Outwit, outlast

It’s said that people leave managers, not companies. But for many, it’s simply not feasible to leave a job in current economic circumstances. Impossible Bosses – Secret Strategies to Deal with 8 Archetypal Managers (published by Jonathan Ball), provides top strategies for dealing with awful bosses.

WORDS: LAURA JONES

Who hasn’t been burned by horrible workplace behaviour? This neat little book, a manual of sorts, Impossible Bosses – Secret Strategies to Deal with 8 Archetypal Managers, focuses on ways to cope with every type of difficult superior. Based on solid psychological principles, authors Vivienne Lawack (Lawyer and Deputy Vice Chancellor at UCT), Hanlie Lizette Wessels (Executive Director) and Robert Craig (Business Management Consultant and Speaker) explain the hows and whys of the game. The copy is straightforward, with some sneaky humour thrown
in, that provides truly laugh-out-loud moments.

IN DISCUSSION

Authors Vivienne and Hanlie met at the South African Reserve Bank in 2002 and “have been ‘friendtors’ ever since”. Between them, they have more than 50 years’ experience in corporate leadership, right up to executive level. Although the two have lived apart in different cities for 16 years, they’re long-distance friends, keeping in close contact and sharing coping mechanisms for tricky situations at work. Each has offered advice to the other, in a strongly supportive relationship. Both admit that helping one another take a step back has prevented the two making rash decisions. In retrospect, they realise their discussions have helped mitigate fundamental career risk.

HOW DID YOU THREE MEET EACH OTHER?

Rob(ert): Hanlie, Vivienne and I know each other because they were previously my clients. With their experience and with some of my tricks, we believed it would be a compelling proposition if we could synergise together.

Hanlie: I’ve known Rob for 14 years and his advice and sometimes impromptu coaching, even while walking to the car, has been immensely valuable. When I first met Rob, he ran an insights workshop to help us understand ourselves and our bosses. This was the most important training I have done in my whole career, and I have seen this changing the course of people’s careers if they are willing to self-reflect and adapt.

WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO WRITE THIS BOOK?

Rob: I was lucky enough to work for a consulting firm with a collection of amazing leaders. However, as a result of my job as a facilitator and coach, I have had an awful amount of personal experience with horrible bosses. One of the worst was a director at a listed company who regularly left a staff member in tears. She has subsequently been walking on egg shells for over three years because she is too scared  to leave and has never been trained on how to manage the situation. Every morning she wakes to a nightmare and it only ends when she goes to sleep. I invited her to our book launch as I felt inspired to have a personalised copy ready for her.

Vivienne: The book came about as a result of our (Hanlie and my) work experiences with various impossible bosses over many years. The anecdotes refer to our personal stories as well
as others’ experiences. Once we realised that every workplace has its fair share of our eight defined archetypal managers, the rest was history. Reducing the book to our own experiences only would have detracted from its universal application.

Hanlie: The techniques [in the book] have helped me out of really difficult situations with impossible bosses, especially using the one secret strategy we recommended when dealing with a ‘Ms Say-Me’. It is a question technique, which helps you to communicate with a very demanding self-centred person in a way that gets them to listen to your input. The sooner you learn to use this, the better chance you have of diffusing a difficult situation.

What I have learned is that the impossible boss does not necessarily have it in for you. You just happen to be close to them, and their focus on you is often incidental. It really helps to understand why they are the way that they are. You can then figure out a response following the strategies we’ve given, with an approach tailored to make progress.

DON’T THOSE IN SENIOR ROLES HOLD ALL THE POWER THOUGH?

Rob: In my opinion, this is not untrue. There’s a reason lawyers get so much flack: have you ever witnessed how their relentless drive for ‘billable-hours’ can inadvertedly create a perceived hierarchy of power? Nevertheless, it’s also not the only truth: I have worked with one South African state-owned enterprise and have seen how many of the supervisors bully their staff. Therefore, my thoughts are: lawyers are bad, but abusive supervisors are even worse.

Hanlie: The more senior you become, the more you will experience impossible bosses. This is why it’s important to learn techniques to mitigate their impact on you. Some experience this with colleagues, others with direct reporting lines. But there’s no doubt this gets tougher the higher you are up the chain. The risk is, if this is not addressed in the organisation, you may find that others start to imitate them to try and find their own power.

Vivienne: It really depends on whether or not your boss is impossible. Even when you’re at the top of the ladder and don’t know how to manage your boss, you may still experience difficulty and even pain, prompting you to consider whether to leave or stay.

WHAT WAS YOUR WRITING PROCESS?

Rob: We needed good clarity on roles. Vivienne and Hanlie leveraged their experience to write anecdotes on each character and crystallise their characteristics. Then they passed each chapter on to me to analyse them and develop the strategies to manage them. With Hanlie as our Project Manager (thank you!), this sequence became our writing process.

Hanlie: We brought different value propositions to the table, and we utilised and shared our strengths. We alternated using a parallel approach, a round robin approach, a strong project management approach (depending on what the task at hand was), and at times an approach of incremental gains. Sometimes we had writing sessions in the evenings to ensure that we made progress. I really enjoyed it, and of course we had our challenges. It was tough at times to
keep to timelines with three different schedules, and personal priorities, but the vision and collective goal we had for the book to add value to others’ work lives kept us focused.

Vivienne: We had a good structure: the anecdotes and characteristics of our eight impossible bosses, the reasons they are the way they are, how to recognise an impossible boss, and secret strategies to manage them. Hanlie project managed the process in the end, setting the targets, word count, and deadlines. We had regular check-in meetings to ensure that we were on the same page. Rob received ‘8 Impossible Bosses’ from Hanlie and me, and had to ensure that we had a ‘pocket coach’ for each character.