[Closed] Boss. Insecure or control freak?

Stop using the term "outwith" straight away!

Insecure or control freak?

Sounds like he could be both.

So…how best to deal with him?

Start a sustained, covert, guerrilla war to get rid of him.

Don't offer to make him brews anymore.

When you arrive in the morning greet everyone by name and ignore him.

Don't speak to him unless you absolutely have to.

When you walk past his desk pretend to be on your phone talking about him. 'Yeah the thing is he's absolute ****er' 'should see his wife, she's an absolute bitch'

Should do for starters.

Ask staff to run it by the manager first, tell your manager if he has staff with issues you think you can mentor or support them with and is willing to let you help then ask him to point them your way when relevant. You may be supportive and helpful but your advice might not be one that gives the correct policy based advice or maybe even discipline based,

Poison his pot plant?

Either, you should be doing this for good company practice (e.g. regulatory compliance), or your boss is a twit and is trying to preserve his empire at the expense of the company. Rigid hierarchies generally don't help productivity.

Tell the arsehole to send his own email to all members of staff requesting that if they have any problems that they go through him first ..

Buy a pipe , dressing gown &  slippers and take a well earned rest ..and should you receive emails requesting your help forward it immediately to your boss sending a reprimand by reply to the person who disobeyed company policy ..copying the boss  in obviously ..

Finally start looking for another job ..as yours has just become redundant .

Oh and yes ..stop using " outwith" ..it sounds completely naff ..

Genuine question..why is he the "boss" and you are not ?

Scottish folk always use the term outwith. They did it all the time at work. I'm from Norfolk by the way.

outwith is a perfectly normal word in scotland.  ~Dunno where the OP is tho

the boss needs to grow a set and tell the staff this themselves.  don't do any of the things he has asked you not to do.  Its his perogative.

All emails that come to you reply with a - "see the boss" and forward to the boss.

It's a difficult but not uncommon situation.

You just have to be seen by him to be absolutely not being after his job. Point requests for help to me him and as long as you're not threatening his status he'll pass them to you to do probably anyway. Become completely irreplaceable and then you'll either be in pole position when he moves or you'll be totally in a position to do his job elsewhere.

With this type of boss you just have to suck it up or leave. Going dirty is painful and risky, although a square of acid in his tea pre board presentation would be fun to watch.

Places I've worked in the past, an email from that sort of boss telling people to not go directly to someone would have resulted in everyone and his dog going to that very person for anything and everything for the next six months.

How big is the company and how big is the team?

Sounds like a fairly normal situation where a new person comes in and does well. One way of dealing with it is a proper sit down chat about roles and responsibilities and how your boss can come out looking better from it 😉

I think there is an online course on Managing your Manager or something like that

Places I’ve worked in the past, an email from that sort of boss telling people to not go directly to someone would have resulted in everyone and his dog going to that very person for anything and everything for the next six months.

The trouble is that this is likely not behaviour which is good for the business, is it.

Tell him people are still emailing you directly despite you asking for them to go through him first. Ask him what he wants you to do. If he says forward them to him before responding, try that for a bit and see how it works out.

It doesn't sound like a huge deal if you like your job generally? If this approach results in stuff not getting done when it needs to be you can bring that up with him, or ask the people who would normally be going through you to raise it with their managers.

Been in this situation myself in the past

i ended up forwarding all such requests to the boss with a simple comment along the lines of

” please see request below from xyz, “

and copied in the sender so they knew I had seen it and referred it onwards

i also made a point of telling the sender either in person or by phone that I was sorry but had been instructed by my boss to follow this procedure and was unable to assist without permission,

most folks understood my position and went along with it

When I managed teams in my old corporate days I would always let individuals shine, delegating as much work as possible and letting them take the credit.

I was judged for building / training / having the best team, not doing all the work myself. The only time I would step in is if characters from external teams where bypassing me to dump work / take advantage of my team memebers to the detriment of my team performance. Is this happening at all?

If your boss is mature have an adult conversation with them, if they do feel threatened it may be In their interest to help you get promoted to a different team / area of the business so they can continue looking good, making sure they only have B players on their team. Trick is to make them see this diplomatically without making accusations / damaging their pride. You may get to this point simply asking about career progression.

If not here are two potential options:

1. Sit back and enjoy yourself while they chose to do your work for you. Use the extra energy you gain through less stress to put more hours in on the trail 🙂

2. Be proactive and take your skills to an alternate team or company, especially if you feel you can do your managers job. Don’t do this without making sure the pay rise is sufficient to find quite a few bike upgrades.

All fun and games.

Your boss does sound a bit paranoid/controlling but on the flip-side he probably doesn't perceive things the same way as you. I'm not sure what you actually do but in my role (IT project delivery) I'm constantly fighting against PMs trying to engage directly with people in the team - I'm not a control freak but I need to make sure things are prioritised correctly, that knowledge is shared within the team (e.g. don't keep giving the SharePoint deployment stuff to the same guy else you're screwed if he leaves/is off work), I try and make sure people have a mix of interesting projects amongst the inevitable boring/repetitive work and also to try and balance people's workloads (the team members are great but find it hard to say no to requests from PMs, I almost enjoy it so am happy to take the flak that comes with it :p ).

Fat old git has it. With the added option of a booking weeks holiday whilst sending the email. 🙂

New email rule. Forward all emails to your boss and delete from your inbox. He’ll get bored of it pretty quick.

Stop using the term “outwith” straight away!

Perfectly normal to use in Scotland, and a lot less annoying than those who use Latin ad infinitum.

Some great advice from people who just seem to want to deal with stuff in a passive aggressive way.

Call a meeting, introduce everyone to your boss as "the boss" even though he's been there ages, that should cure the insecurity & cheer him up

Or sit down together and detail who does what and who is the contact for what and issue it out (or via a meeting) to make sure things run smoothly and the right people are aware of what is going on

Maybe it's time to deploy the Egg of Peace?

Have you got a guitar?

I don't see the problem really. He needs to have an overview of what is going on and if he is being by-passed then he won't have that view.

We get a variation of that problem with support calls - once somebody responds to an email to support the customer then that customer emails that person directly. To the customer they have built up a relationship and all is sweet until that person isn't available and their request goes unheeded.

As above, outwith is a perfectly normal word in Scotland.

OP, your boss sounds like a control freak, stick the heid right intae him, it’s the bare minimum he deserves.

I have absolutely no issues with him being the boss and I fully understand his need to know what his folks are doing and have tried my absolute best to help him with this in terms of guiding others this way.  Ultimately, I end up doing the work anyways.

His job?  No thanks, I did his role as part of wider responsibility 10 years ago, and now happy to get paid a decent salary for a decent days work using my experience and skill-set as a 'doer'.  Also happy to support him achieve his goals, as ultimately if he looks good, then it keeps the rest of us whole.

What I do struggle with is the 'guilty until proven innocent' type accusations and quite often the method of people-management which deploys negative methods rather than positive methods.  I'm not particularly tall, but there is also a fair bit of 'wee man with chips on both shoulders' going on.  Being able to have an open discussion is a challenge due to ongoing re-organisation and redundancies....  Simply none of his team feel that they could have an open discussion without some form of retribution.  I wonder if some the behaviours would be deployed outwith the work environment where there is no hierarchical or power protection for him.

Sounds like he's operating at a level beyond their competence?  I'd expect a decent boss to be focused on things like leadership and direction, objectives / goals, priorities, performance and dealing with exceptions rather than the niff naff and trivia of managing stuff within your teams normal roles, day-job stuff.

Assuming you have a regular weekly or monthly meeting, try and present some objective evidence about performance?  Perhaps if you can find a way of presenting this more effectively, then he'll have less need to get his oar in?

I've just baled from nearly 30 years in the corporate world, from working with managing directors downwards and learnt to get quite proficient of getting the monkeys off my back.

Send him Pineapples.

He is new and needs a good overview. He should speak to you to ensure you do it in a way that you are happy with and that you understand why.

I joined company 7 months ago. There were a number of issues to resolve so I took a "command and control" approach for a bit. Built trust in my team (not all off them!) then relinquished most activities once confidence was built. Unless he is an idiot (and or you are rubbish at your job) he will eventually be happy to gradually allow you to get on with things.

From what I read..he isn't new as the OP said he had been with the company a year longer than his boss and I got the impression that he had been there for a while ..to be honest the more I read the Op's comments the more I seem to think he is blowing his own trumpet...

If you haven't worked him out by now then you probably never will ..just do what he is asking and you won't have a problem ..will you ?

Or get yourself outwith from the company and find a new job if it bothers you that much ..😁

I'm kind of on the other side of this fence.

I've got three apprentices working for me.  The project managers / coordinators have a tendency to latch on to one or another based on previous work we've done for them and send requests directly to the individuals.

This is fine as far as it goes, but causes a number of issues.  Aside from time management / work allocation, I need a record of what work they've been involved in in case there's any questions in the future.  So I'm having to go go back to the projects team reminding them to go through me or at the very list CC: me in on emails so I can keep track.

Critically though, this is my job as a manager to do this.  It's not my minions' responsibility to be telling other departments what to do.  If people are coming to you directly then you need to notify your boss, but it's your boss who needs to manage the situation IMHO, not you.