I’m a marketeer in an organisation where our budget is controlled by a separate R&D team, which treats us as suppliers, with no respect for our professional skill. Our boss hates confrontation and she tries to “work around” issues. How can we get our boss to be more assertive?

Bosses come in all shapes and sizes. There is the autocrat, the bureaucrat, the laissez faire, the benevolent, the participative and so forth, and some combine different approaches in different circumstances. The key to managing your boss is to understand what drives her to behave in the way she does. Vance Packard, who wrote The Hidden Persuaders in the 1950s, suggested that “leadership appears to be the art of getting others to want to do something that you are convinced should be done”. The reverse of this applies as well: if your manager is not delivering for you or your team, then you may need to manipulate her to do what you and the team believe should be done.

You could, of course, just give your boss feedback through your appraisal, if you have one, but the chances are that your boss will find it difficult to accept in this context and it could backfire and adversely affect your relationship with her in the future. Therefore, you may need to convince your boss indirectly by taking the following steps:

Assess your boss’s style Assess your boss’s management style, and what may drive it. In your case, although in most respects she may be a good boss, her diffidence in confronting R&D is undermining your team’s, and ultimately your own, performance. It is now time to play workplace psychologist. Is your boss unassertive because she is job insecure and doesn’t want to rock the proverbial boat? Or is it because your boss has a bad relationship with the leader of the R&D team? Or is it because your boss is shy and introverted and finds it difficult dealing with problematic interpersonal situations?

Set a course of action Each of these drivers will require a different approach. If your boss lacks self-confidence, for example, then you might be able to help by providing your boss with “a briefing” or business case of the costs and benefits of why you need the enhanced budget. Of course, you will need to do this very indirectly, for example, by giving it to her as if she asked you to do it; “Here’s the briefing you wanted.” If you assess that your boss is feeling vulnerable and insecure and doesn’t want to be rejected by the request to R&D, then you need to get the team together to find a way to support her. If the budget request was seen to come from the whole marketing team, that might obfuscate her feelings of vulnerability.

Be a team Managers who tend to be unassertive tend to feel vulnerable and lack self-confidence, particularly in situations such as your own. Work as a team to find ways to help and support your boss, don’t let her feel isolated and vulnerable. In the long run, this may give her the confidence to be more assertive in the future, particularly if she feels that you will always be there to back her up. Remember what the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”

- Cary Cooper is Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at Lancaster University Management School. Send questions to businessfeatures@thetimes.co.uk

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