How to manage your manager

I am frustrated by my job, and my boss. Let us call him Mr Bossman, for anonymity. And for the record, he’s really a lovely man. He just drives me insane and I’m not sure if it’s my fault or his that I sit here doing nothing day in day out.

I am also frustrated by my inability to explain exactly what’s wrong, so I tried to set it out for myself. Here’s what I came up with:

• I am the first person to hold this position, so the role is not clearly defined.
• My boss has difficulty communicating things to me – what’s going on, what we need, what I should be doing. I think this stems from the fact that he’s not used to delegating the work that I should be doing. Before I was here, he did it himself (or it didn’t get done).
• Work in this office is done on a reactive basis – nothing is tackled until there's a pressing need for it. My presence should help us be proactive, but it’s difficult for Mr Bossman to change his attitude and look beyond today’s immediate crisis.
• I can rarely help with today's immediate crisis, beyond proofing a memo or two, so I sit around waiting for him to have a quiet day when I can get him to consider what we need to do in the long term, which should provide me with something to do. I sit around a lot.
• I know there is work for me there, but I can’t generate it for myself. I seriously don’t think this is a failing on my part: surely a duty of a manager is to tell their underlings what to do. Especially at the beginning, which is still where I consider myself to be. So how do I get my hands on the work? I need to figure out how to manage my boss.
• I have no knowledge of the subject matter, so I have to be fed the information (or told what to look for). The work I produce then has to be filtered back to Mr Bossman for his input and/or approval. At this stage, it gets lost in the vortex of his paperwork on his desk. He’s not computer-friendly, so sending it electronically would not solve things.

Well, no point presenting him with a list of my gripes. I need to look at what I can do to make it better, and present him with some suggestions for how we should approach things.

I should try to:

1. Get Mr Bossman to prioritise what I need to do and set out how I will go about doing it.

prioritizing should be easy enough given the spreadsheet we already created how to go about it is the more complicated part – three ways: - find out if there’s an existing version in the system - plagiarise some other institution’s version from the web - get Mr. Bossman or other involved person to outline it to me

2. Set up a system for Mr. Bossman to review what I’ve done so it doesn’t just disappear. For instance:

- bug him with e-mail alerts once a week reminding him what he has that we need to move on  - always print what I give him to review on distinctive paper (green?) so it’s easy to find on his desk - keep it in a distinctive folder for him

3. Ask Mr Bossman to delegate more to me

- would free up more of his time - but I don’t have the knowledge to write what needs to be written most of the time - I might just end up a glorified secretary, taking his dication - which is better than doing nothing – call it ghost writing

4. Try to learn more about the subject matter

- I lack interest, but that’s not the point - a lot of it I will pick up as time goes on – they do keep me informed and aware - I will be sent on training as it arises

 First thing to do: set up meeting with Mr Bossman. This is the hardest part.

------------- So I asked him if I could meet with him, and he said later this afternoon or tomorrow. We'll see if this works or if it ends up like all the other times I tried to get him to sit down and look at what I was doing - i.e. nothing. I can't make it much plainer to him - I'm making no secret of the fact that I'm surfing the web waiting for him to give me some work.  Sigh. Will keep you posted.