Managing your manager

The challenge 

Sam is CFO and COO at a large fast-moving consumer goods organization. This dual role sits well with Sam’s profile and professional attributes as someone who is highly rational and detail-oriented. Sam reports directly to the CEO, a more flamboyant personality who brings vision and creativity to the senior leadership of the organization. Over time, Sam’s relationship with the CEO is becoming increasingly fraught. Frequently and publicly the brunt of loud and aggressive criticism – accused of “bottle-necking” ideas or prioritizing caution over creative risk-taking – Sam is starting to feel undermined and disenfranchised in the workplace.  

With stress levels rising, and unsure how to manage this relationship and forge a pathway forward, Sam comes to IMD looking for help from a professional coach. 

The coaching journey 

Sam’s approach towards authority has worked well until now. Sam has consistently worked with dominant but fair figures of authority, and an early career in the army has taught Sam that compliance – as well as respectful, mutual challenging – can be an effective tactic in managing domineering bosses and getting things done. Calmness and a grounded demeanor have always been the basis of Sam’s credibility in the workplace.  

So, what was going wrong? 

Using transactional analysis to unpack the interpersonal dynamics at play, Sam’s coach was able to help surface two critical discoveries. First, the problem is not about managing tough emotions per se – although Sam’s boss can be prone to verbal and emotional aggression – but more related to personality type.  

Sam is a grounded personality and a rational thinker. By contrast, the CEO is a “creative genius” personality: someone who is visionary and left field in their thinking, and for Sam, almost impossible to understand. The lines of communication between them are so tenuous at times that Sam feels like they are speaking completely different languages. And when they do clash – often because of a misunderstanding – Sam feels more and more at a loss. To make things worse, Sam’s CEO is leveraging their authority to yell at Sam in front of other colleagues: something that feels unfair and undermining to Sam.  

Talking this through with the coach brings Sam to the second discovery that this relationship has to change.  This will mean two things:  

1. Sam needs to make the CEO understand how certain behaviors are undermining and make it hard to get things done.   
2. Sam must get the CEO to agree to a kind of relational and professional recontracting. In other words, they need to draw up a new interpersonal contract that clearly sets out expectations while delineating what is acceptable (especially in front of other colleagues) and what is not. On the professional aspect, they need to clarify mutual expectations as to who is doing what and how to complement each other in a respectful way.   

Key tactics, insights, and impact 

One of the key tactics deployed by Sam’s IMD coach was to set up a three-way meeting with Sam’s boss. This helped to shed objective light on the problem and forge a sense of shared responsibility and mutual buy-in when it comes to resolving it.  

From here, one-to-one sessions unearthed Sam’s long-standing approach to authority. Sam had never had any issue with autocratic bosses in the past and is adept even at deflecting aggression – provided that this kind of authority comes from a place that Sam could rationally understand. To bridge the personality gulf with this CEO, Sam had to leverage emotional self-awareness and find the vocabulary to express emotions constructively and clearly. Sam also needed the authority to reconfigure the contractual relationship between them so that misunderstanding and tension could be attenuated and defused.  

Getting to this point took a number of intense and illuminating simulation exercises and role-plays, with Sam’s coach enacting the part of the CEO. At the end of the coaching journey, Sam felt empowered to convene two meetings: one to pinpoint behaviors that were undermining and the second to set expectations going forward. Both meetings took courage on Sam’s part, and a determination to shift from feeling like a victim to feeling empowered enough to manage the manager. The outcome has been “incredibly positive.”  

Since then, Sam and the CEO have agreed goals and set boundaries. But that’s not all. They have gained an understanding and appreciation of each other’s different aptitudes and styles, finding a new complementary approach that feels as though they are working with “one brain.” The CEO remains a creative visionary who sometimes needs to vent, but these behaviors now feel healthier to Sam, who in turn feels more empowered and energized. Things at Sam’s workplace have “dramatically improved” as a result of being better equipped to manage this manager. 

Questions to ask yourself: 

Do you struggle to understand or make yourself understood by a colleague or boss? Ask yourself:  

• How would you define your relationship with authority? What are the emotions behind this?  
• Are you leaving any synergies or complementary qualities on the table? 

• If so, what are the roadblocks, and how might you articulate these and forge a pathway forward? What would that take? 

As you ponder these questions, remember that the IMD coaching ecosystem is here to help you at every step of the way.