What if the low performer is your manager?
That’s the question I received, in a private message on LinkedIn from a longstanding connection, shortly after publishing my last post on handling low performance situations. It’s not often asked so bluntly, but it’s a common question still, and for good reason. We know people very often quit jobs to get away from bad management. We also know they can feel powerless to do anything else but quit when their manager isn’t serving them well.
That’s a shame, because if you’re unlucky enough to be in that situation, there are other options worth exploring. As with so many other organizational problems, the keys that unlock those options are empathy, realism, and clear, respectful communication. Let’s unpack more specifically how those apply.
Managers are people too [citation needed]
To understand your best options for dealing with an ineffective manager, just as with an ineffective employee, it helps to learn what you can about what might be driving that ineffectiveness. Some possible factors are the same in both cases and easy to empathize with; for example, external-world stressors like family or health challenges can affect a manager’s performance as surely as anyone else’s. But the special difficulties of trying to figure out “why is my manager acting this way?” are that:
they have a job you probably haven’t had, with incentives and constraints you haven’t faced before
and if you just ask them why they’re doing things a certain way, they may well not give you a straight answer.
It’s usually not culturally comfortable— though it ought to be— for managers to be frank with their reports about their job difficulties. And of course sometimes that frankness really must be limited, e.g. for confidentiality reasons.
But you can often gain insight into your manager’s behavior by recalling that their actions are more indirectly tied to concrete outcomes than yours. This is almost definitionally true by the nature of hierarchies, and it may seem obvious, but in my experience people don’t often think enough about what it means for how their manager is likely to act. In particular, the greater indirection that comes with being further up the hierarchy can produce a strong incentive to play status games rather than do what’s best for the team, and this incentive is at the root of many frustrating types of mismanagement. Common status-gaming behaviors include:
neglecting service to reports in order to curry favor with executives further up the chain
distorting productive organizations by trying to juice metrics (team size and seniority, scope of responsibilities) that increase a manager’s status and odds of promotion
trying to align employees’ workload with short-term team needs and/or role ladder expectations instead of the employees’ strengths and motivations
trying to minimize trouble and embarrassment and have an “easy life,” both in the sense of lower workload/stress and less chance of a black mark on the team’s record.
Sadly, managers often turn to these behaviors out of fear, and it’s a fear you’re unlikely to be able to assuage. Does that mean you’re just stuck unless you quit? Happily, no.
Speak up for yourself— but do it strategically
To give voice rather than exit its best chance of success, ask yourself: how can I talk about this not in terms of complaining about “I’m blocked by manager behavior X” or “I need manager change Y in order to get what I want”, but in terms of “here is a change my manager and I could make together that would help achieve their career goals as well as mine”? This is similar to the usual advice to “come to your manager with solutions, not problems”; but in this case you’re focusing specifically on solutions that would require the manager to act differently, and you want to convince the manager that by their own lights it would be rewarding and satisfying to make that change.
Here is where your Situation-Behavior-Impact skills will be needed most, especially given the level of respect-signaling a manager will typically expect of subordinates. All the general communications principles for difficult conversations apply doubly here, too. Principle #3, about leading with questions and being open-minded enough to learn something new from the answers, is especially important.
You probably want to get different perspectives on the issue than just your manager’s, too. For this, it helps a lot to have a diverse network of co-worker relationships, where the relevant axis of diversity is types of role and seniority within the company. Who might you confide in that might have experience with the same sort of management issue? Who might add the most to your understanding of why your manager is acting the way they are— or conversely, who might have the integrity and courage to call you on it if in fact the problem is you and not the manager?
Finding really-greener, not fake-greener, grass
A diverse internal support network also helps if you decide you can’t “manage up” to fix the issue and need to try and make a role change instead. If there are other teams, or even other job roles you could play on the same team, that avoid the kinds of dysfunctions you’re now experiencing and align better with your strengths and expectations, it’s those folks who will tell you.
And that’s important, because it’s typically worth your while to consider internal moves of that sort as alternatives to “classic quitting”. When we’re dissatisfied with our current situation, it can be very tempting to believe what we want to believe about how another company’s job offer would make everything better. But the structural incentive and constraint problems that created your unhappy management situation probably aren’t as special as you might think. All super-Dunbar companies, for instance, have some degree of organizational dysfunction that drives some managers to play unproductive status games. It might be worth rolling the dice anyway, but often there’s a higher expected-ROI option sitting just down the hall, or across the paper divide of a job ladder.
And if you want to discuss what might be the highest-ROI option for your case, I’m all ears! As always, you can schedule a free 30 minute intro chat at https://calendly.com/nweininger.
