The Nike Boss: “Just Do It”

Episode #149 The Nike Boss: “Just Do It”

Quite often when we push back on a boss who wants us to take on more work, we’re told to just do it. Or sometimes when we raise risks and issues, they’re glossed over and ignored and were told to just do it. Given that the world’s leading athletic brand has the tagline just do it, I took to calling these people, Nike bosses.

I think we’ve all experienced the Nike boss at some point in our careers and even though it seems like it should be a fairly simple problem to solve, it’s not. The dynamics can be quite complex and the underlying drivers make it difficult for Nike bosses to change. You don’t want to be that boss and you certainly don’t want to work for that boss.

In this article, I’m going to give you both perspectives. What would you need to do to make sure that neither of these things ever happens to you?

• We’ll start by looking at what drives a Nike boss.

• I’ll then talk about how to push back on a Nike boss if you ever find yourself in that situation.

• I’ll finish with some tips for making sure that you never become a Nike boss yourself.

What characterises a Nike boss?

Sometimes it’s about the ‘what’. Let’s look at a typical conversation that would give it away.

Your boss comes to you and says, “Hey, I’ve just come out of our weekly exec meeting and there’s something we need to get done”.

You say, “Well, hang on. We’re already under-resourced”.

The boss says, “I know, but the CEO thinks that this is really important”.

Well, you push back. “Fair enough. But what are we going to drop?”

Your boss says, “Well, nothing. It’s all important”.

You say, “Hang on a minute. If we do that, something else will suffer and we won’t deliver it. What don’t you want?”

And that’s when your Nike boss says, “You’ll find a way. Just do it”.

Or sometimes it’s about the ‘how’. For example, you go to your boss and say, “We’ve started to work on this initiative and can see a few problems with it.”

“Oh yeah, like what?” says the boss.

“Well, the costing on the civil engineering works in the business case is really under done”.

Your boss says, “Well, can’t you make it up somewhere else?”

You say, “Well, no. It’s the biggest single project cost and most of the other areas have been estimated with the same level of optimism”.

Your boss says, “Can you cut some corners? Save some costs somewhere else?”

You say, “I strongly doubt it. We’re going to have to go back to the board and tell them that the project is going to be late and over budget”.

That’s where the boss fires up. “No, no, leave that to me. I’ll find a way to manage the board”.

You say, “Well look, something’s got to give. We can’t just keep going as we are”.

That’s when the Nike boss says, “Look just to do it”.

Now there are a few common characteristics here.

The first is the reluctance of the Nike boss to challenge upwards

They don’t want to give their boss bad news, so they say yes to everything. New project. Oh yes, boss, I’ll get that done. Is everything okay? Oh yes, boss it’s all going great. When something goes wrong, they hide it. When things are off track, they lie about them. This can easily become a kiss up, kick down style of boss. It’s all smiles and positivity upwards for their boss, by the way, who they spend a lot of time sucking up to.

But it’s tyrannical rule for those below. That’s the only way to resolve the tension and pressure that they feel from being constantly exposed to potential discovery and leading the double life of knowing what’s really going on while pretending that it’s better than that.

This causes an even bigger problem. When something inevitably fails, bullshit excuses are the only way to cover that failure up.

So reporting becomes sanitised. The people above don’t hear the truth and they make poor decisions because the information they’re getting is inaccurate. When bad news is completely unavoidable, because it’s a clearly visible failure, it always comes as a surprise to those above the Nike boss.

So it’s obvious why you wouldn’t want to work for a Nike boss, but I can’t even understand why you’d want one working for you.

Think about what it’s like to have a Nike boss working for you.

• You can’t get accurate information

• You don’t get any constructive challenge

• There’s no thought leadership

• There’s no creativity, nor is there any innovation.

They just tell you how good you are, and they always tell you what you want to hear.

Ah, well maybe that’s it. The reason why weak leaders like Nike bosses working for them.

How do you manage a Nike boss?

I’ve got four really good ideas here for how to push back. I’ll put this in a free downloadable, which you can download here.

1) Clarity of objective

Make sure you have agreement on what’s important. You know if you can do that, and keep coming back to it, you paint your Nike boss into a corner. They won’t like that, but they’ll have to either engage or they’ll have to ignore and avoid you.

Either way works for you to tell you the truth. Engagement is best by far, that’s your chance to make some headway. But even if they go for an ignore and avoid strategy, it gives you the opportunity to seek recourse with someone above them. You’ve got to be really careful with this one. Reading the play is particularly important in these situations.

You don’t want to go over your boss’s head if you can at all avoid it. Especially if your boss has a close relationship with their boss, which often happens with Nike bosses. The kiss up kick down seems to work really well to ingratiate themselves and consolidate their position with those above. So just watch how you do this.

But still, if you can’t get through your boss, you’ve got to go around or above, otherwise you’re stuck where you are.

2) Value ranking

You’ve got to know with extreme precision, what drives the most value for your team and for the organisation. That’s the only way you can have a proper conversation based on facts.

I know that we all get heaps and heaps of prioritisation done. We have 10 priority ones, 15 priority twos, 400 priority fours that we never get to. Prioritisation doesn’t help you that much.

The precision we need comes from value ranking. You need to know very specifically what’s number one, what’s number two, what’s number three. If you can apply your team and your people to the most important, the biggest value drivers for your team and organisation, then you don’t need to do all the other crap. You can rule the line under number 9 and not worry about numbers 10 to 468. They are marginal. You’ve got to focus down on the things that really work best.

Once you’ve got this rank list, when your Nike boss comes to you and says, “I need you to take this new thing on.” You can say, “Absolutely, let’s sit down and have a chat about it”.

You put the rankings on the table and you say, “Is this more important than number one? No. Oh, okay. Is it more important than number two?”

Very quickly, you’re going to be able to compare and contrast the different things that you have on your plate and whether or not something new is of any value, just because it happens to be urgent or just because it happens to have come from someone important. If you can identify the high value items really clearly and draw that contrast with those in the other urgent priorities, then you’re much more likely to protect that value.

3) Negotiate everything

Get into the habit of negotiating with your boss to set appropriate deadlines, resourcing levels, and scope of work. Having ‘buy-in’ early, let’s you have a conversation that keeps your boss informed. If she chooses to tell you to just do it, it won’t be for lack of having good information to base her decision on.

Follow up conversations with an email, just to confirm and reiterate the outcomes from any conversation. So for example, “Hey Marty, just to make sure we’re on the same page. here’s my understanding of our discussion about the project in today’s meeting. We agreed that it was likely to be high risk in a certain area, and that I would continue to monitor that risk and keep you informed. We also spoke about the fact that I have a strong view that it’s under resourced at the present for the timeframes we’ve set. And I’ll certainly do my best to get the team to peak performance and do everything we can to meet the deadlines, but experience tells me that we’re likely to be off target by 10 to 15%”.

Once you get into a pattern of doing this, the conversation flow is the most important thing. You’re never going to have to say, ‘I told you so’, but this will offer some solace and protection if everything goes to custard.

I remember years ago as an I T project manager, I was in one of these negotiations with my boss and he was becoming increasingly agitated with the news I had to give him. He just wasn’t happy. I had told him that the best delivery timeframe he could get would be four and a half months. He was adamant that he wanted it in six weeks.

Eventually he said, “I need you to make this happen. It has to be delivered in six weeks”. I looked at him and I said, “Hmm, okay, six weeks it is”.

Then he paused and he narrowed his eyes and he looked at me and he said, “Hang on a minute. You just told me it was going to take four and a half months”. And I smiled and said, “Well, it is. But if you’re really passionate about me telling you it’s going to take six weeks, I’ll tell you that. You’ll just be waiting for another three months after that for the software to be implemented”.

Sometimes you have to spell out the obvious, but harsh realities for your boss. And with that boss in particular, I had to tell him, although it’s fairly easy for one pregnant woman to give birth to a baby in nine months, it’s not possible for nine pregnant women to give birth to a baby in one month. Projects are just like that sometimes and the realities of resource allocation cannot be changed.

4) Give your Nike boss the occasional win

If you take the advice from the last three points, you’ll do pretty well protecting the high value work and stopping all that irrational shit that can tend to flow downhill from a Nike boss. But just occasionally, there’s got to be stuff that the boss asks for that you can do pretty easily, without major disruption to the high value work programme. There are always slack resources lying around in certain areas, and some things do actually make sense if they enable greater efficiencies in other areas of your work programme. Never risk the main outcomes. Of course, focus on these with laser like precision, and don’t allow distractions to creep in. But you don’t want to be pouring cold water on everything you’re asked to do otherwise the relationship is going to sour.

How do you not become a Nike boss?

Do everything I just recommended for someone who works for a Nike boss

That’s where it begins.

Most Nike bosses become a nightmare for their people simply because they aren’t prepared to push back. Having some tools and strategies for pushing back is a great way to start protecting your team a little more.

You need to develop the willingness and ability to push back on those above you. If you’re a ‘yes man’ or ‘yes woman’, that will be super tough. You want to be seen as a ‘can do’ person, but there’s a massive difference between a workhorse and a trusted advisor. Trusted advisors always looked much more promotable to me than workhorses ever did. Now it’s true, good soldiers get promoted too. Especially when their bosses liked to surround themselves with people who don’t challenge or disagree with them.

But I had many a tough time with bosses who didn’t like being challenged. That’s one of my main afflictions. I wouldn’t bullshit them just because I knew it was what they wanted to hear. And it definitely worked against me on more than one occasion.

But this is when you have to ask yourself some really important questions…

What type of person do I want to be? And what type of person do I want to work for?

To me that mattered. It deeply mattered. My bias was to be a trusted advisor, not a workhorse. And if I couldn’t be a trusted advisor for my boss, then it was the wrong boss, and I acted accordingly. I voted with my feet. Being a trusted advisor, shows that you’re likely to handle the rigours of the next level up. And that means you’re way less likely to be typecast in the role you’re currently in.

It does take a fair bit of courage to push back on your boss. And that’s why you have to earn their trust. You have to deliver on what you say you will and give your boss confidence that you’ll produce the goods, and that your judgement and guidance is sound.

Show them how not just reacting to every thought bubble from above is a good thing. That is actually the secret sauce to producing superior results.

Talk to your boss about simplicity and focus and the value that that creates. Show him how well your team performs when the people aren’t distracted every week by the new shiny objective.

You’re going to come across many Nike bosses in your career, there’s no doubt. But even though it can be tough, many of them are able to change if you give them the confidence and the facts they need to be able to push back on the people above them. What you can’t do, is absorb the pressure from your boss only to push it down to your team. They deserve better, and you need to be better for them.