'Yael Zofi thought she was going to get fired.
An outgoing, talkative woman, she reported to a man whose personality couldn't be more different. Her boss ran the global leadership development and performance management division of J. P. Morgan. The two were in frequent communication, but Zofi tended to write long, detailed, chatty e-mails, and her boss zapped back terse, single-word responses. "I would write an e-mail describing the approach, the process, the length of time the project would take," she recalls. "He'd write, 'Yes.' I'd say, 'Yes what?'"
Terribly frustrated, Zofi reluctantly adjusted her communication style to suit her superior. "It drove me nuts to report to him until I realized he needed bullet points," she says. She began to omit all but the most pressing details from her notes, sending her boss e-mails that were nearly as brief as his responses.
After some weeks of this strategy, she left on vacation with a girlfriend. "My relationship with my boss was so rocky, I thought I was going to get back and be fired." Instead, when she returned to New York she discovered she had been promoted to vice president.
That was back in the 1990s. Zofi didn't quite realize it then, but she was using a technique that many oppressed underlings have found useful in dealing with difficult superiors: managing up. In other words, assessing your boss's weaknesses, paying attention to his or her management and communication style, and coming up with a strategy for dealing with it.
In 1998 Zofi left J. P. Morgan and started her own consulting and executive coaching business....In 2008 she published a book on the topic of managing up. It's now one of the focuses of her consulting work.
"You have to look at your relationship with your boss as your most critical relationship in your company," she advises. "Think about the boss not as a boss but as a client." Approach your boss on his own turf, she adds.
Zofi finds there are four primary categories of bosses--trendsetter, outgoing, perfectionist and stable--but she concedes that most humans are complex creatures who can have a little of each quality. Once you've figured out your boss's style, you can come up with an approach to suit it.
For instance, if you have a perfectionist boss who can't tolerate any form of chaos and expects employees to be expert at their tasks, you should always do plenty of background research, ask questions in advance of your work on a project, provide plenty of data to the boss and check in with progress reports along the way.
What if your manager is downright incompetent? Zofi has a solution for that, too. One of her clients worked at a medical device manufacturing company and reported to the daughter of the owner. The company made sophisticated medical resonance imaging machines that were constructed from parts produced in various countries including India, China and Israel. Overwhelmed by the challenges of coordinating so many disparate sources, the boss became extremely anxious, constantly pestering the employee for information and even interrupting her when she was in meetings or on the phone with long-distance suppliers.
"My client was getting sick over it," Zofi recalls. "It was affecting her personal life. She even thought about going on Prozac." Zofi counseled the employee to assess her boss's erratic personality and come up with a strategy to calm her down. Instead of confronting the boss directly, Zofi's client reached out to the foreign suppliers and gathered information. She wound up creating spreadsheets that laid out the status of each part and when it would come into the manufacturing facility. "She gave her boss a comfort zone," Zofi notes. The strategy worked. In addition, the employee formed good relationships with the suppliers, which helped everything run more smoothly. "She doesn't love her boss," Zofi notes, "but she's still got a job, and she's dealing with it." '
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