From the Ask Tom mailbag:
Question:
How do you handle Managers who take credit for your work (my immediate manager and his boss)? My immediate manager does not know the job well and depends on everyone for support. The operation has downfalls due to his shortcomings. Only a few immediate individuals know the truth and feel uncomfortable going to upper management.
Response:
The Manager and the Manager-Once-Removed are both absolutely responsible for the output of their teams. I hold them both accountable for the team’s successes and the team’s failure. So, they DO get the credit when times are good and they shoulder the blame when things go bad.
And often, it is not necessary that a Manager have in-depth technical knowledge. That’s what the team is for. I often lead teams where I have zero knowledge of their internal processes or technology.
So, my concern is for the downfalls in operations. Why are they happening? And how can we get better in the future? I use the following questions to debrief. You might be able to share these with your boss so your team can make some progress.
- What did we expect?
- What did we do well?
- What went wrong?
- What can we do next time, to prevent that from going wrong?
- When will we meet again?
When the team focuses on these questions, things begin to change. Complaining to upper management accomplishes little. -TF
Complementary remark: key is to negotiate success (*) with your manager. This means agreeing on what the team needs to reach expected outcomes, to learn from mistakes. What the team needs, can be resources, but also specific commitments from the management.
(*) Cfr. a very interesting leadership book by Michael Watkins: “The First 90 Days”.
If you really feel that you’re not being given due credit by your immediate manager then somehow tell him how you feel before going to upper management. If your manager is indeed incompetent, I doubt he could fool the rest of the organisation for very long before being realized as such. Maybe there’s an aspect of his job that you don’t really understand and maybe the credit he gets is misinterpreted as credit only to him and not to you as part of his support team.
Of course a manager relies on his or her team for support. That’s why they’re called managers. They manage information passed on by the team. As a result, the details and specifics of any job get diluted as they travel to higher levels of management. It’s a process dependent on reliance and trust and can result in success or failure at any level of the organisation.