Guide your boss past damaging rumors and unfounded blame

Dear Bob …

Perception is reality — at least that’s what my boss’s boss, the IT director, says. And I’m getting a little tired of hearing it.

[ Also on InfoWorld.com: Bob dishes on dealing with other workplace cliches in “How to expose empty office rhetoric — constructively.” | Keep up on career advice with Bob Lewis’s Advice Line newsletter. ]

The situation: Last week we had a couple of hiccups in a system I am responsible for and is the backbone of the company, even though I have zero dollars to spend for maintenance and/or upgrades — but that’s another issue!

This was the first time in six months that we’ve had any troubles with it. As soon as the incident was brought to my attention, I fixed it, but the delay in getting notified amounted to 4 to 5 hours of downtime. I have monitoring in place and it sends out emails, but all of the system admins (myself included) shut off email notification at night — so that we can sleep. We amended this situation by getting a smartphone app that rings when a text with a certain phrase comes in.

Now, the IT director is spouting off about how we in IT operations are a complacent bunch of do-nothing, overpriced, worthless employees. Of course, he claims he doesn’t feel that way, but that is the perception from the higher-ups (his peers) and we all know: Perception is reality.

He is visiting us in a couple of weeks, and he plans on having a talk with us. Of course, whatever hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.

On top of all of this, we took a major hit in our IT department — not coincidentally — about six months ago. We lost about a quarter of our IT staff (a small group before the departures), so the other system administrator and I are handling their jobs, even though one of them is entirely outside our area of responsibility.

I want to tell the IT director that since he is at the level where he hears this perception/reality stuff, it is his responsibility to handle it. I would also like to tell him that I am tired of hearing all these rumors about how horrible we are and to give us some concrete examples instead. Both of these would be career-limiting moves, which I am loathe to take in this job market.

What do you recommend we do? How can we handle this situation?

– Perceiving Reality

Dear Perceiving …

What should you do? Find a different job in a different organization. Otherwise, do what you can to ride it out until the IT director is replaced by someone less inclined to treat blame as a legitimate expenditure of effort.

If you decide you have to improve your current reality, start with this: For those who view you and your colleagues as complacent shirkers, that perception is part of their reality — not objective reality, their reality. It also means that their perceptions are part of your reality. In effect, as you’ve already noted, it’s more a marketing problem than anything else.

The safest alternative is for you and your colleagues to keep your heads down, let the IT director have his talk, and figure it will all blow over. It isn’t particularly satisfying, but there’s something to be said for safety.

If you want to try for better than that, here are some possibilities:

Assuming that you and your colleagues have an opportunity to turn your talk with the IT director into a conversation, you might try the old assumption-of-agreement ploy. The way this works is that you overtly state your assumption that the IT director agrees with you on some obvious, key points, like, “As you know, we’re nearly 30 percent under strength here, and I know we don’t have to explain to you that when we’re stretched this thin, something is going to give. The question is how we make sure the people you have to deal with understand this in a positive way.”

If the IT director cares at all about evidence and logic, you might consider having everyone keep track of where their time goes between now and his arrival, to show both the total hours you’re all working and how much of your time goes to covering the open positions. You may report, “We’re already working 50-hour weeks, and as you can see the extra hours are all going to cover the open positions. If you want us to cover the third shift we can do that. Just help us reprioritize so that we know what other work we should set aside so we can be on-call for the next outage. We probably should do this, too, because without a maintenance and repair budget, outages are more likely than they used to be.”

Another possibility: While I’m not a big fan of service-level agreements — they’re an alternative to effective leadership, not a sign of it — you might find them to be a useful technique, given the absence of effective leadership you’ve described.

The way this would work is if you state, “I think our failure here was that we didn’t clearly establish that there would be a change in service levels after the staff reduction. Clearly, we’ve been too informal about this. A four-hour response to a third-shift incident is about right, given our current staffing. We’d be happy to put a plan together to improve this, if you like. As you know, though, this sort of thing isn’t free — it will either take part of the budget, or we’ll have an opportunity cost because something else will have to slip to allow us to provide better third-shift coverage.”

One other possibility is moving away from silos: Propose to the IT director that you and the other company locations provide enough documentation and cross-training that you share staff for rotating third-shift coverage.

No matter what else you do during the talk, part of the conversation must involve you and your colleagues asking the IT director what information he needs so that he can deal effectively with IT’s detractors. By phrasing it this way, you help him understand his proper role in this, offer your aid, and make clear you don’t consider your performance to be anything less than strong, considering the situation — that is, you need to make your reality his perception.

– Bob

This story, “Guide your boss past damaging rumors and unfounded blame,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’s Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.