Everybody has some level of insecurity. However, when your boss is insecure, your career prospects can be affected. You'll never know what to expect of him. His actions are chosen to make him feel better, even at your expense. Jeanne Sahadi of CNNMoney.com says that, in the best of cases, you learn to contort your actions to soothe the boss's quivering sense of self. In the worst case you are perceived as a threat, and you are fired. Your abilities, popularity, and communication skills can surprisingly drive your boss up the tree. He will schedule his meeting around your travel schedule, take credit for your work, and eventually convince his boss to get rid of you, even though you are a top performer. He will try to throw you under the bus at every turn. He will try to make you unsuccessful by impossible assignments and take credit for your earlier accomplishments. Driven by fear, envy, and self doubt, a boss's insecurities can be manifested by:

Micromanaging - They turn to perfectionism, meddling, and clogging up the work flow;

Indecisiveness - They may hesitate to remove poor performers and drag down good workers;

Hide and seek - He avoids giving the team a sense of purpose and hides in his office;

No direction - Prior instructions are reversed with chaotic consequences;

Overcompensating - The insecure resort to bullying, arrogance, and power games.

On the positive side - Since you can't choose your bosses, chances are that you will have one or two insecure cases in your career. As a rule, don't take credit for his accomplishments, and never make the boss look stupid. Don't take his screaming personally [easy to say]. Acknowledge his accomplishments; we all have our good days. Let him know that you like your job, and you want to know how to do a better job for him.

If you are an insecure manager, think again before you gut the organization of top performers. Eventually you will lose, and you will have to face the consequences. The stuff you let fly in your department will come back to haunt you.

If you are on the top rungs of the ladder, you can do yourself a favor by removing the insecure types, who will ruin your company if you let them. Better to listen to the opposition and know the real situation facing the company rather than letting all the good people leave the company and go to the competition.

Managing Smart People - Some people are more talented than others. They have their good points, and they have their weak points. Your challenge is to choose people that not only show some accomplishment in the past but an ability to adapt to new challenges in the future. A person who has scored well in new unrelated assignments in the past shows this adaptability. Your job is to make stars out of people with potential. Anyone falling short on this criterion needs to be sidetracked.

It's good for your reputation to be seen as helping new stars rise. You will win acclaim for this accomplishment. If there is any ambiguity of who takes the credit, yield to your talented crew. Ask them what they need to accomplish their mission. This is in the best sense of empowerment, and it delivers a strong message of respect. It causes your people to step up and fully invest themselves in the job.

This is not for the insecure manager. He may start off OK, but when anything about them comes into question, they get defensive, retreat back into their authority, and end all discussions. It's a form of denial; managers need to accept feedback on how the mission is going.

The secure manager asks how each employee wants to be managed. At this point the manager just listens and keeps quiet. This procedure applies to reorganization, taking over a new team, and other turning points. The more assertive employee may initiate discussion on something you never thought about, and it can dramatically improve your abilities to manage. Your people will give you better feedback on management than your boss. It enhances your role of bringing out the best of your people to doing their best work.

Respect your people's talents that you do not have. Brief outside consultation can shed light on how to enhance the strengths of your organization:

- Acknowledge that you have weaknesses;

- Admit that your shortcomings can be damaging to the team;

- Get help hiring experts for roles you are not familiar with, and go out of your way to involve them in the decision making process.

- Deliberately hire first rate strong willed persons to represent specialties that you may tend to undervalue;

- Be sure you are on top of your game, and make sure you are driven by bias, but by good judgement and perspective.


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For more management and leadership articles or for anti-leadership advice from the Crass Captain, visit http://www.CrassCaptain.com . Find Christine Casey-Cooper's new book, entitled The Crass Captain's Guide to Organizational Dysfunction, on Amazon soon.