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Confronting a Manager who Undercuts your Authority |Dodging Landmines

Ed Muzio, CEO of Group Harmonics, says to approach your manager in private with a specific incident and then turn the conversation into a discussion about how decision-making should work around the office. Although your manager has the ability to fire you, if you let the behavior turn into a pattern, it will get more and more difficult to change.

Speaker: Ed Muzio, CEO, Group Harmonics

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Tags: Tools & Techniques, Management, boss, manager, team, employees, Dodging Landmines, authority, undermine

 
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    naveenv

    07/23/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Confronting a Manager who Undercuts your Authority |Dodging Landmines

    This is really a cool approach which can point things very smoothly to the boss. The only thing is that we have to do this repetitively to make him understand it.

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Confronting a Manager who Undercuts your Authority |Dodging Landmines

Ed Muzio, CEO of Group Harmonics, says to approach your manager in private with a specific incident and then turn the conversation into a discussion about how decision-making should work around the office. Although your manager has the ability to fire you, if you let the behavior turn into a pattern, it will get more and more difficult to change.

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Host: Let's say I have a manager who always seems to just go around me to my own employees, and I don't like it. What can I do to solve it?

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Interviewee: So your manager gives directions to your employees -

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Host: Yeah.

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Interviewee: And that compounds the whole thing -

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Host: And they're not listening to me.

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Interviewee: Right, right. Well, OK, so the first thing you want to do is is you want to not air it in front of your employees. You don't want to go to your employees and say, "Don't listen to her when she comes by." That's, that's a bad idea. What you want to do is instead go to your manager one on one privately, and you want to say starting with a very specific instance. "Hey, last Tuesday, you know, I told Fred to do A, B, and C. You had already told him to do X, Y, and Z. Fred came back to me confused." See if you can lead from that conversation into a more general conversation with your manager about who gives directions to your employees.

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Host: I'm already feeling a bit uncomfortable though. I mean, this could be an awful conversation considering this is my manager, and he or she has the potential to fire me.

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Interviewee: Well, you're right. To potentially fire you and also the responsibility for deciding how things will work, and that's why what you want to do is you want to start with a specific example and get to a conversation about how things are supposed to work. It's up to them to work with you on what the plan is. What you want to make sure is that you're having a conversation about how things should be going rather than coming at them and saying, "Hey, you usurped my authority" which is putting you in a bad situation.

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Host: But how many times do people just seem to just internalize or just live with this issue instead of trying to stop it?

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Interviewee: Well, you can certainly choose to ignore it, and, and actually if it's only happened once, sometimes the best thing is to let it go by, but once you see a pattern, if you don't respond to the pattern, and the pattern keeps going, what's going to happen, it's going to get harder and harder to fix. So I would say it's better to deal with it once you know it's, it's a common thing.

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Host: In summary.

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Interviewee: So in summary, what you want to do is be unified to your employees, take your manager aside, start with a very specific conversation about one incident, and try to broaden that to a conversation about who gives direction without getting too assertive and saying, "Stop usurping my authority".

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Techologies ====