Image from article.
Posted on 09/05/2013 12:15:37 PM PDT by fishtank
Warning: Your Nice Boss May Be Killing Your Career
September 04, 2013
Chris spent years working for a supportive, encouraging manager at a major technology company. In fact, his boss raved about him. His manager gave him top ratings in the performance evaluations, gave him space to do his work and had never been controlling. He was, according to Chris, terribly, unswervingly nice. Picture perfect boss, right? Wrong. (Read more here from the original Harvard Business Review post here).
His manager had been in the company for 20 years. He had learned how to survive in the bureaucracy: don’t make too many waves, don’t cause problems. He played the political game well enough to still be there but not well enough to strengthen his reputation. He had slowly lost his political clout. As a result, his team had been winnowed away to a fraction of the size it used to be.
His own reputation bled over onto the members of his team. For Chris it had a powerful effect on his career: he had been passed up several times for a promotion he was repeatedly promised. It was not what his boss was doing that caused the problem. It was what he was not doing.
Over a twelve-month period I have gathered data from 1,000 managers about their experiences at over 100 companies including Apple, Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novel and Symantec. I wanted to understand the conditions under which people did the very best work of their careers. What I expected to find were examples of over managing, controlling, tyrannical managers. About half of the participants confirmed this assumption. The other half surprised me: what they described were managers who were nice but weak.
I once worked with just such an executive. He spoke with a soft, quiet voice. He never interrupted anyone when they were speaking. When he walked into the meeting he had a “nice” word for everyone. Every time the team became “positively frustrated” and ready to make the change necessary to get to the next level he would stand up and say sweetly, “Oh, I just wanted to remind you all of how far we have come.” And after a few more sentences the spark of aspiration was gone from the room. He unintentionally signaled the status quo was plenty good enough. There was no need to try harder or change how things were going. He reminded me of what Jim Hacker (the fictional politician in the English cult classic “Yes, Minister”) said to his bureaucratic colleague, “You really are a wet blanket, Humphrey, you just go around stirring up apathy.”
Another executive I worked with had an almost voodo ability to neutralize people’s desire to take action. With an almost Jedi-like wave of the hand she seemed to say, “These are not the things you care about changing.” People would be kicking and cussing before she walked into the room but a little later they would wonder what they had been frustrated about. That is a useful party trick to be sure but the result was career limiting for each member of her team. Everyone on the team was branded as average and in a reorganization the entire team was “let go.”
These nice but somewhat absentee managers can continue to survive, unchecked for decades. At least a controlling boss who yells all the time gets noticed: they create acute pain and people complain. In contrast, the pain these nice “Neutralizers” produce is chronic. The pain is inflicted slowly, drip by drip. On any given day an employee can say, “Well, it’s not so bad.” They are, after all, nice. But the cumulative effect on your career can be dramatic.
This is a problem hidden in plain sight. The issue has been unintentionally camouflaged by leadership thinkers (I am guilty) who may have overemphasized overmanagment and underemphasized undermanagement. The majority of the leadership literature over the past 25 years has done this. But what happens if an undermanager reads an article, book or attends training of this kind? It may encourage them to continue in their hands-off, low control, absentee approach. They may say, “Yes, I don’t like to smother my people or control them.” They may speak about empowerment and enablement. All the while they allow their people’s career prospect to decline slowly.
In the case of Chris, just naming the problem was liberating. Once he could see how toxic the situation was he took action. He met with his mentors. He visited with his connections. Within a few weeks he took a lateral move to get away from his “nice” manager. After another move a year later he is in a terrific position in a better company with far better prospects than he had before. Just developing a heightened awareness of the issue can be helpful. After all, we cannot solve a problem we do not see. Consider the following questions:
Does your manager leave problems on the team to fester because he or she doesn't want to cause offence?
Does your manager avoid the hard conversations?
Is your manager getting weaker or stronger overtime?
Does your manager lack the political muscle to advocate for your promotion?
Is it possible you are working for someone who is killing your career softly?
I look forward to your thoughts below.
Image from article.
Aggressive female employees are 'assertive'
Two strikes left.
Yep. Been there more than once. Worked for many managers, directors, or VPs in my 40-year career who were nice and quiet, and definitely kept the horse blinders on. Didn’t want to stir things up. Didn’t want to take the trouble to investigate, make more efficient, or change anything.
My answers to the questions at the end of the article:
Yes
Yes
Weaker
Yes
Yes
Ugh
How considerate of LinkedIn to sow suspicion and discontent when they profit from it's existence.
Early on in my career, I had some tough bosses. They ran the office like a boot camp. They were never satisfied, and always found something that wasn’t meeting standards.
However, I have come to believe that working for such people had toughened me up, and made me a better more diligent employee. Working for other less stringent bosses, I have heard lots of praise for my work ethic, attention to detail, etc.
Looking back, I think that some former bosses were tougher than they needed to be, but, also think that working for them made me more productive. I may well have risen higher in my career because I was striving to meet high standards, and it became part of my work habits.
When I was younger, I moved, transfered, job hopped and took promotions and pay increases. And along the way I was also laid off, let go, forced to resign and even delivered Domino’s pizzas just to get by.
In these tough economic times, one must learn to assess where you are. Are you stuck in a dead end job with a manager that is “killing your career”? If you’re over age 45, and at least that job is stable and pays well enough... suck it up and go to work each day.
I don’t know if this is a fair comparison, but it came to mind while reading this article:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGhTr8lDCV0
Different people need to be managed in different ways. I'm in IT and the teams that I've been a part of are mostly aggressive go-getters, mostly Type-A's, and generally not in need of much management. My managers primarily set the direction and cut red tape...that's about it. They're managers, not leaders.
In my job, in general, if we "come to the attention of upper management" it's usually because something is broken, and hopefully not as a result of what we did (or didn't do, or should have done). In general (I'm talking in broad strokes, here) "quiet" and "status quo" are good things. Getting in front of senior management to explain why your stuff breaks all the time is career limiting, to say the least. Not all face time is positive.
Has this lack of aggressive management held me back? Not really. There are plenty of non-mangerial rungs on the technical ladder.
Now, in a group with a different dynamic - particularly one that requires management that is more involved - I could see where an aggressive leader would help a career.
I just thought that it was worth stating that this article, and others like it, are not one-size-fits-all.
Anyhoo, this guy used these quarterly reviews to belittle both my work and me personally. We also had a monthly "Lunch out with the boss", for approximately the same behavior. He was hypercompetent, but a OCD-level perfectionist who was impossible to work for.
Other than the boss who was embezzling from the company and tried to pin the blame on me, this guy was the worst manager I've had. He did make me a more diligent employee, though, more out of sheer paranoia than anything else.
The one positive that came out of my stint in this man's dungeon, was that I know what a "bad boss" looks like, and can now appreciate a good boss when I have one. :-)
Boy howdy. Testify. < |:(~
Well said. I've had a few bosses like that. I still use them for references, and happily return the favor for them, on occasion.
So, I have to ask this question that I have asked dozens of people from various careers:
How much of your pay would you give up for a "good" boss? Or how much is a "good" boss worth?
from LinkedIn?
based ONLY on the amount of LinkedIn SPAM I receive I will never read an article of theirs.
Based solely on the title... my manager is the nicest guy in the world. Great advocate. Asked me to think about a promotion in our last annual review.
Not a week goes by that one of my co-workers says "well, at least I have a job."
Yep.
Depends on your path. In engineering, if the head boss of your BU knows you name, it is likly not because you are doing good.
Screw that. I quit my job in 2010 and downsized to live at the beach. I'm happier and healthier than ever. Best move I ever made.
“Different people need to be managed in different ways”
I actually took a course dealing with exactly that. Called Situational Leadership. There are different types of leaders, different types of workers and different work situations. The course taught optimum use of the given combination.
One of my observations in years of management was, there are so many qualified talented managers out there, why did they hire this jerk.
But - I can give a semi-specific answer to your question. Earlier in my career, I took a 20% paycut, to work at a better company, in a more stable, less demanding position, with a (much) better boss.
Of course, it was a temporary paycut - the better boss and better company enabled me to earn it all back, and then some, within a year or so.
So, the paycut was not 100% boss-related. But management was one factor in my decision.
In general (there's that word again) I try not to make job decisions - positive or negative - based on a single manager. Management changes, always. I look more at a company, and their management style, if anything. Along with pay, bennies, vacation, environment, travel requirements, expectations, opportunity for advancement, length of commute, whether I liked the place, whether the coffee was good, if the workplace was in a safe area, and about a million other things. :-)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.