Next Level Blog

Five Ways to Survive a Clueless Boss

Well, after many years in the job, Michael Scott has left the office at Dunder Mifflin to pursue other dreams. It remains to be seen how things are going to go for the team with the new boss.

You may or may not be surprised how often I hear in my coaching work about senior level bosses who are basically clueless. The cluelessness can show up in different ways – time sucking, pointless requests that come out of left field; no clear direction; much more emphasis on bluster and style than on the substance of getting things done. The list could go on and on. (Feel free to add your own observations on what makes for a clueless boss in the comments.)

As I wrote here a few months ago, leaders can change the weather. If you’ve got a boss who is foggy and cloudy in their approach, it’s pretty easy for everyone on their team to show up foggy and cloudy. Obviously, that’s a pretty dangerous career situation for everyone in that boss’s organization. How do you help yourself and your team survive when you find yourself in a clueless boss induced fog bank?

Here are five things some of my savvy leadership coaching clients have done to survive a clueless boss:

Bossypants: Leadership Lessons from Tina Fey

I did something this past weekend that I rarely do. I read a business book all the way through. (You see, the dirty little secret about most business books is you can get the meat from them with a heavy skim in an hour or less.)

Of course, having read the title of this post, you may be surprised to learn that Tina Fey wrote a business book. Bossypants is a lot more than a business book.  It’s a memoir of how a working class Greek American girl from the Philadelphia suburbs grew up to be a really powerful person in the TV and movie business. It’s about how she overcame sexism in the comedy business and how she seeks to strike the balance between the joys of being really great at her work and the joys of being a mom, spouse, daughter, friend, family member, etc. It’s also about what she learned at high school drama camp, what she learned on her honeymoon cruise and how she learned to do her Sarah Palin impression.

If you like Tina Fey’s brand of intelligent, snarky, slightly off center humor (I do), and if you’re interested in what a successful woman has learned about leadership, you’ll like Bossypants and likely laugh out loud as you read it. If you’re offended by occasional profanities and body part references, it may not be your cup of tea.

Either way, there are some important leadership lessons from Tina Fey in Bossypants. Here are a few that stood out for me:

What Leaders Need to Learn from American Idol

If you been reading this blog for awhile, you know that this is the time of year when my corporate friend, Jennifer, and I handicap and kibitz about American Idol in emails we send each other. We both agree that the show is way better than we expected it to be in the post Simon Cowell era. It's actually less stressful and more entertaining to watch without all of the genuflecting toward Simon. That's probably one reason why the ratings are as strong as they've ever been. 

So, that's one thing right off the bat that leaders need to learn from American Idol. Hardly anyone is irreplaceable. If you put the right team (who knew Steven Tyler and J Lo could be so entertaining?) and processes in place, your organization can keep rocking forward even if you lose a key player.

Another big thing that leaders need to learn from Idol this year is that people perform better when they're allowed to play to their strengths. Unlike previous seasons when each week had narrow musical themes that forced the contestants to perform outside their comfort zones, the weekly themes this year have usually been broad enough to drive a truck through. For the most part, the contestants who are left know what their strengths are and sing to them. The hard rock guy, James, the jazz driven Casey (who I think might be the love child of Will Ferrell and Zach Galifinakis) and country crooner Scotty are all playing in their power alleys. Once she got past singing Blondie's Call Me, Haley seemed to find her bluesy groove and Jakob is consistently channeling his inner Luther Vandross. The contestant I'm most concerned for now is young Lauren who's really talented but seemed to peak during the auditions and Hollywood Week. She was loose and having fun back then but now seems like she's got a little voice inside her head reminding her she's singing on American Idol and she better not screw it up. She's holding back as a result.  Leaders need to quiet their inner critic and show up fully confident when they're on stage.

And that last point leads us to Ryan Seacrest. Am I the only one who thinks he's handling his role on the show better than he ever has? He seems more confident, relaxed and really dialed in. Could it be because he's not so fixated on winning the games of one upsmanship that he got sucked into playing with Simon over the past couple of years? The leadership lesson here is don't get so fixated on your nemesis that it throws you off your game.

So, one thing I learned when I wrote a post called Feedback Do's and Dont's from American Idol a couple of years ago was that lots of people have strongly held opinions about this show.  So, let 'em rip in the comments. I'd love to hear any hidden leadership lessons you're picking up from the show but pure fan boy or fan girl comments are cool too. Have fun with it!

The Math of Leadership

I have a confession to make. I’m not that great at math. Don’t get me wrong, I can do the basics, but I’m not going to be writing any Google or Facebook style algorithms anytime soon. My math challenges literally go back to first grade when the concept of subtraction just rocked my little six year old brain. It’s always been a struggle and the math skills I have have been hard won.

That’s why I was so interested to read an article called A Better Way to Teach Math by David Bornstein on the New York Times blog this week.  Bornstein describes a teaching approach called Jump Math which has been used with 85,000 math students and has pushed the performance bell curve very far to the right.  According to the program’s originator, John Mighton, the secret of Jump’s success is that it teaches students math by breaking problems into micro steps and giving the kids time to develop mastery in the basics before moving to more advanced problem solving.  As Mighton told Bornstein,  “Asking children to make their own discoveries before they solidify the basics is like asking them to compose songs on guitar before they can form a C chord.”

The interesting thing is that teaching math isn’t the only discipline where we tend to move people into situations for which they’re unprepared. The same is often the case with leadership. Think about it.  How many times have you seen people put into leadership roles and then fail because they weren’t ready? I’ve seen it so much that I wrote a book about it called The Next Level.

The story on Jump Start gave me a fresh perspective on the issue of preparing people for new challenges.  Here are a few things I think are important to keep in mind as you prepare leaders for bigger roles:

You Like Me, You Really Like Me

One of the most e-mailed articles on the New York Times website the past couple of days has been an article by David Carr on how it seems to be acceptable behavior to text someone else while you’re in a conversation with an actual live person who is in the room with you. Carr, the media reporter for the Times, noticed this in buckets when he attended the annual South by Southwest Conference in Austin this year.

I think Carr’s article has struck a chord because lots of folks are tired of being treated as if they don’t matter. In coaching busy and highly focused executives over the years, I’ve worked with a lot of people who are secretly concerned with whether or not their co-workers and team members like them. 

Here’s the magic secret to making people like you. Treat them like they matter. If you’re looking for more details about how to do that, here are five ideas that are relatively easy to do and likely to make a difference.