Dear Bob ... I work for a CIO who has all of the questions and all of the answers. Theoretically I'm part of the IT leadership team. In reality, all of us on the team are not much more than the guy's arms and legs. Oh, and I nearly forgot ... his scapegoats when things go wrong. No matter how bad the idea, from his perspective anything that goes wrong was a problem with execution. How can I handle this guy? As t Dear Bob …I work for a CIO who has all of the questions and all of the answers. Theoretically I’m part of the IT leadership team. In reality, all of us on the team are not much more than the guy’s arms and legs.Oh, and I nearly forgot … his scapegoats when things go wrong. No matter how bad the idea, from his perspective anything that goes wrong was a problem with execution. How can I handle this guy? As things stand now, any time I succeed he owns the success so the best I can ever do is avoid failing too badly.– Just a limbDear Limb … What you’re describing is a bad manager and worse leader, and you can’t fix that. If you’re determined to stay and try to make it work, what you can do is become adept at manipulating him.The first thing to realize is that your CIO is almost certainly looking for admiration. He’s a narcissist – it’s all about him. The least effective tactic for people like this is to challenge them publicly. The most effective tactic is to privately feed thoughts to him in such a way that he thinks they’re his own, so that later on he can present them as his own.Find ways to get him one-on-one. Ask his advice when the opportunity presents itself. When the time is right, ask his advice about something you’ve “read about” – you’re sure he’s already thought it through and would like his insights. That’s one way to insert your ideas. You’ll have to find others as well, and to be subtle about it. You won’t get credit for any of this. What you will get is insider status – if you handle it right the CIO will start to think of you as a good sounding board, and might even consider you his protege.If you decide to pursue this approach, there’s one other thing you should do: Buy some industrial strength soap. It’s hard to avoid feeling a bit unclean when you work with a manager like this. It is, after all, a form of sucking up.If it makes you feel any better about it, the CIO is your personal customer – he makes the buying decision about the services you personally have to offer – and we’re all supposed to make our customers happy, aren’t we? As an alternative to all this, you might consider either leaving or just keeping your head as far down as you can to wait things out. Eventually, he’ll probably move on.– Bob Technology Industry