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Tell the truth. You’ve griped about your boss, haven’t you? You’ve characterized her as an idiot. You’ve wondered aloud how he got the job. So how do you move from your perverse enjoyment of this greatest of all indoor sports to a mastery of what to do about a stupid boss?
In “What to Do if You’re Smarter Than Your Boss,” Amy Gallo of the Harvard Business Review polls the experts for smart ideas about how to deal with a bonehead manager.
Perhaps the best starting point is to decide that there’s almost no one on the planet that you can’t learn something from. After that, it becomes a matter of technique.
• Be honest. Are you really smarter across the board? Maybe your manager has pretty decent emotional intelligence and good leadership skills. She may have hired you because she knew you could complement her.
• Be quiet. Whether you’re right or wrong about your boss’s intelligence, shut your trap. The word always gets back—I know this from bitter experience—and besides “If you badmouth your manager, it’s going to reflect badly on you. People … worry you’ll talk about them the same way.”
• Be competent. When you find a “higher purpose,” which is doing a good job, people notice.
• Be helpful. “There’s no reason not to be generous. If your boss is successful, there’s a greater chance you’ll be successful too.”
• Be wise. After a point, it serves no one well for you to clean up your boss’s mistakes. Annie McKee of the Teleos Leadership Institute says, “You may need to have a conversation with HR.”(I don’t know about you, but I’d probably exit stage right before taking that route.)
• Be respectful. That is, find something about your boss you respect, even if it’s that he’s a devoted husband or great Boy Scout leader.
• Be a mentee. Identify someone in your organization that you can learn from. Volunteer for skill-building projects. Keep learning.
I wish that I had had the smarts to take these recommendations to heart earlier in my work life. Instead, I was arrogant about my intelligence and ended up breezing by opportunities for learning that, had I taken them, would have made all the difference.
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