When Your Boss Has No Backbone

Episode #392 When Your Boss Has No Backbone

WEAK LEADERS ARE DANGEROUS!

I want to be clear from the outset: weak bosses aren’t necessarily bad people. Like the vast majority of us, they’re just doing the best they can with what they’ve got.

But, because they don’t have the strength of character that good leadership demands, they cause all sorts of havoc.

Working for a boss who doesn’t have a decent spinal cord has a range of impacts on you and your team, and it can actually make your life pretty miserable. Most of all, it’s really hard to get results when your direct boss seems to be at odds with you.

In this newsletter, I give you some practical remedies for dealing with a weak boss, and I refer you to some of our more sophisticated content to help you overcome that barrier.

The four symptoms are:

1. Weak leaders don’t push back on their boss;
2. Weak leaders can’t build capability;
3. Weak leaders don’t provide air cover; and
4. Weak leaders follow the path of least resistance.

After all that, I wrap it all up with a few early warning triggers for you to be aware of.

1. WEAK LEADERS DON’T PUSH BACK ON THEIR BOSS

When you report to a spineless boss, sh!t flows downhill. Your boss can’t say no to his boss.

He agrees for the team to deliver any outcomes that his boss suggests… regardless of resource availability… regardless of the team’s current workload… and regardless of whether or not the outcome would actually deliver any real value.

What are the main impacts of this?

Priorities change regularly, because the higher-up boss never hears about the disruption that their decisions create.

When this happens, the team becomes cynical, and develops a sense of futility. It also creates an unsustainable workload for the team, which is coupled with the irrational expectation to keep delivering more and more.

You’ll find dozens of unfinished tasks that just got put on the back burner so that you could deliver the latest executive thought bubble: and no one even misses most of those.

Add all this up, and there’s only one outcome: performance plummets.

But there’s also a hidden risk we don’t talk about much: there’s no feedback or guidance flowing upwards… just a yes-man, nodding, smiling, and trying to stay in their boss’s good books. This creates groupthink, and it drives a massive disconnect between what the more senior leaders believe is happening, and what the team below them is actually doing.

How do you deal with this?

You’ve got to create a watertight work program in your team. Unless you get your own backyard in order first, there’s no way you can even have a sensible conversation about it with your faint-hearted boss.

Be clear on exactly what you’re delivering.

Be clear on exactly the value that it’s going to generate.

This is such an important piece that we lead out with the concepts of value creation in our Leadership Beyond the Theory program. We give you the specific tools you need to identify and isolate the value for each potential resource investment; to rank the relative value potential of each; and to understand how to direct your resources to get the biggest bang for buck.

You can’t do everything, so you have to make choices. And you have to get your boss’s buy-in for those choices.

Once you’ve done that, you have to be prepared to stand up to your boss. To push back, not in an obstructive way, but to say very clearly, “We’ve agreed on a set of deliverables, so let’s work out where this one would fit in.“

Never accept more work without either dropping something of lower value or adding more resources (money, people, assets).

If your spineless boss won’t engage, and decides to become a Nike boss (you know, the one who says “Just do it“) then your job is to inform him of the impacts. These could range from increased risk, to delivery delays, or to reduced scope.

If he still insists you do it, send an email to detail the likely impact. Your low watermark response is to agree to do it on a best-efforts basis.

But be clear on what your constraints are: you need to be direct with your boss. He shouldn’t be surprised if you can’t manage to bend light or change the laws of gravity.

Just think for a moment: can you push back effectively on your boss to get him to agree to a sensible course of action, without damaging the relationship? It’s not easy. You have to be able to handle conflict calmly and rationally.

This is why in Leadership Beyond the Theory, we give you the tools to work on both the skill and the will you need to handle this type of conflict. We have tools to help you manage any mental blocks, and clear steps to improving your skill levels.

This is a massive confidence builder, and when your boss doesn’t have a backbone, these are essential skills.

2. WEAK LEADERS CAN’T BUILD CAPABILITY

When you report to a spineless boss, you’ll find yourself working with a lot of muppets. That’s because a boss without a backbone is neither capable nor motivated to do the hard work of performance management.

He doesn’t know how to have a direct conversation with one of his people about their individual performance; he doesn’t have the skill to hold people accountable for delivering outcomes; and he certainly won’t have the strength to remove an obvious underperformer from the team.

The obvious impact from this (and the only possible outcome) is a mediocre team.

The good people take their foot off the accelerator and go into cruise control… until, of course, they eventually get the sh!ts and decide to leave.

But the poor people flourish, secure in the knowledge that their boss will never have the courage to let them go.

There’s also a hidden risk here. All sorts of other problems start to overtake a team like this. People develop a sense of entitlement; they start to focus on everything except performance; they become insular; and they ‘untether’ themselves from the rest of the company to avoid critique.

Once they do that, it’s really hard to bring them back. And it’s especially frustrating if you’re on the outside, relying on that team to deliver results.

How do you deal with this? By creating an island of excellence in your team.

The good news is, your boss isn’t going to put pressure on you, which gives you a lot of open ground to run in.

The bad news is he doesn’t put any pressure on your colleagues either, so it’s very likely that one or more of your peers will be next-to-useless.

You have to fix your own backyard first, before you have any credibility to put pressure on other teams to follow your lead.

Start by building your own island of excellence:

• You can set your own tone, pace, and standard, regardless of what your boss does;
• You can establish your own performance management regime;
• You can create the expectation for your people that they need to deliver, and let the ones who aren’t interested in doing that self-select.

Many times during my corporate career, I would lift up all the rocks to see what was underneath. I have to say, it’s always pretty ugly under there when you’re following on from a weak leader.

But when people understood they couldn’t simply hide from that level of scrutiny anymore, they would scurry out from under the rock I’d lifted, and try to find another one nearby. The result of this was that people left my team to find a less demanding job in another team.

And even though I don’t like exporting problems to other parts of the same company, that was exactly my intent.

One critical piece here that you can’t overlook is your need to neutralise your boss before you go down this path.

You can’t expect a weak boss to support you, or to actively get on board with the process of lifting the performance bar… but you can at least get his agreement to let you lead your way; to not step in and prevent you from focusing on capability and performance.

This is why, once again, having those conversations isn’t easy. It takes enormous resilience on your part. It takes skill in communicating the principles of accountability and setting the standard, and it takes a really good meeting cadence.

I developed these skills over decades in executive roles, mostly through trial and error, and I managed to distil all of these learnings into the techniques and methods incorporated in our Leadership Beyond the Theory program.

I show you specifically how to avoid the trial and error, and quickly develop these core disciplines. You’ve probably already found out that there are many subtleties to implementing these techniques when you’re living under the shadow of a weak boss.

3. WEAK LEADERS DON’T PROVIDE AIR COVER

You’re never going to feel secure in your role.

A weak boss blames her team when something goes wrong: everything is something or someone else’s fault. She’ll deflect for as long as she can, until one day you’ll find yourself exposed.

When you need protection from the vagaries of senior leadership, your boss won’t be there to shield you. She’ll be missing in action. She’s only interested in her own position, and her standing with her own boss.

If anything threatens that, you’ll see just how quickly any perceived loyalty disappears.

The obvious impacts are that, without air cover the team becomes extremely conservative. They’ll never set stretch targets, because everyone knows that to miss a target is to risk being thrown under the bus.

People start to build their own rear-end armour, trying to have plausible deniability for everything they do (or everything they don’t do).

But there’s a more subtle hidden risk: when no one feels secure, team cohesion dissolves; suspicion and fear are always there just below the surface; trust is low, and that pushes people towards self-interest.

If you know your boss isn’t going to back you, you’re going to be forced to protect yourself. It’s every man for himself.

How do you deal with this?

You have to build relationships beyond your line of leadership. This makes good sense in any world, but a weak boss who can’t be trusted to back you presents an unacceptable risk to your future career.

It’s really important to develop senior relationships, and your boss’s boss is a really good place to start. Just remember though, if your spineless boss still has a job, it’s because her boss thinks that that’s a good idea… which means your boss’s boss may also be a weak leader, who sees a little of himself in his protegé.

Either that, or your weak boss is just really good at managing upwards.

You need to change your mindset on this. Every time you’re in a meeting room with senior people, it’s a job interview: they are always checking out the room; working out who’s sharp; who might grow; who’s delivering results; and who’s strong enough to speak their mind.

Building relationships, managing stakeholders, and leveraging cross-team capability is essential in your quest to minimise the impact of a spineless boss.

4. WEAK LEADERS FOLLOW THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE

Their decisions will always gravitate to what’s popular, not what’s right. A boss with no backbone doesn’t want to disappoint anyone, so he’ll go with the most popular decision every time.

And for those who disagree, he’ll just make excuses to them: “Oh, it was out of my hands”, or “There was nothing I could do“, or even, “I think your idea was better, but I was overruled.”

The obvious impact when your boss does this is that he often sets up a lot of resource-intensive processes. Management by committee; decision making by consensus; all sorts of processes to consult … and inform… and communicate.

Nothing that remotely resembles single-point accountability.

Nothing that would improve the quality of any given decision.

But the hidden risk is even more insidious. This behaviour gets normalised in the culture. The dramatic negative impact it has on performance becomes invisible. People start to believe their own bullsh!t: “We really do have a high performing team, don’t we?“

It’s a really long way back from there: it’s almost impossible to get back to a decent culture, until a major failure causes a more… intrusive intervention.

How do you deal with it?

The only way is to become a great decision maker yourself. Unless you’re an excellent decision maker, no one around you is going to see the benefits of making sound decisions quickly.

In Leadership Beyond the Theory, we have an eight-step checklist that clearly defines the things that make a great decision. If you look at every decision through this lens, it’ll enable you to ask the questions that push any discussion towards a better solution.

When your boss wants to follow the path of least resistance, many people will gladly go down that road with him. So, if you want to keep your team from drifting into mediocrity (and retain your sanity), your willingness to make unpopular decisions and to help the people around you to make them is critical.

Showing your team and your peers the value of making the right decision, at the right time, for the right reasons eventually moves the needle. And even your boss might find a little bit of backbone, with some help from you.

TUNING INTO THE EARLY-WARNING SIGNS

Sometimes it’s easy to see these symptoms playing out. But not always.

Weak leaders find ways to disguise their worst vices. To finish, I want to take a really quick fly over the top of the five early warning signs to look out for, if you suspect your boss may not have a backbone:

1. They like to keep an enforcer handy.

Many times in the corporate world, I saw a weak leader who would hire a real bulldog to get things done. This was typically someone who was not very bright, but very keen to impress: a chief of staff; a GM of operations; sometimes an HR director. Weak leaders know they have to get some stuff done, so they hire someone with an overdeveloped backbone, and an underdeveloped EQ to help them.

2. They explode in group settings, but avoid difficult one-on-one conversations.

Weak bosses do not like one-on-one conflict, so instead they’ll take their frustrations out on the team, yelling and screaming when they don’t get their irrational way. You don’t want to be close to these landmine leaders when they explode.

3. They don’t like feedback.

As my favorite columnist in The Economist so eloquently put it, “Every boss says they want honest feedback… until you make the mistake of giving it.” They don’t want to know. And, if you challenge their ideas or point out the flaws in their approach, you won’t be thanked for saving them a misstep… you’ll be resented for contradicting them.

4. They don’t like people who are smarter than they are.

Anyone who shows up a weak leader is a threat to them.  And this is precisely why they should never be allowed to hire other people. A weak leader can never be more than a 7 (on the 1-10 performance scale). It’s impossible. And we know that 7s hire 5s; and 5s hire 3s. You’ve got to watch out for this because the gene pool gets really thin, really quickly.

5. They are experts in impression management.

They kiss up and kick down. They are all smiles and positivity to their boss. But when their plans (which were always doomed to failure because of mismanagement) actually fail, they take it out on you. They’re constantly trying to wallpaper over their incompetence.

CAN YOU LIVE WITH A SPINELESS BOSS?

When your boss doesn’t have a backbone, it’s a long day in the office.

The only thing you can do to combat it is to build your own strength. You have to be your boss’s backbone, and take a disproportionate share of the accountability for his team.

It’s only when you can demonstrate superior performance from your own team, though, that you earn the right to talk about the performance of the wider team. The type of skill, strength, and confidence that this takes can’t be overstated.

In this episode, I touched on just a few of the techniques and tools that are central to Leadership Beyond the Theory. But the program isn’t for everyone. It’s for leaders who genuinely want to improve their leadership capability and confidence, and who are prepared to do that work. If that’s you, doors close for our upcoming cohort this Friday.

So, make the choice, and commit to your own future today.