Managing the manager

I've recently had an epiphany regarding managers. Oddly enough, this observation was revealed to me only after working with what I would consider a "bad" manager for the past year or so. My revalation? Just as the manager tells the employee what the manager needs from the employee, the employee also needs to tell the manager what the employee needs from the manager. It's a rather wordy concept, I know, but it basically boils down to "communication is a two-way street."

About four years ago, I had the opportunity to work with a manager who is, perhaps, the best manager I will ever work with. We were on the same wavelength much of the time and we just got things done. Looking back, I realize that this manager-to-employee and employee-to-manager communication was occurring all the time. The difference was that since we held similar values, work ethics, and ideas, the communication went unnoticed. We didn't have to explain to each other what was required because we already knew.

I am lucky enough to still be working with and for this person. A little over a year ago, however, we were moved within the organization and were constrained to working under our current manager. As I have explained before, I find our manager to be highly ineffective and feel he has a tendency to be a gatekeeper of information thus creating a clogged channel of communication. In other words, I often wonder if he is communicating to upper management the issues that he says he will communicate.

Before I go off on a tangent about his ineffectiveness, let me get back to my point.

About four months ago, our manager decided we (7 people total) needed to have a weekly meeting. In general, this is a good idea. It keeps everone involved informed about what is going on and lets the manager disseminate information to everyone at the same time.

It was doomed form the start.

The first week, we all gathered in the conference room only to be informed - at the last minute, of course - that the manager had been called away by our director. The next week went off without problem. There was nothing memorable about how good or bad the meeting went - it just went. Weeks three and four were also pre-empted and, only after reminding the manager that he had scheduled this meeting did we hold a meeting on week five. After that, it went in to the bit bucket as another YACMF [pronounced yack-muf] (Yet Another Charles Management Fad).

Fast-forward a few weeks and these same six people who were compelled to attend this meeting have a meeting with the new CIO. As an example of our manager's inconsistencies, we explain the meeting and its history. Two weeks later, we're having our meeting again.

We were all glad to see this because it meant that upper management had obviously taken our condemnations to heart and had spoken to our manager about it. Unfortunately, the meeting started by the manager coming in, sitting down and posign the question, "So, what have you guys got?"

We're stunned. Who calls a meeting and doesn't have a reason for calling it? (sadly enough, he's the second person I've seen in the past year to start a meeting like this) Do you not have any information for us? Are we expected to set the topic of the meeting on the fly? We made it through but we stared at each other after he left and I think actually said, "What the hell was that?"

The meeting has been going on consistently like that for about six weeks now. We gather at 10 am every Tuesday, the manager comes in and says, "What have you got?" Nevermind that we know he meets with the CIO at least on a weekly basis. Nevermind that we have questions outstanding from the previous meeting. Nevermind that we have started sharing meeting minutes that point out that we have outstanding questions. Nevermind that someone else has started preparing an agenda that our manager sees prior to the meeting. It starts the same way. He obviously missed the point.

I tired of this quickly. I tried reversing the roles on him one week by answering with my own question of, "what have you got?" but the subtlety was lost on him. Finally, last week, I decided to come right out and say what was on my mind. I decided to tell him just what I thought of his meetings - tactfully, of course.

At the end of the meeting last week, I explained that it was frustrating to us to open the meeting the way he does. I explained that we want to hear information from him that he has gathered over the past week and that, if a question is carried over from a previous week, we not have to ask the question again to get an update. Interestingly enough, he actually admitted, straight out, that he was only having a meeting because he was told to have the meeting. I think I caught him totally off guard. It also confirmed that we were right - he missed the point.

At any rate, throwing the subject of the meeting itself out onto the table gave us a chance to express our expectations but it also allowed him to express his expectations. We were able to see that his intention in opening the meetings that way was to keep it as "our" meeting and not "his" meeting and he was able to see that we needed more of a leadership role from him.

I am cautiously optimistic that this will turn out to be a highly productive meeting from now on and we will start getting what we need from our manager (at least where the meeting is concerned). I originally looked at this process as managing the manager or, perhaps, telling the manager how to do his job but my attitude turned to something more constructive, especially after the meeting. I had no idea he was trying to set a particular tone of group ownership by opening the meeting that way. On the flip side, he probalby had no idea how frustrating it was to us that he did that.

Communication does, indeed, go both ways.