What is the role the coachee grants to his/her boss?
Since I started coaching, I have invited my clients to think about not only their own person (strengths, weaknesses, personality, personal background…) and personal difficulties, but also about the various roles, starting with their own, in their organization.
I have been struck by the fact that in most cases, although they told me “In my position, I should do or not do this or that…”, they had never checked whether what they believed their role should be matched the actual expectation from their boss. They took for granted something which was rarely explicitly confirmed.
Even more intriguing, whereas they had thought about their own role, that of their peers and the role of the people reporting to them, they had never thought about the role that they were granting their own boss. I consider this forgotten aspect of “organization in the mind” as something of major importance.
In an article (HBR - Designing jobs right, R.L. Martin, January 2023), the author explains first how people, when given an assignment they don’t want to do (too complicated or, most important for today’s purpose, too simple), will make up a different job. From the employer’s perspective, this rarely works out, and this is when issues arise. “Managers and their subordinates can prevent this by taking time to explore their jobs and objectives together”.
This is however rarely seen as understanding the role of the boss himself, as is related in the second part of the article which describes how CEOs (seen as the boss), or even the Chairman (boss of the CEO), also want an interesting job. It gives the example of a CEO “who had given his proud and accomplished Chairman a stupid job – to admire the management’s wisdom. The Chairman took offense and decided to do another job: schooling the CEO in meetings. Being left aside, and limiting one’s role to that of approval only, will result in a numb job for the boss; they will then go nitpicking”. “Bosses love helping their managers and adding value if subordinates offer their bosses real tasks; bosses will delightedly provide helpful input”. The author recommends: “Instead of waiting until the 11th hour to give bosses a dumb job, give them smart jobs along the way”, by asking them their opinion and input upstream on relevant topics.
One of my clients, a CFO, had not spoken to his boss the CEO, for more than 6 months when we started the coaching program. This situation was the result of a conflict they had had in public during a meeting. Since then, my client acted on his own, self-defining what he had to do. He never checked what his boss wanted him to do, and considered his boss as useless, if not stupid. Obviously the CEO could feel that, and had a poor opinion of his CFO (who, nominated by HQ, could not be removed from his position). Each of them probably waited for the other to leave the entity.
I showed my client a picture of a chess game which I find particularly enlightening for conversations about roles at play.
I invited him to think not only about his own role (he saw himself as a rook, and believed his boss saw him as a pawn), but about what role he was actually leaving to his boss, the king. He had actually forgotten the king, its importance and role, and that without working closely together, they were sure to lose the game. He could not win by himself, just as a rook, and could not win without taking into consideration the role of all other pieces, starting with the king. For his own moves, he had to take the others’ roles, capabilities, positions and freedom of movement into consideration. (Even if he, or the others, sometimes made stupid moves). And most important, he had to allow the king to be the king.
This rang a bell in my own professional experience, when I did enormous amounts of work to prepare project reviews by my boss, waited until the work was as “finished” as possible and only then, presented it for approval. My boss acted as he liked this way of doing for some months but then, with time, became difficult. I thought I was doing my best but was blind to the fact that the role I was granting him was not satisfactory for him, even if it was not conscious for him. He never explicitly complained about this but I now realize it probably made him uncomfortable.
Symmetrically, another client is backtracking in front of his boss (a lady) who now occupies all the space that he has left her, and micro manages him in an ever more pressing way. On a recent discussion, he was postponing the analysis of a (minor) problem until his boss could, at the time of her visit six weeks later, make her own opinion. “What exactly are you expecting from her on this matter?”, I asked him. Was he expecting her to do his own part: analyze the problem and decide? What did he see as her role, as opposed to his own role? She is a micro manager, but he is actually encouraging her to behave as such by not taking the role he should. And they have never discussed about each other’s role boundaries.
This also brought me back to my own experience, and to the situation previously described. I now think that I had fallen into the trap of leaving no role to my last boss, because the previous one had been a micro-manager. I did not want to experience the same unpleasant situation of being told what to do in every detail, which unconsciously drove me to occupy all the available space, and leave my boss the only role of approver of my initiatives. He had to “fight” to be back into an interesting position.
The difficult but interesting part of these phenomena is that they are mostly unconscious.
Thinking about the situations encountered by these two clients has helped me see aspects of my previous executive life that I had not understood. Reciprocally, I have been able to reflect on my own past experiences and on how I managed my various bosses or rather, what role I left them take or prevented them from taking.
Another important aspect of role alignment lies in the explanation about his own role that the boss gives to his direct reports, and even below. Not only in respect to the direct relationship, but more broadly. It is not rare to see teams or team members criticize the role of their boss, for lack of understanding of the boss’s agenda.
One more client of mine has had difficulties since taking over a new position, with a new team. He was soon criticized by some people in his new team for not doing what they thought he should be doing, and doing things that they considered irrelevant. The team has been judging their boss’s actions by comparing them (or rather their visible part), to what his predecessor was doing, which was partly different. The new boss thinks that what he does is obvious, normal, or even in some cases none of their business. But they feel authorized to make a judgment on what he does. If not well explained, this will result in frustrations and even conflict.
Once again, I have experienced this situation myself in my previous roles as CEO. A part of what I was doing (external PR for example) what not understood by some staff just because the result of some actions was by nature invisible or long-term oriented. Teams may tolerate this situation when everything “goes well”. But in case of stress or difficulties, the probability for the team to enter into a self-defense mechanism, and to project bad feelings (splitting) to the boss, is a reality. One way of preventing this from happening could be to regularly align and explain the various roles in the organization in broader terms than what seems directly relevant.
Conclusion
Starting with the organization in the mind of the client, it seems extremely important to me in my coaching practice to invite the client to think not only about his role, the role of peers and the role of people reporting to him/her, but also to include the role of his/her boss. It is not only up to the boss to define their own role in respect to his team, but the way teams or direct reports understand the role of their own boss is crucial.
The way one, consciously or unconsciously, defines one’s boss’s role, should not remain unexplored. It is a key aspect of what the coach should do with his clients. It may be seen as a kind of reverse 360 on role definition of people in the organization.
