In Defense of Your Dumb Boss

People are generally smarter than we like to give them credit for. In my experience, while lower level employees like to moan about their dumb bosses who are obviously out to lunch, those dumb bosses are generally hard at work, choosing the set of problems that they believe will have the least negative impact on the organization.

Yes, bosses make lots of bad decisions, and don’t always have a good process for making decisions, but what they generally do well is accept that some amount of problems are inevitable and actively chose to have those problems that are not too bad.

So if your boss seems too risk averse, too slow to pull the trigger, or too removed from what’s going on, remember that your boss is doing the best with the information s/he has, and take responsibility for helping your boss see things differently… and I don’t mean by harping; I mean by fundamentally changing your approach so that your perspective triggers a different reaction from what it has triggered historically.

For instance, I had a boss once upon a time who seemed oblivious to the operational pain we were experiencing at the ground floor of the organization. We used to joke about how we could run the company better… until I got some insight into the process of how companies get funded and the pressure CEOs are under to generate spectacular returns for private equity shareholders. Suddenly, even I could see that our operational issues were meaningless compared to the potential for problems at a financial level; if we busted our butts, so what? We’d get a few thousand dollars as bonuses; and if we came up short, so what (again)? Maybe two or three of us would get frustrated and leave, turning over $30k-$40k jobs. But if the i’s weren’t dotted and the t’s weren’t crossed for the financiers, the result could be the shuttering of our entire company, and that would be significantly worse for scores of people.

Suddenly, my dumb boss wasn’t so dumb anymore!

Later, when I started my own consulting firm, another consultant asked me who my target market was. I named three specific categories of companies, then added a fourth category: “Anyone willing to hire me!” The other consultant, thinking she had just isolated my core issue, admonished, “It sounds like someone has a focus problem!”

“No,” I replied, “Someone has a cash flow problem!”

Be careful when assuming you can see the issue more clearly than someone else. Like that consultant, you may overlook the fact that the apparent problem might not be the result of oversight, but perhaps the result of a decision to isolate the least costly problem.

Now, every situation is unique, but before you dismiss your fearless leader as a perfect candidate for middle management at Dunder Miflin, consider for a moment that perhaps there is another side to the story…

Jason Seiden is Co-founder and CEO of Ajax Social Media, a training company that shows professionals how use social media to work more effectively.