Enforcing an unwritten policy when your boss doesn’t have your back

Dear Bob …

How do I handle it when the boss wants me to be the bad guy?

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For example, a user will enter a help desk ticket requesting something we don’t do, such as provide a loaner notebook for a trip they are taking or requesting support for software the user has installed without IT’s permission. My boss, or, more frequently, my boss’s boss, will put the ticket in my queue and send me an email saying, “Tell them we don’t do this because it’s an unwritten policy we have” — a different problem as the director absolutely refuses to put any policy in writing.

The latest episode that prompts this email is one of the top executives requesting we help one of his people with a process that’s gone awry. When it turned out that this person was using an unsupported method for the process, it became my problem (at the IT director’s behest) to explain to the user that she would need to change her way of doing things.

In the director’s words: “I am sure that if it is explained to [user] that she will be happy to let you do the [process] for her. Give her a call and see how she reacts.”

Well, as you might expect, she was not at all happy about having to change her way of doing things, and I got to hear all about how this process has worked for years and I don’t see why I have to change, and so on.

I suppose it wouldn’t be bad if I felt that the director had my back, but he’s burned me before about things like this. It’s almost as if he is playing “good cop-bad cop” with us grunts always ending up as the bad cop.

Is there a way to get management to take responsibility and still keep my job?

– In the middle

Dear Exposed …

Congratulations. This is a new one — an email instructing you to cite an unwritten policy. Since an email, according to standard English usage, is a written document, you now have a written unwritten policy. Wonderful!

To answer the question you asked, no. If you worked for the sort of manager who took responsibility, your managers would already be doing exactly that — taking responsibility. Instead, you work for the sort of manager who views company politics as a game and who plays it both for fun and to win. If you want to change their behavior, you’ll have to change the game; trying to play their game better than they do isn’t likely to be a winning approach.

The best approach I can see is to be entirely professional in every interaction, explaining to the end-users you work with what the situation is and what their alternatives are. For your accounting user, you might try this explication:

I know you’ve used this method in the past and it’s worked. It isn’t, however, an officially supported method, which means IT doesn’t guarantee it will be available for your use. That isn’t anything I can affect — from that perspective my hands are tied. What I can do for you is to either help you find a workaround, or help you write a service request to reclassify the method so it becomes supported.

Or for the help desk request: “I’m afraid we can’t help you with this. The director has informed me that doing so would be against policy.”

When the user complains that there are no written policies, agree with them:

Yes, I know, and I understand this can be frustrating. As of now, the director prefers not to create an official policy manual. Nonetheless, we do have unwritten policies based, so far as I can tell, on how we’ve handled similar situations in the past. In any event, the instructions I received were quite clear. If you’d like to request an exception, here’s how you should go about it.

What you’re trying to do is to handle each situation in a way that those in your reporting chain can’t possibly complain about, even if they don’t like it. It’s hard to imagine one of them telling you, “You weren’t supposed to tell the user that I told you it’s an unwritten policy.” If your boss were to say something like this to you, explain that when you present something as policy, written or otherwise, you’re inevitably asked who writes and approves these policies, and “I don’t know” as an answer will only make the director look bad — something you’re trying to prevent.

I’m not telling you this approach will lead to pleasant results. I don’t think anything you can do will end happily, other than your finding a different IT organization to work in or waiting until the director’s boss becomes tired of the buffoonery and replaces him. However, it’s the best I have.

– Bob

This story, “Enforcing an unwritten policy when your boss doesn’t have your back,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’s Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com.