St.Louis Business Journal
WORKING FOR A MANAGER WHO OVERLOADS YOU CAN BE HELL ON EARTH

By Anna Navarro

February 2007  

Author's note: Client stories in this column are based on actual situations fictionalized to protect privacy and told with permission.



Working for a manager who dumps an impossible workload on you can be hell on earth. But sometimes it's possible to salvage the situation by teaching this kind of boss how to set priorities.

Betty had a new boss who kept heaping new projects on her. She was feeling frantic about being able to accomplish everything she was being asked to do. The pressure was triggering headaches.

I suggested she do two things. First, list everything she had been assigned and how long it would take to do each item. Second, review the list with her boss, explain it wasn't possible to do it all and ask what he wanted to drop, delay or assign to someone else. The thought of doing this was scary, but eventually Betty agreed it was the only alternative to being overwhelmed.

Not surprisingly, her boss' first response was that everything was equally important, had to be done right away and that she was the only one who could do it. I’d prepared Betty to stay calm and refuse to budge if this happened. Her next move was to offer her own priorities, indicating things she thought could be delayed or dropped.

At this point her boss began to argue for different priorities, and that’s when Betty realized she was making progress. She walked out of the meeting with a tough but doable set of goals.

That, of course, was not the end of her struggle. Her boss would routinely email her or give her new assignments verbally when she already had a full plate. She would have to communicate back patiently, without getting angry, that she couldn’t get that done along with the other five things she was juggling in the same timeframe. She would then ask what his priorities were. He would usually ignore her question. After a few days she’d email again with what she thought were the priorities, saying that unless she heard otherwise, this is what she planned to do. Sometimes that would lead to a negotiation. More often she wouldn't hear from him and she would simply act on her own plan.

In the beginning this created a great deal of stress for Betty. It also took time. She was used to bosses who set realistic goals. Eventually she accepted that this boss was just not capable of doing that part of his job and she had to do it for him. Fortunately, she was skilled at her job and had been around long enough to have a good sense of what was important. As she got more experience doing this, it got easier.

While this approach worked on a day-to-day basis, we needed to make sure it wasn’t going to backfire on her when it came time for her performance appraisal and salary review. To deal with this I suggested she do a monthly report to her boss detailing what she’d accomplished and how many hours she’d worked. She also listed what she'd dropped or delayed and why. The report included a brief summary of her requests for his priorities and his response (or non-response).

Her performance review went very well, and she got a raise. Her boss never mentioned the priority setting ritual she had developed or the items she hadn’t accomplished. Our best guess was that he'd come to realize she knew what she was doing even though he wasn’t comfortable enough with his own limitations to acknowledge what was happening.

Things worked out well for Betty. But what if her boss hadn’t tacitly gone along with what she was doing? What if he had berated her for the things she wasn’t getting done? Or blamed her for things that she didn't know were important to do because she didn't have the big picture that he had?

If that happened I would have suggested Betty tell her boss she felt she had no choice but to go to his manager to discuss the issue. Sometimes a boss’s boss will step in and coach a supervisor to do a better job, or perhaps even fire an incompetent manager.

If talking to her boss' boss hadn't improved the situation, Betty’s best alternative would have been to look for another job. When all else fails, the only way to prevent being grossly overloaded when you have a manager who is incapable of setting priorities is to be willing to walk away.

Anna Navarro is the founder of Work Transitions, a nationwide career consulting firm that trains independent career strategists and consults with individual clients.

This column was originally published by the St. Louis Business Journal. The actual title of the column and date in which it appeared in the Business Journal may be slightly different from what appears on WorkTransitions.com.