If you want evidence that the standard corporate or institutional hierarchy is a broken system, ask yourself "What would happen if I went over my boss's head to see my boss's boss?" In some organizations, no one would notice. In those organizations, people talk to their boss's managers all the time.
In other organizations, you might as well clear out your desk the minute you decide to step outside the chain of command and talk to your boss's boss about something on your mind. You know that when you make that visit, you're not going to come out in one piece.
Either your boss will get wind of your treachery and fire you, or your boss's boss will pretend to take your issues very seriously and then completely by coincidence, your job will be eliminated.
A lot of senior managers, sad to say, don't know how to make themselves more available to their 'skip-level' reports, as one-down employees are known.
Do you know how I know that? I know it because I sit in depositions and answer questions about good leadership practices. Companies pay enormous sums to employees who were abused or harassed by their bosses. It is a sad thing to witness, much less to be part of.
My part of it is to state for the record how eyes-open employers avoid problems by opening up communication up, down and across their organizations. Sometimes when my deposition is finished, the employer settles the case the same day. They can see that they're not going to win at trial, so they pack it in.
The higher-level boss never knew about the bad behavior his or her subordinate manager was engaging in. There was no practical way for an employee to skip over their own boss and go see the higher boss to report the problem. They would have been fired if they'd tried.
How can an employee prove that belief? It's easy to prove if it has already happened to someone else. They went over their boss's head and voila! their job disappeared - completely by coincidence.
You have to know the organizational culture where you work if you're thinking about paying a visit to your boss's boss to talk about something that isn't working.
Here are some clues:
- Does your boss's manager know you well already? Does he or she talk to you when your boss is not around? If so, you might have a chance to start a productive conversation with him or her.
- If your boss is difficult, unqualified, dealing with a personal problem that gets in the way of work (like a substance abuse problem or a mental health issue) does your boss's boss seem to notice? If not, do you think he or she is really going to take your input seriously? Everyone is busy at work, but when you're so busy that you're completely unaware of an elephant in the room that is trumpeting at a hundred decibels, I'm not sure it's worth your trouble to talk to your boss's boss. You might be better off just getting out of Dodge alive.
- Is your company's HR team very involved with employees, and easy to talk to? If so, you might skip the boss's boss approach and talk to HR instead. If your HR team is distant, hard to talk to or disinterested, you might be wasting your breath and worse, you might be hurting your own future job reference (even if the information you have to share is offered with the best intentions).
We had a client who was in a tough situation. Her boss had an out-of-control alcohol problem. Our client, Rita, had no relationship at all with her boss's boss, the company CFO. Rita was terrified of her direct manager, the woman who was struggling with alcoholism.
The CFO didn't seem to notice anything wrong, although everybody in Rita's department knew about the alcohol on the boss's breath in the afternoons and had seen her slumped over her desk snoring many times.
Rita called us one day. "Listen to this," she said. "The CFO called me and said he wants to meet with me tomorrow morning. I can guess what he wants to talk about. What should I say? I'm very nervous. I'm caught between a rock and a hard place."
"You are not in a safe space to say what you know," we said. "Why should you share your perspective on your boss's substance abuse issues without any protection for yourself? Your boss is out of control. In our experience, the CFO will ask you a lot of questions about your boss.
"He will listen to whatever you tell him and he'll take a few notes. Then you'll go back to work and worry your head off. Your CFO is very unlikely to act immediately. You'll be wondering who knows what and what's going to happen and you won't be able to sleep."
"So what should I tell my CFO?" asked Rita.
"Sadly for your company and for your manager, who needs help, I wouldn't say anything," I told her. "Say that you're saddened to hear about your CFO's concerns, if he even shares them with you. He may not say a word. He may just be digging right now. That's too bad for him.
"You are paid to be an accountant, not a private investigator. Let the guy get out of his office once in a while and wander around. He should have been doing that all along. He would see the problem with your boss in two seconds if he used his own powers of observation rather than relying on yours."
We would love to coach people to go see their boss's manager if something were amiss, but in way too many organizations it isn't safe to do that. That is why plaintiff's-side employment attorneys keep their jobs. People like Rita quit and then file a lawsuit over bad behavior, because all roads to do something about the problem while they still worked for the company were effectively blocked.
It might be worth making that trip if you think there's a chance your boss's boss will take your concerns seriously and act on them.
That could happen in a case where the company is put at risk by the problem you're planning to report. A supervisor with an alcohol issue is probably not one of the risk factors that keep CEOs up at night, but there are plenty of other risky situations that do.
If your boss were your company CFO and he or she were siphoning money away, that would get the CEO's attention. If your boss were systematically sexually harassing people and building up a stockpile of aggrieved employees who might one day band together for a class action lawsuit, that would do the same thing.
If you're an executive wondering whether the employees who work for your subordinate managers would feel comfortable talking with you directly, the answer is probably no. Unless you are actively cultivating relationships with those people, they wouldn't have any reason to think you would listen to them.
If you feel awkward about establishing relationship glue between you and the people who work for managers on your team, let that concern go! If your managers are freaked out about you being friendly with their employees, you can coach them out of that fearful state.
Don't, of course, bypass the managers who work for you and give instructions to their team members directly. That will confuse everybody and beg the question "Why do you have managers working for you, if you intend to manage everybody directly by yourself?" In my experience, this is a much less common situation than the opposite one -- the scary one where employees have no access to their boss's boss at all, even in emergencies.
That's what you have to watch out for. Our client Rita buttoned her lip and didn't say anything to her boss's boss about her manager and her alcohol problems. It was not her fault -- her boss's boss asked her oblique cat-and-mouse questions to see how much Rita would spill. No dice! Rita had us in her corner.
It took months, but finally Rita's manager passed out at a staff meeting and was sent to rehab. Rita never talked to her boss's boss again. She got another job while the company was busy cleaning up the mess that had accumulated while its incapacitated accounting manager was on her downward slide.
You can begin to create a relationship with your boss's boss if he or she doesn't reach out to you.
It's good to get to know your boss's boss if you can. Establish a relationship if the opportunity presents itself. Let your boss's boss know your name, and don't be shy about chatting in the hallway and sharing your opinions. You never know when that relationship might become a lot more central to your working life than it is right now.
