Boss Ball Game

I hate my boss. Well, everybody does!

I do not like my boss to try and visualize the battle from the coffers of his cabin we fight on the ground and comment “absolutely ridiculous”.

Regardless of my liking, however, a boss will always be boss. Because a sword is hanging over his head too, to be slain at any time if things turn otherwise. Now, these word “things” can have so many meanings. Among others, it is vision. An organizational vision, translated into various Business Units; then into various Divisions and then finally into various Departments.

I work on the support department of a Business Division, where my job is to fulfill a specific requirement. It is one of the links of the entire chain, stands at say position 2 or 3 of the chain. Any bottleneck in my chain will jeopardize the activities of the whole chain & most importantly the end of the chain. At the end of it, standing tall is the King, i.e the Customer.

My department has certain guidelines; the business divisions have their “quarter-end” goals. Between the clash of the guidelines and goals, we strive to achieve equilibrium. The guidelines should not be so rigid that, the goals are adversely affected; or the goals should not be impractical that the guidelines go for a toss.

On a recent assignment, me and my team was to support the business for one of the Projects. The deadline was X number of weeks. If we cannot finish our process within those X number of weeks, the process at the end of the chain suffers resulting in customer dissatisfaction.

To complete our process, we had to undergo some activities at the granular level, which would take Y number of weeks. That would mean we will miss our internal deadline of X weeks for our complete process.

At this juncture, I tried to reach our Boss/team of Managers, for help. In what way we complete our internal activities in less than Y number of weeks so that we can achieve our target of X weeks for the entire process? Our team of Managers had no time. “Don’t involve us in day to day activities, if need be use us for escalations!” that was a reply I received. For me and my team it was need for help/ an escalation, which met with ill-attention from people sitting at the helm.

I decided to tweak in the guidelines; we launched parallel activities, so that we could finish our job on time. We thought we were looking at the bigger picture and hence some flexibility could be excused.

We completed our job on time and the stakeholders and the customer’s satisfaction was intact.

However, at the end of our quarter-end review, with our boss/team of managers, my decision to fully not comply with the guidelines was brought to book. I had my justifications which were termed as ridiculous. I objected saying, I cried for help and no one ever bothered.

My boss grins, “ Mr Z, you were given complete freedom to manage your activities, if we do not participate, that does not mean we were not interested, it means you are expected to do some jobs, without our help. Our intervention does not mean, you are relieved off your duties. You need to be cognizant of that. And not following   the guidelines make you even more dangerous. Guidelines taking Y number of weeks is a standard which must not be avoided. If need be, you should have pushed back to the Project Team and justify.”

I just told my boss, that I was expecting this golden speech, when I was crying for help and not when it is over and I left.

I hate my boss. Does this incident make everyone hate their boss, or make them hate me?