By Tony Samson
THE BOSS always thinks his word is law — when I say jump, you can only ask: how high? But is the boss always followed? Being a subordinate doesn’t mean doing exactly what the boss orders, even when the latter is evaluating performance — “subordinate is disrespectful, surly, and exhibits mutinous behavior.”
A newly designated boss from another functional area or pirated from the competition is tested by underlings on his first day in office — Sir, what are your marching orders? We are all waiting with bated breaths. (Let’s start with coffee.)
It’s possible to have both one’s subordinate and super-ordinate working in tandem like a tag team landing body blows on the boss in the middle. Multiple reporting lines (both formal and informal) are common. The big boss can hire one’s subordinate. (Can you interview my niece for a position under you?) Guess who the newly hired subordinate considers her real boss?
In the ever-flattening organization charts, more and more subordinates are reporting to fewer and fewer bosses. It is now a principle of management that one-to-one reporting is not acceptable, as it shows that one of the two boxes is redundant, usually the one with the higher salary.
Can a subordinate really undermine his boss?
“Slow walking” is routinely employed in government offices. The order of the boss is carried out, but without any sense of urgency or even a fervent wish to complete it. When asked for status reports, the subordinate is vague — we’re still investigating all the complaints and what happened to the derailed rail car, and why the lines are so long. Are the headlines screaming? (I can’t hear them.) When will a solution be ready? It’s not possible to give a definite date as there are many more consultations needed. Slow walking allows the illusion of movement without getting any closer to the goal.
Skipping reporting lines is the best revenge. The subordinate skips his direct report and goes one level higher, keeping the boss’s boss in the loop (Just for your info, Sir) and delaying reports to the one directly above him. When slip-ups occur, the uber-boss already knows what happened, and asks his executive in the dark for a report. The subordinate who leaked the yet incomplete report becomes unavailable. He doesn’t answer text messages and leaves his voice mail to handle his increasingly panicking boss: I am on a client call, Sir. Any queries should be addressed to your boss.
Eroding the boss’s access to clients is a simple matter of arranging meetings with them on one day’s notice, and leaving the boss out — Sir, it was just about operational details on the new project, which you as a big-picture person loathe. We were discussing the pricing of our service and the organizational support we need as well as the new approaches that can be tried. Do I need to send you a call report?
Cutting off internal access is almost routine. This entails calling meetings of the lower ranks without informing the boss — Sir, I thought you were in Mexico watching the wall going up. During coffee breaks, there are dropped hints that the boss has recently been distracted (he attended a koi convention) and can no longer complete sentences without needing to pause until he finds the direct object of his transitive verb. Little details leaked to the boss’s peers create a picture of dementia — he was figuring out what one key in his keyring was for. It was for his office.
How about the subordinate that needs to explain what the boss really meant? Like a mother explaining the tantrums of her baby (he’s just restless and had to break your plates) not everybody readily accepts the interpretations of sacrilegious invectives — he is merely applying a doctrinal stress test to challenge your belief system. (Can you say that more slowly, Sir?)
The short-circuiting of reportorial loops is a risky enterprise. It doesn’t always benefit the subordinate who is devious and disloyal. Discrediting the boss on a regular basis can backfire when discovered.
A pattern of sneaky behavior to undermine the boss is sure to lead to a quick exit…even when walking ever so slowly. Still, the boss’s boss can also have an unreliable underling.
Tony Samson is Chairman and CEO, TOUCH xda
ar.samson@yahoo.com
