How to Manage your Boss's Boss (Challenge #92)

Before I came to my current university, I was associate library director at a similarly-sized public regional university in flyover country. It wasn’t the flashiest place in the world, but flash isn’t really my thing—and in any case being a big-ish fish in a small-ish pond makes it easier to see how your work leads to a better world. I had a great director, the rest of the administration was smart and dedicated, and all was good—except for the governor and state legislature. They respectively named and funded the state board of higher education regents, who oversaw our university’s president, who in turn managed the provost, who managed the library director, who of course was my direct supervisor. What happened next is a story of what can happen when you have a challenging boss—or in this case a challenging boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss—and how you can navigate your relationships with ALL your stakeholders to do the best you can with the resources available for your career, your team, and the community you serve.

~~~

Welcome to the Kind Leadership Challenge, where every Monday morning I teach you how to heal your school or library in the next ten minutes! I’m Dr. Sarah Clark, founder of the Kind Leadership Guild, where I use my PhD in Higher ed leadership and nearly 2 decades of experience in academic libraries to advise a growing community of educational and library leaders who want to build a better world without burning out. 

Kind leaders make the tough decisions without becoming jerks. We plan effective systems that help us get the job done with less money and effort. And we’ve learned that once we stop controlling and start collaborating, any vision becomes possible. To be clear, Kind Leadership’s pretty simple, but it’s rarely easy. So if you’re up for a challenge, stick around to learn how to create a legacy that will strengthen your community long after you’re gone.

You see, the state I used to live in cared a LOT about making sure it taxed its residents and businesses as little as humanly possible, so that its services cost as little as possible, and their voters and donors could keep as much of their money as possible. And speaking as someone who worked for that state’s government for almost 20 years between my time in human services and higher ed, I’m actually ok with that up to a point. 
 
 And for me that point was cutting the higher ed budget by almost 20%, in large part so they could give a tax cut to one of the state’s biggest and most lucrative industries. And no, by statute we couldn’t raise tuition high enough to fill the gap, not that it would have been fair to our students to do that anyway. So, long story short, we all took pay cuts. The library’s operations budget was slashed. And did I mention that this all was announced two weeks after I defended my PhD? 

I was a member of my previous university’s faculty senate at that time, and like any faculty senate would be in their situation, they were hopping mad. Somehow we got our local state representative to come to faculty senate after the budget was approved to explain the reasons behind his vote in support of the hatchet job to his district’s biggest employer.

The meeting went about how you’d imagine—it was cordial on the surface, but all the intellectual jargon and political doubletalk was a thin veneer over a knock down brawl over the proper role of higher education in the state. I don’t get into politics on this show for obvious reasons, but you can pretty much fill in the blanks of who said what, and how it was received. By the time the representative made clear to one of us that if we were unhappy with the current situation we were welcome to move to another state, I had heard enough. My long exasperation at the restrictions my school had to labor under crystallized into clarity. I was done here. And a little over a year after that state representative gave us that advice, I had taken him up on his suggestion and moved to the east coast.

So what’s the moral of this story, other than that education funding has it’s frustrations on both sides of the public/private divide? Well, one lesson is that relationships matter—not just with your bosses, but also with the people your bosses report to, and the people who control the purse strings, be they a board, a government, or some over oversight entity. You will always do a better job of advocating for your organization if you understand all your stakeholders’ goals, and can find ways to explain how providing resources or support to your organization will help you both attain your goals. 

And I hate to say this, but you will also do a better job of advocating for yourself and your higher-ups if you check your ego and your temper at the door. We have all sat in meetings where a normally intelligent and insightful leader let their emotions run away with them when discussing a matter they care about dearly, leading a loss of respect and a lack of progress toward their goal. I am quite well that’s more easily said than done, in fact that’s why I advocate every educational leader find a coach and/or a community of colleagues with whom they can speak frankly and move through their feelings and toward a solution to the problem they are facing.

And of course, all of this strategizing and consideration of tone is irrelevant if you and those above you are working at cross-purposes. In the best case scenario, because of your different perspectives, both you and the stakeholder you are trying to persuade may have the best interests of your organization at heart—but you may define those interests very differently, to the point that your vision is mutually exclusive with theirs. And of course, sometimes that stakeholder is willing to sacrifice your organization in service of a bigger goal. It’s been almost 8 years since that faculty senate meeting with that state representative, and to this day I wonder if he thought he was helping or damaging higher education via his choices. But ultimately his motives are irrelevant, and the same is true of any situation where you and someone above you are working at cross-purposes. If they won’t move, and you aren’t able or willing to accept their decision, then sometimes, like I did, it’s time to move on.

So, here’s this week’s challenge. Is there some person or organization above you in your organizations power structure that you need to convince of something? Find an opportunity, book a time to talk to them before you lose your nerve, and make a plan. The next steps checklist will help you navigate that challenging conversation with a calm mindset, a strong rationale, and a fuller understanding of your stakeholder’s side of the problem. Those of you who already get my emails can download it from the kind leadership vault, if you’re not getting those emails already, just head on over to kindleadershipchallenge.com/next to get access to the next steps checklist.  

Thanks as always for listening to the kind leadership challenge, and for growing humanely, managing effectively, and creating collaboratively in your own organization. And if you know someone who might find this episode helpful, hit share in your podcast app or send them over to kindleadershipchallenge.com/92. Never doubt that day by day, you’re building a better world, even if you can't see it yet. So until next time, stay kind now.