When I got my first “big girl” job after graduating college, I had one supervisor. She was the boss. She gave me my schedule, my paycheck, and approved my vacation. In the 11 years I worked for that company, it transferred ownership a couple of times and was restructured three or four times. I got passed around to different departments, but always had one person to whom I answered. Fast forward a few years: I was hired to work for a church who cobbled together a full-time administrative assistant position out of two part-time administrative assistant positions. I reported to two supervisors of completely different ministries and things got complicated. Robert Sutton, professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University and author of Good Boss, Bad Boss*, says, “as you go to a matrixed structure, you can easily have between one and seven immediate supervisors.” If this is your situation, here are three suggestions:
Organize: Be ahead of the workload. Take good notes. Keep your calendar updated. Color code assignments. Revisit flagged emails weekly. Are there production goals you need to meet? Are there sales goals for which you are responsible? Do you know what your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are? Find out what your managers’ priorities are. Write them down if you have to and refer to the list when choosing how to spend your time. Projects usually take longer than you anticipate, so leave yourself margin whenever possible. Over promising and/or under delivering quickly gives you a bad reputation. If you get to set a deadline, forecast completion of the project a day after you think you will actually complete it.
Communicate: Meet with each manager weekly to discuss expectations, priorities, deadlines, short term and long term projects, and what you are doing for your other managers. This may seem like overkill, but when you report to more than one supervisor, it’s almost impossible to communicate too much. Be vigilant with follow up. Create a shared spreadsheet listing your projects for each manager so all of them can see it. If you work for managers who do not work out of the same office as you, they will wonder how you spend your time. When they are stressed about one of your projects, convey a sense of urgency. Email regular updates regarding your activity. Even if it’s just a couple of lines at the end of the day, “Here is a list of the steps I took to complete your project today.” If your time is billed to multiple clients you need to do this anyway, so it’s really not extra work. If you fail (IE: didn’t meet goal, missed a hard deadline, etc.), don’t wait to be called to the carpet for it. Be proactive. Go to the manager, tell her you screwed up, and why. Then tell her how you plan to fix it and your trigger to avoid making the mistake again. Are your managers competitors? Don’t talk negatively to one about the others. If they bait you, ask: “If I tell you what Manager X and I spoke of in confidence, how will you ever trust me not to talk to Manager X about what you and I talk about in confidence?”
Prioritize: There are 168 hours in a week. Even if you work all of them, it’s unlikely you can get everything done for everyone. Do you work on the projects you like best first? These may not be the projects your managers want done first. If you ask them to prioritize your projects and they say all the projects need to be done, refer them to your previously mentioned spreadsheet and say, “As you can see, I have A, B, and C all due for you today, as well as projects due for Manager X. Of A, B, or C, which one is the most important to you?” If you don’t receive a clear response, complete a task you know is important to him. Send an email informing him you completed the task, and ask him what he wants you to do next. If you consistently do this, it will become a painless habit for both you and your supervisors. When your managers’ plans for you conflict, use an email thread, conference call, or meeting to get everyone on the same page of your shared spreadsheet (see how handy this is?). If all this doesn’t work, determine who the Elvis is and finish his projects first. The Elvis is the manager who is ultimately responsible for you – the one who does your performance reviews is probably him. At the end of the day, this is the manager you need to be most loyal to if forced to choose.
Do you work for more than one supervisor? Use the form below to tell me some of your coping strategies.
*Copyright@2010 by Robert I. Sutton