshole is a boss who needs to make others feel small and less important.  They thrive on it.   They consider the “power” of their management role to be a direct reflection of their personal power, and they let you know about it all the time. 

You can find them by seeing how they treat assistants, waiters, and sales clerks.  If they have constructive feedback to give, they will be mean about it.  They are bullies.

This is the boss who makes selfish decisions, is a hypocrite, lies, cheats, and covers his own back at a cost to others. 

Reality: They are out there.
You can probably think of a couple.  There is not a great filter to prevent them from advancing, and in fact they can be quite masterful at it, by turning their bad behaviors on and off as it suits their goals.

Strategy #1. Minimize Contact.
If you work for an Asshole, the best strategy is to minimize your time under fire.  Bullies need someone to bully.  Don’t be present.  If you are getting yelled at don’t engage, don’t take it personally, leave the room.

Strategy #2. Business Focus.
For example if you are in his office and he attacking you for your poor work, try to say, can you re-state your desired business outcome for this, so I can make sure to tune it the right way.  Get the conversation off of You, and onto the Business.  If this still doesn’t work go back to strategy #1.  Get out of the room. 

4. The Irrational Abusive Boss

I have had several people close to me encounter this type of boss.  The distinguishing factor here from mere “Asshole”,  is that there is a specific psychological disorder at work, and these people are not capable of changing.

This is a boss who rages out of control and way out of proportion,  for reasons which have no logical basis.  They are genuinely abusive.

Reality:
The issue here is Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  (NPD).  I used to think that Narcissism was just about people being overly into themselves.  The disorder is actually much more specific.

I have included a partial list from the National Institute of Health on NPD:

• Reacts to criticism with rage, shame, or humiliation
• Takes advantage of other people to achieve his or her own goal
• Has unreasonable expectations of favorable treatment
• Requires constant attention and admiration
• Disregards the feelings of others, lacks empathy

Working with a Narcissist

People with NPD need to be “inflated” (think of a bicycle pump) at all times.   As soon as they start to get deflated,  they need to be pumped up again.  And there are two ways they get pumped up.  1) by people feeding their disorder with attention, praise, and admiration, or 2) by becoming irrationally abusive.

Why they are there

The other part of the reality is that Narcissists can be highly successful.  Their NPD pushes them to get their way with little grey area for questions, justifications or doubts.  If big success is what they are after, they often get there, albeit leaving many causalities along the way. 

So shareholders are not necessarily motivated to take them out, and if enough workers can survive the tyranny, there can be big business outcomes.

Strategy: have a self-preservation plan
If you have a narcissist boss on your hands it is critically important to:

• 1. Learn as much as possible about this disorder
• 2. Recognize that they won’t change
• 3. Not take it personally
• 4. Develop a either survival or exit strategy

To learn more about NPD and how to deal with people who have it:

There is a book that is a must read:

• The Search for the Real Self, Unmasking the Personality Disorders of our Age, James F. Masterson
• NOTE: Chapters 2, 6, 10,12 are the ones to read for a business person trying to understand a narcissist.

And here are two shorter articles to get started:

• CIO Magazine article: Narcissists at Work: How to Deal with Arrogant Controlling Manipulative Bullies
• A Definition from the  National Institute of Health

Photo Credit to Scott Adams: Dilbert Boss

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This week our member webinar was on
the topic: Avoiding Career Hazards.

1. DO Better, LOOK Better, CONNECT Better
My DO Better, LOOK Better, CONNECT better model is really important if you want to build value in your career.  Whether you are looking for a new, bigger job, or just wanting to be effective at the job you have now, missing any one of these is a big Career Hazard.

DO BETTER HAZARDS

2. Missing The Real Requirements for Top Jobs
It’s different at the top.  You need to change the game, not just solve problems.  The scope is different and what you measure and care about needs to change. 

3. Accepting your job As-is
You need to understand what your job needs to be.  What does the business need in the future? It is up to you to evolve your job to add more value to the business, not just keep doing the job as it was given to you.

4. Failing to rise above the activity
You need to make yourself less busy, (no one else will). You need to work ON your business not just IN your business.  You won’t add enough value to the business if you don’t make time to think and act strategically.

5. Holding on to detail
You can’t carry all the detail and deep content knowledge up with you to higher level roles.  You need to let go.  Trust your team, don’t  compete with them.  If you don’t let go you will fail to work on the more important things you need to be doing at a higher level.

LOOK BETTER HAZARDS

6. Being Invisible
Make sure decision makers and influencers know you.  Create positive visibility for your work and your team.  This is not politics.  It is about being effective. But no stalking. Don’t be annoying.

7. Low Credibility and Relevance
Make sure you are building credibility and relevance for your work and your team.  This is critical not just for a getting a new job, but for being effective in your current one.  People with high credibility get more done.  People who are relevant have more of an impact.

CONNECT BETTER HAZARDS

8. Not on “The List”
You need to get on “The List” for any top opportunity.  You won’t get the job if you are not on “The List”.  Find out how it works in your environment and get on it!

9. Getting the wrong experience
Don’t expect your current job to give you the experience you need for the job you want.  You need to get experience in your target job before you are in it.

10. Failing to get help
Don’t let your ego get in the way.  Be open to help, coaching and ideas. Get mentors.  Build your network. Successful people get a lot of help.  That is why they are so successful.

You can Download a Podcast of this Webinar (~35 mins)

DO YOU WANT MORE SUPPORT ON CAREER HAZARDS?

Attend one of my Career Workshops.
We spend a full day covering these topics and more.

The workshop is personalized to YOU. 
You will build your plan for your own career with coaching from me.

This is a chance for you to join me and a small group of people to build your plan to be more effective, build your Personal Brand, increase your influence, and grow your network.

Photo by Jacek Walicki Down Dog Photography

Highly successful people are successful because they get a lot of help, not because they are too good to need it.

You are not expected to know everything.  Really.  So pretending that you do doesn’t have much of a payoff, especially if it keeps you from getting the job done. 

Don’t let your ego get in the way of getting help.  I have seen many careers fail for this single reason. 

Here is why getting help will widen your margin of success over those that fail to seek it out, don’t recognize it, or refuse it when offered.

Get help to make sure you deliver.

If you are growing your business or career, you will be in over your head from time to time.  At times you will feel like you are not qualified, you are not doing a good enough job, and you are not sure what to do about it.

Never suffer alone!  It’s OK to be confused, it’s not OK to fail to deliver results.  So get some help.  Find people who have done similar jobs and ask for best practices.  Get mentors who are not in your business that you can go to and say “Help!” and be safe in doing so.

The last thing you want to do is struggle on your own, act smart,  and fail to deliver.

You are NOT expected to know everything.  But you ARE expected to be able to recruit the support you need, and learn how to do the things you need to do along the way.

Get help to make you better, smarter, and faster

You always need to be increasing you “fund of knowledge”.  Think about what you know about a particular topic.  Your  fund of knowledge comes from what you already personally know, plus what you can research on your own in a given amount of time, plus ideas and information you can get from others.

If you develop a habit of learning from others, the bigger your fund of knowledge will become on an increasing number of topics.  So you will become better and faster at solving problems.  You’ll learn even more best practices, and get continued inspiration for innovations.

The best way to do this is to avoid the temptation to feel like you know more than others, and to develop the habit of always asking others for inputs and opinions.  See also: Who has the best ideas?:

Get help to grow your influence

Successful people have a ready network to go to for referrals, recommendations, introductions, leads, sales, partnerships, participation in key events, and general support of whatever they are doing – All the things that make business go.  Don’t underestimate the value of this.

I know I have been caught up in being narrowly focused for months (or years) at a time, not realizing just how much these kinds of connections drive real success.  Without growing your influence through others, you will not accomplish as much, and you will will not compete effectively for the top spots.

Get help to get more work done

Sometimes there is just too much work to do.  People who invest in building their “extra team”, can get more people to do actual work for them.  They have access to more resources and support for what they are trying to accomplish.   Without this you will go slower and have less capacity to produce value for your business.

Standard Rules of Networking Apply:

• Network when you don’t need anything
• Give more than you take

Make sure you help others

Everyone can be a mentor.  Seek out opportunities to help others too.  This is important to keep your balance of give and take in your network always leaning toward “give”.

When you are asking for help, I have found that starting a conversation simply with “I’m hoping you can help me…” is a good way to start a conversation.  Most people want to help.  It doesn’t make you less credible to ask, and in fact, can build trust and confidence.  Never Fail Alone.

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I was giving a talk this week to an
audience of CIOs and one of the topics
we discussed was choosing the level of
service you want your team to deliver,
and how to do specific things on purpose
to make sure your team is consistently
delivering that service.

It occurred to me that this is an
important issue for any team to
decide on purpose — not just ones that officially deliver “a service”.

Your team has a Brand today whether you know it or not.

Your current Brand is based on how your team collectively behaves.  Your Brand is defined by the experience people have with you.  More specifically:

Your Brand is defined by the things others experience most consistently.

What does your team do consistently?  Does everyone on your team have the same view of responsiveness, quality, innovation, collaboration?  Do they do they have the same values? Do they do the same things when they interact with others?  What collective impression is your team giving your many stakeholders, influencers and other audiences?

Leaving your Team Brand to chance creates a big hazard for you, and a lost opportunity to step up to play a bigger role in your company.

Doing a team brand-building exercise is great not only for team building, but it helps increase your team’s effectiveness, and builds credibility.

In its basic form building a Team Brand has a few simple steps:

1) Find out what your current team brand is
2) Decide as a team what you want to be known for
3) List the audiences you want to make an impression on
4) Build a plan to do it

What is your definition of Service?

Service is a good place to focus when you are deciding what you want to be known for, because it forces you to define your values, your expectations, and how you plan to show your brand by what you give to the rest of the world.

First, what does service mean in your world? Who are your “clients”? What are your “services”? What are your “service intentions and promises”? And what is your “style” of service? These things will have a huge impact on your Team Brand.  Remember your Brand is defined by how people experience you.

If you are an IT organization, service is a huge part of your brand.  It starts with your help desk, and your website.

If you are a Marketing team, you provide service to many organizations: the sales force, the product teams, the executive suite, the media.  What level of service do you want your team to be known for?  What will it look like in terms of quality, responsiveness, creativity, business acumen?

If you are a Product Development organization, how do you define the service you deliver in terms of general competency, handling change requests, customer understanding, quality, innovation, and communication?

Everyone has to share the same view and committed behaviors.

To have a consistent and positive Team Brand it is important that everyone on your team has the same understanding of what the Brand is, and how to deliver it.  The more you define it on purpose, the more likely it will be that every member of your team can and will deliver on it consistently.

Brand is not just for “Show” – it’s about effectiveness.

And when your team shares the same values and definition of service, and reinforces a set of brand-supporting-behaviors they all do on purpose, your team will be more effective and have higher credibility.  So you’ll deliver stronger results and get more done.  And you will position your team to play a bigger, and more important role in the company.

More articles on Service:

Here are some additional articles on Service you can use to start thinking about what type of service is important to you.  These also happen to be some of the most popular articles on the site.

Service or Torture?
Serving or Selling?
Customer Cost or Care?
Customer Value and the P&L

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If you want to advance in your career you
have to give yourself permission to not
KNOW everything and not DO everything.

And you need the imagination to do
more of what the business requires than
your job entails.

As I have been preparing for our next
monthly webinar on Avoiding Career Hazards,
I stepped back to think about what really
holds people back in their careers.

What struck me is that at the heart of most
career stalls is a fundamental issue with
permission or imagination.  This is particularly
evident in the following:

1. Your Job Description is not a life sentence

2. You need to do the job that needs to be done, not the one that is given to you.

3. You need to make yourself less busy

4. You don’t need to know everything

5. You need to do more than your job

For all of these, not only do you have permission to do them, you are expected to.  And the higher you go, these things are no longer merely expected, they become required.  You will fail if you don’t do them.

You need to recognize this and give yourself permission to do these things.  Then you need to fuel your imagination so you have the necessary ideas and insights to do even more.

1. Your Job Description is not a life sentence

People have a tendency to think their job is a combination of their job description and whatever else their boss piles on along the way. This is one of the things you need to break free of.  Your job is a contract with your company.

You have the ability to re-negotiate your contract to better suit your strengths, and your ideas about what your job should be — as long as it is good for the business.  This is how you put yourself in a position to thrive.

It is up to you to develop ideas about how to do your job even better — more efficiently, more creatively, more effectively, and push back on your boss when new requests are detrimental to achieving the critical priorities.

If you accept your job as written and just do your job, you will not stand out.  Give yourself permission to change your job description.

Which gets to the next point…

2. You need to do the job that needs to be done, not the one that is given to you.

As people step up to higher level roles, there is an outright expectation that they will not just do the job as it stands today, but that they will make the job bigger.

As an executive you are expected to understand what the business needs and raise the level of your job to deliver on where the business needs to go, not where it is today.  They didn’t hire you to just do the job, they hired you to raise the game and invent the job.

In other words, not only do you have permission change your job – that is the job!  You need  to understand what is not good enough about the status quo, and figure out how to build capability for the future.  You need to have the imagination to do this.  This is an area where having good mentors can be a big help.

3. You need to make yourself less busy

Early in your career, you get paid for your work output.  It is very much based on the time you spend working.  If you take a long lunch you are stealing from the company.

But as you advance you not getting paid for your time any more.  You are getting paid for the value that you add to the business.

And to do that you need to give yourself time to think.

You need to give yourself permission to not work on just the work every minute of the day.  You need to make time to think strategically, plan, organize, and invent.  I like to talk about this as working ON your business vs. Working IN your business.  This is your job.

Again, not only are you allowed take some time to think, you are expected to do this.  Otherwise you are not adding value, you are just doing work, and you are not doing your job as a leader.  See also: Make More Time.

You have permission to come in late, schedule some time and hide, or go for a walk to think.  You are not stealing time from the company if you are adding value working ON the business.

4. You don’t need to know everything

Another thing that holds people back as they get progressively higher roles, is that they don’t give themselves permission to not know everything.  They try to stay expert in the content.  This backfires for 4 main reasons:

1. The higher you go there is more and more content underneath you, you can’t stay as deep as your people.
2. You end up competing with your team.
3. You spend so much time on the content you fail to do the job you need to be doing adding value to the business.
4. You fail to hire smart people beneath you because they threaten you.  See also: Are you smarter than me?.

It is so important to give yourself permission to back off on being a deep content expert.  That is not your job.  See also Addiction to Detail.

Your job is to be working ON the business and finding ways to develop your team, be more efficient, innovate, negotiate for resources, plan strategically, and always focused on adding value to the business.

If you never give yourself permission to not know everything, you will get stuck.

5. You need to do more than your job

Once you give yourself permission to tune your job, create the necessary job for the future, make yourself less busy, and not know everything, here is where your imagination can really kick in so that you can take on broader initiatives outside your current responsibility and have a more strategic impact on the company.  See also: Do a bigger job.

If you want to get ahead you need to show that your reach and influence is broader than your organization, and you can create and execution things that impact the business in bigger and more strategic ways.  That is how you build relevance and get ahead.

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I hope so.

I have been continually amazed at how many managers are threatened by having really smart, capable people working for them.  I seem to be encountering this quite regularly these days when more people are more nervous in general.

I have never understood this.

I guess the possible fears/explanations are:

1. You feel like you will lose your job to a smarter person
2. You psychologically need to be the smartest person in the room at every moment
3. OK, I’m out…I really don’t understand this!  Because I have never seen it work.Everyone around these people notices that they are nervous, threatened, and defensive.

Smart people hire smart people.

On the contrary, when leaders make their top performers famous, the glory always rubs off.

Let’s look at the model in it’s purest form…If smart people hire only even-smarter people, and those people hire only even-smarter people, the organization gets even stronger and smarter as it grows.  The leader is a hero.

If stupid people are threatened by smart people, and hire people less smart than they are, and so on, the entire organization gets more weak and stupid over time.  The leader washes out because the organization can’t deliver or compete.

But let’s look at this from the perspective of one manager and one really smart person.

As a manager if you find yourself saying Wow, this person is really smart, and really capable. In reality, they could do my job, maybe even better than me.

You have two basic choices.

1. Uh-oh – Be threatened and lock them in a supply closet.
2. Hurray! – Pile the work on, shine a spotlight, and let them move mountains for you.

In the first case, what do you accomplish?

• You create a temporary façade of being the smartest person in the room
• You organization delivers less work overall
• You piss off a high performer
• You may “get rid of them”, and that may be your goal…
• You lose the respect and support of your team because they see you don’t value good people
• Your organization delivers even less output over time
• You are eventually seen by all as an ineffective leader

In the second case, what do you accomplish?

• You have another person working at your level, so your team delivers more
• You can delegate virtually all your current work to someone you can trust
• You free up your time to think about and work on even higher value things
• You free up time to build even more capacity into your team and broaden it’s impact.
• You motivate a high performer
• You are become known for attracting stars and developing talent.
• You are still seen as actually being the smartest person in the room because people see you winning the loyalty and support a really smart, talented person (which is your job).
• You personally are getting someone ready for a big promotion
• You are building favor with someone who will be in positions of importance in the future.

I can not see a single downside to letting a really smart person be as good as they can be.

I have never seen a smart person letting a smarter person thrive beneath them get damaged by this.  It’s good for you, it’s good for them, it’s good for the business.

But, I have often seen people who are threatened by smart people and limit them to appear more qualified personally, lose the game and get moved out of the way.

I chose the picture for this post based on an Australian expression,”Tall Poppy Syndrome“, which is used to describe the need some people have to cut down the most capable and talented people around them – the ones who stand out.