Managing Your Boss (es) :

Background :
Our company structure is a matrix one. This means having 2 bosses instead of 1,
one of them is Business Related (called Business Director) who is responsible for the
functional activities related to business like Sales, P&L etc. The other boss is
Administrative boss who is a Country Manager responsible for routine administrative
jobs like Expenses, Holidays, Office space allocations etc.
The key to success in such organization is to manage both bosses at the same time
as usually they have conflicting objectives and require different strategies to
manage.

Incidence :
One incidence I personally went through was when I was assigned the Sales
Manager responsibility for the country. The functional boss was interested to assign
me this task, while the administrative boss had conflicting objective as he wanted
his self hired person to lead the business. Despite showing good performance
during last 2 years, he was still not oriented to assign this new responsibility
(promotion) to me. He tried to frustrate me adopting different ways like assigning
work table among other junior staff members, not highlighting my performance to
leadership and indirectly projecting a negative picture. This under normal
circumstances may have lead to frustration. As this is what he wanted me to
express during our annual review in front of functional boss as well. How I managed
was to take inputs from my functional boss and showing no emotional outburst
during the annual review meet. In fact, I welcomed the gaps which he identified and
thanked him for being very transparent in pointing out the reality. The net impact
was that the meeting went smoothly and follow up discussions between functional
and administrative managers reflected a positive image about the behavior and
how I managed a tough situation. The administrative manager had no choice but to
endorse the comments of functional manager in annual review and subsequently I
got what I wanted.

Outcome/Conclusion :
If you have more than 1 bosses or stake holders who can decide your career growth,
it is necessary to keep at least one of them completely on your side. He in turn can
act as your link to convince the other boss and stake holders.

Also, never show frustration especially in a group review discussions (in 1 to 1

meets, you can express more liberally). This leaves no chance for the group to put
on record any short comings in behavior which might hinder your career growth.