Managing your Manager

(Or how to help your manager manage you)

I’ve been coaching for over twenty years and, among the many issues my clients have presented to me over the years, the one that is more common than any other is their relationship with their manager. Many coaching relationships start with a grumble that  “my manager hates me……… or doesn’t understand me……….or doesn’t appreciate me……or doesn’t value me”.

Even seasoned Chief Executives like to start a session by having a bit of a moan about their Chair, or their Board of Directors or their Trustees.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised:- no professional enjoys being given instructions, even if we have a good relationship with the person doing the instructing, and none of us wants our shortcomings and our points of failure to be pointed out, however much we know them to be true.

And I recognise, of course, that there is a cathartic value in the coaching relationship for my client to simply rid themselves of their frustrations by getting them off their chest before moving on to getting down to some proper coaching work.

But in the coaching relationship there are usually only two people in the room, and neither of them is the manager, so once the client has released their frustrations: what then?

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of poor managers out there as generally we still aren’t very good at developing the talent in our organisations to become effective managers of people.

Initially, however, many of my clients actually don’t want to do anything about the poor relationship. There is something comforting about having a bit of a moan without having to take the responsibility for doing anything about it. There can also be a sense that confronting this sort of issue at all could be severely career limiting.

I am, however, a  “solutions” focused coach and, as my relationship is not with the manager but with my client, my approach will always be to encourage my client to analyse the nature of the relationship and take some real and practical actions to improve things.

There are a variety of tools and techniques I might use to tease out the issues:- for example, we might explore the issue by playing out the roles. The client assumes the role of their manager and I take the roles of the manager’s manager and peers. My client focuses on, may even try to visualise,  the nature of the relationships the manager has with their manager, with their peers, with external organisations, and starts to understand the pressures they are under, the deadlines they have to meet and the consequences of their failing to meet their own objectives.

We will then start to explore the practical things my client can put in place to help their manager become more effective in their own role, with the expectation that their own relationship with their manager will improve.

So, my client might look to anticipate a report the manager needs from them and deliver it on time and in a form that is useful to the manager, they might identify specific moments of pressure and offer to off-load some of the burden, they might offer to work in a way that complements the skills and experience of the manager.

It isn’t always easy. Lots of quite senior people enjoy living with a comfortable resentment of their manager, and they ask themselves why they, the junior partner in the relationship, should put in the work to make the relationship more effective.

In my experience, however, it is almost always well worth the effort and invariably leads to a more fruitful and constructive line manager relationship and a more enjoyable work environment.

And in the process, we both also learn a bit more about the art of good management.