Managers versus Leaders

What do you do when someone is making bad decisions that affect you?  It is a particularly tough question, particularly when it happens in the workplace.

I have exactly this situation right now in one particular part of my life (which I am deliberately keeping obscure because this is not an anonymous blog).

The person in question does not have direct authority over me, but has the authority to make decisions that affect me, and how I do my thing in the organization. In my estimation, the decisions are often bad ones, based on no critical thinking.

When you study management, you learn that managers are the people with formal authority. On the other hand, leadership is the result of social and interpersonal relationships.  It is not at all unusual that the formal manager has little idea what subordinates do on a day to day basis, and as a result has a weak frame of reference for making decisions.

I learned years ago that the way to cope with such a detached manager is to be proactive and provide strong recommendations backed up by sound logic, preferably before the manager even realizes that there is a problem that needs to be resolved.

This usually works for me, because I am a strategic planner and I am good at detecting patterns in the data and synthesizing strategies.

But we have a situation now that could become very difficult for our organization. We won't really know for 1-3 months.

The person I am talking about refuses to think about contingencies, instead insisting on waiting to find out our fate and then planning from there. In order words, insists on being reactive rather than proactive.

There has also been an issue of honesty recently, with this person pretending that something happened which actually did not, so basic trust is an issue.

This person would be happy to see me gone, but I do not think is proactive enough to be actively putting pressure on me.  The decisions are just superficial, made with no understanding or thought about consequences.

I told someone on ResearchGate recently that if a boss makes a wrong decision too often, it may be time to find a different job.  I don't need to do this, because I am secure in the position I am in, and money is not really an issue. But I can't help reflecting sometimes.....

To what level must we tolerate bad decisions simply because a person has the formal authority to make them?

When do the problems a person causes outweigh the good we can bring to an organization?

Do we let jerks push us around?

I didn't start writing this thinking about presidential politics, but I guess the same questions will apply there also in 2017.

How long and hard to you fight bad decisions (and we can see a lot of bad presidential decisions on the horizon coming our way)?