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Working Against Your Boss
Is it OK to lie to your boss? To plot against him or her? If so, when? For what reasons?
I’ve been there. I have had had staff working directly against me because they did not think I deserved the job. Making things up, fudging numbers, spreading rumors. They helped sow the seeds of my ultimate “Termination without Cause.” Ugly.
I get they did not think I should have the job. I think they should have resigned, not worked against me. If you have a job, it is your job to support your boss. If he or she is not supportable, you should leave, not foment rebellion or spread rumors, or change the books to make the boss look bad.
But, maybe I am biased as it happened to me. I have never worked against a boss, even one I did not like. What do you think?
Published in General
I think it is, because volunteers are in a sense share holders – though they put in labour rather than capital.
As I stated, I don’t agree, generally, with the OP. I don’t think it makes a difference if you are a volunteer. You are still investing your time. It’s just the legal arrangement you have with the organization that is different. In neither case (employee vs. volunteer) do you have any organizational standing to remove someone from the org chart. But you have the same impetus for doing so if the that person is destructive.
I think you did the right thing.
If your subordinates look bad, you look bad.
Cato’s discussion, for some reason, reminded me of this idiot I used to know.
A great deal of my career has been in a matrix organization and almost exclusively in a project/project management context.
There was this fellow who got hired as a Project Manager. He was, simply, an idiot. This was in the early 80’s. Some of us who worked with him got curious and did some checking – his degree (with honors) was from an on-line degree mill. The work history he bragged about was largely fictitious.
So here’s what we did about it, after a good laugh or two: Nothing. Nothing at all. We did our jobs, he never interfered. We got done what needed doing. He never redirected us. He might, on rare occasion, ask me what I was working on, and I answered. He would nod his head sagely, we’d talk about the price of tea in China, and he’d mosey on down the hall. We never went to anybody in management about the fellow, we just worked. The projects he was given were successful, he was there a number of years and was finally let go in a downturn. And things just kept moving along.
Now, that is a good con. Just stay out of the way and let things get done. I wish more folks understood that management skill.
The light dawns. Maybe he was smarter than we though. But common sense with the fellow was clearly not so common.
No. I’m really not talking about what happened to you. Not knowing the details, I can’t say whether or not I think that was justified. I’m really just making the generalized claim that it’s not always unjustified to undermine or seek to remove a boss. I think your duty is to the organization, not your boss, and that sometimes that leaves room to seek your boss’s removal – if done honestly. I don’t think it’s always justified, and I certainly don’t think using dishonest means is pretty much ever justified. But I think there are cases where it’s not inappropriate to use honest means to try to get a boss you think is bad in some way or another removed.
Yea it was a long fight and we lost and we lost and we lost until finally we won. And a 120 year old organization is back to providing activities and character development to about 1000 children a year, with mostly volunteer help. But it was a close call. I continue to believe the organization would have died had we not gotten him removed.
I think volunteer organizations really are different. The need for buy in is so much more acute. It’s not as easy to replace somebody valuable if you’re not willing or able to pay the replacement. The people who show up reliably and work their asses off just because they believe in the mission need to be treasured and cultivated in a way you don’t necessarily have to with employees who are there at least in part because it puts food on the table.
That’s how we feel about this place. We call it “ours.” Nobody really owns it but we’ve built it together for many years, and people like us with the same kind of commitment did it for generations before us.
One of the funny stories that came out of the fight – one of the guys this jerk “fired” (he was a volunteer but had been banned from volunteering for crossing the jerk) turned out to be the only guy with most of the keys to the organizations facilities. He was a trusted long time volunteer who knew all the facility mechanicals and helped maintain them, and so he had keys to everything. In many cases, it turned out no one else did. Having to ask for them back after you “fired” the guy for “insubordination” had to be a little embarrassing.
Guys like that are seldom embarrassed.
Thanks, I think this is spot on.
I didn’t want to write a long “on the one hand , but on the other hand” comment earlier. So on being indispensable, what’s good for the mission or organization are arrangements that ensure the work goes on regardless, but for an individual striver, one certainly wants to be and be seen as indispensable to the job. Just another example of how institutional vs individual incentives can differ.
I had a concrete example in mind with my previous comment: a small nonprofit that’s had the same executive in charge about 20 years and a handful of support staff. The executive is effectively the sole source of continuity, given a board of directors whose composition changes yearly, sometimes more frequently. On paper, the executive reports to the board who can hire and fire him. In practice, there is such churn and inexperience on the board that the executive can outlast them all. Except maybe the director won’t–after experiencing a life-threatening health issue.
In those circumstances, I think responsible people who care about the mission should be talking about delegation, training, preserving and transferring institutional know-how–so that this knowledge isn’t lost if anything were to happen to the executive. But what to do when the executive refuses to discuss such things with the board? Frankly, I think that’s just [COC]-poor leadership.
If you’re a leader who cares about the mission, why wouldn’t you set things up so that the work continues and thrives after you’re gone?
That’s a difference between leaders and managers.
This occurs only to good bosses.
I’m not sure I agree that’s the real difference.
The Marine Corps is a cult of leadership. We can talk about leadership all day long everyday. In fact we do. There is never a lot of agreement on what makes a good leader, though “official” people have tried to define it. One typical official leadership trait is to be “technically and tactically proficient.” I’ve never seen that as critical to being a leader. Very many times someone comes along and is put in charge of something he knows nothing about and has no hope of figuring it out, but if he’s good he can provide really effective leadership to get others who do know about it to work hard and effectively.
Many times people say leaders should take care of their people. Stalin didn’t do that, but can we really say that his leadership wasn’t effective? He was quite a powerful leader.
Caring about the “mission” is frankly something a “manager” would do. A leader is more likely to create his own mission. Whether that is good for the organization or good for himself can be both true, or only one of those two can be true. In fact, neither can be true and the individual can still be a powerful leader.
The key is for the higher leader to arrange things so that the subordinate leaders have incentives to make their priorities jive with the higher leader’s priorities. Once you get that combination, you tend to get good results. Getting middle level managers to follow the head’s direction and not try to take his job is very difficult. As a middle manager, keeping your job, and getting enough attention to get promoted, is the primary motivation. We can preach that he should look out for the good of the company, but that is unrealistic and rarely is that going to be effective. It’s only by aligning his interests with the company’s interests that the company will thrive.
People in private industry who don’t see themselves as more important, ultimately, than the welfare of their boss or the company, will rarely advance much. They will get stepped on. The business world is Machiavellian, without the killing.
On this I would say yes and no.
Some people hold on to unique knowledge so that, for example, they are the only ones who can fix a certain part of a system, or who know how this key financial spreadsheet works. That is not a way to move up. That is the way to get stuck. Or more likely in the IT side of things to become a wealthy independent contractor.
You can also become indispensable because you get things done and make a team see the right way to go or can be counted on to solve problems with the minimum of fuss. That sort does get you moved up and you pull those below you up behind you.
Exactly and those people are good leaders.
But was he a “good” leader? Certainly he was effective during his life, but look at the evil he committed and the mess he left behind.
Edit.
I guess my point is that I don’t equate “powerful” with “good.”
The individual doing their job is the most important person. They must do what is right for them. That is why I don’t like counter-offers when someone has been offered a new job. If they feel the new job is better for them, congratulations! No one is indispensable (see above). A leader should always want what is best for his/her people, even if that is a loss for the organization.
Having only ever being the boss I might bring a different perspective. Owning the business can make you paranoid. Your customers always want more for less and longer to pay. Your suppliers always want to give you less for more and want you to pay more promptly. Your employees want to work less for more pay. The governments (all) want every penny they can get. In all my years in business my business was never broken into, only out of by usually my most trusted employees. I suppose thievery is working against the boss. If I were to guess very few if any Ricochet members have ever stolen from their boss so that might not even be thought of as working against the boss. Of course being both the owner and the boss eliminates a bunch of petty politics.
Time. It’s irreplaceable, and what is the most stolen.
Of course. But most often powerful suffices to succeed.
When I was at Dell, there was this old guy who had no authority whatsoever. He would come to a meeting and request data be provided to him. For a while people would take the time to provide data to him because he didn’t ask for a lot at first. Very rarely did anything come from his data collection, except for him to call a meeting and tell everyone that he concluded that he needed more data.
Eventually, his requests for more and more and more data became more extreme and no one had the nerve to tell him no. He became a titan of data and spread sheets that rarely amounted to anything except to convince his boss that he knew everything that was going on everywhere. Everyone in manufacturing was constantly overwhelmed with feeding him with more and more arcane and useless tidbits of information in ever changing formats. TPS reports had nothing on him.
He knew nothing about how to do anything. I designed the factory. I designed the process. I interacted with operations to figure out the best way to improve the production line. I interacted with logistics to get parts where they were needed. I know what I did and I know that he had nothing to do with it. My engineering partner and I expanded Dell’s income by a lot from our designs. This other guy got paid a lot more and all he did was terrorize people to collect data, endlessly manipulate spread sheets and make directors think he was helping them. He was behind a few schemes that lost millions upon millions of dollars for Dell.
I got laid off. He got a promotion.
I like working for myself now. :)
Perhaps only if your name is Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg?
You have reshaped my image of Dell as a supplier. Not in a positive way.
Well, I was there from 1997 to 2001. It’s a big company and all large organizations have issues. I don’t mean to sound like it wasn’t a good job, and I have no hard feelings. For all the jerks, there were lots of good people too, like many other places. I’ve worked places that were horrible, and I learned that no job is worth that. Dell was okay, with foibles.
I have always heard that Stalin did take care of his people. Between 15 to 20 million of them, it has been said. In fact, those people were taken care of permanently!
Carol, so dark!
Sounds like this guy at least knew his own limitations. I’ve worked with idiots who had a wildly over valued sense of their own abilities and just made things worse.
Have we worked together? 😉