Dear Ron,
My new boss seems to be a really great person. But because she’s new, she counts among her allies a woman who’s not only incompetent at her job, but very mean-spirited. In front of the boss, she’s all sweetness and light, but with the rest of us, she’s petty, unreliable, and insincere. Should we try to let the boss know that she’s the weak link in our office, or just let her find out on her own?
Because you don’t want to appear divisive or petty yourself, you’d be better of letting your boss figure things out on her own, but you can certainly hasten her process of discovery. The key is to subtly isolate and highlight your colleague’s poor performance, without pointing the finger specifically at her.
What you want to do is discuss your group’s overall performance with your boss without naming or blaming this colleague specifically. Explain that certain errors are making the group and your boss look bad, and then initiate some inquiry into why they’re occurring. Framing it in these terms will reinforce the idea that you’re a team player, as well as signal to your boss that her reputation is at stake. But the question you want to ask, at least initially, is not who’s wrong, but what’s wrong. And you’re hoping that in the process of discovery, your colleague’s weaknesses will be exposed.
In order to figure out how aggressively you can play things, you should also test your assumptions about how strongly your boss supports this person. Anytime there’s a staff meeting or other group event, be very observant of how your boss responds to your colleague, both in terms of what she says and her body language. Separately, you might make some open-ended references to this person in front of your boss, and then listen keenly to what she says — and doesn’t say — about your colleague.
If the relationship is not as close as you suspected, you can feel more confident about your plan to highlight some of your group’s weaknesses and talk to her about what’s going on. At some point, your boss may ask you point-blank who or what you think is the problem, in which case you could “reluctantly” give up this person, particularly if you feel the relationship between the two is not that strong. If the relationship is as close as you suspected, however, then you have to be a lot more subtle in leading your boss to the appropriate conclusion.
I once had a client that was a project manager in a utility company whose group experienced some losses that one of his fellow managers was trying to minimize. My client knew that this manager had made some poor decisions that led to those losses, which my client had fought against earlier but to no avail.
So my client went to his boss with the stated purpose of reviewing the group’s decision-making process to see how things could be improved, and in the process, pinpointed two areas where problem could have occurred. And of course, these two spots were under the purview of his problematic colleague. The boss was smart enough to put two and two together, and the other manager was eventually removed. My client, on the other hand, gained added trust from his boss, and he did it without pointing any fingers; it was simply a matter of looking at the decision points. He kept things on a professional, rather than personal, level, and that’s how you should seek to resolve your problem.
