Your relationship with respect to your own boss is of paramount importance, as it is likely that he or she will be involved in almost any decision process which determines whether you acquire the plums or the prunes. A key question then, is what role you should play in this relationship.
The answer to this should be apparent from the previous section on staff. You need to
a) benefit from your own boss landing desirable work which he or she will delegate down. So the second best option is that you want to be an Extension staff member of your boss
b) benefit from your boss treating you as a confidant, and providing you with confidential information. So the better option is that you want to try to be a Loyalist. It goes without saying that you should want to be a Praetorian, not a Dependent.
The Praetorian role is the key. It is essential to remember that you are not there to be useful to your boss; your boss is there to be useful to you. If he or she can no longer deliver (to you) then it is time to dispose of them.
Disposing of your boss is covered in the next post.
Disposing of your boss is covered in the next post.
Assuming your boss is actually useful to you, so you prefer not to go for immediate disposal, how do you exploit his/her usefulness? Proxy-trade agreements are the usual method. They work like this as follows. Frequently your boss will need particular information, or will need certain actions carrying out, but cannot be seen do be doing their own dirty work. Meetings can present great opportunities for this – see the whole sections on meetings in later posts, particularly the sections on using meetings to block things. The method by which the information is obtained, or the meeting role taken on, will require you to be appointed by your boss to a position or task which will be useful to you on an ongoing basis: secretary to a certain decision making committee for example.
The more effective you are in performing the dirty work required by your boss, and equally important, the more efficient you are in returning with useful information (e.g. that Peter sat next to Flopsy and Mopsy in a particular meeting), the more trusted you will become. This will tend to lead on to higher status assignments, where it eventually becomes anomalous that someone as junior as you has a position in such a senior group or project. This is easily resolved: you have to be made more senior.
Another area of boss-exploitation to be managed carefully is your Loyalist role. Be very careful that you really are a Praetorian and not a Dependent. Why? Because the whip-hand swaps hands between these two roles. If you are useful enough, your boss will be keen to retain you. If he/she thinks you are a Dependent, your retention will be managed via intangibles: love, attention, listening and similar useless baggage. You need your retention to be managed via salary, promotions, listening (to you hint about needing a company car). Tactically, imply that your loyalty is of course never in doubt, but continuing not to bite the hand depends on the hand feeding. Avoid your boss on Monday mornings and Friday afternoons, as this is when bosses look for Dependents to most betray their dependence. If you start to feel you need his/her attention frequently, you need to take a long hard look at your motivations: who exactly is the boss here? It should be you: if it isn’t, you need to make some changes.
Assuming your are confident of your Praetorian status, and furthermore confident that it is your boss that it is dependent on you, you need to frequently hint that your loyalty is in question. No full-blown “if you don’t gimme loadsamoney I’m off” threats of course. Just gentle blackmail. Read the trade press regularly and visibly (assuming it contains job adverts). Refer occasionally to being happy about being paid the market-rate for the job (doesn’t matter if you are or not, bosses always worry that they are unable to pay the market rate for the job. This extends right up to the board-room: just look at the stories in the press about executive pay, which really boil down to the chairman’s paranoia that he/she needs to pay the chief-executive the market-rate). Note not “unhappy”, but “happy”. Keep it subtle but reasonable. Refer to your grade a lot - phrases such as “the group of us on grade 7” are appropriate – but try and include comparisons which imply your grade is too low. The phrase to try for is “the group of us on grade 7, even including old Bill”. Everyone knows old Bill is a four-star plank, so it is ridiculous that you are rated as lowly as him. But don’t say that. Just leave that judgement to your boss. He/she has to buy in to the premise of regarding “grade 7” as a group to follow the conversation through. That in itself guarantees that your boss will evaluate this group in his/her mind, and make the comparisons. All this is designed to reinforce your “keep feeding me” message, without overdoing it, a strategy known as Retention Blackmail.
OK, you’ve made sure the emotion is ironed out and you are a Praetorian. Now how about the opposite balance? Are you sure you are a Praetorian and not just an Extension. An Extension is a good thing to be (are you sure you are not a Minion or Inferior for heaven’s sake? Just checking!), but not as good as a Praetorian. Why? Because Extensions are unable to indulge in the Retention Blackmail strategy with anywhere near the same effectiveness.
Extensions are just that: Extensions. They perform a role that the boss could perform just as well, if not better, if he/she did not have better things to do. If an Extension departs then a) the boss can do it themselves for a while and b) replacement is a relatively straightforward task. Praetorians, on the other hand, have access to areas the boss cannot reach, or more relevantly be seen to reach. And that access is hard to replace. Extensions often have another disadvantage: they tend to meet the boss in more formal and/or professional encounters. Loyalists are expected to chat, that’s what they’re there for after all. If the chat turns to matters that interest the Loyalist occasionally instead of the boss, well that’s just natural isn’t it?
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