How can you constructively disagree on a goal manager wants to add?

[heyDiddleyHiDiddleyHiDiddleyHo]

I will try and keep this as short as I can.

I have been working in a fairly senior role at current company for 8 years. I am well respected, absolutely not difficult and have always had positive relationships with my team and manager.

My long standing manager retired last year and an existing employee was moved sideways into her role. She is loved by some and disliked by many so I guessed it was going to be a challenge. And its turned out to be so much more than a challenge! New boss does not have much experience/knowledge in the area I work in and the team reporting to her are extremely experienced, very competent, well respected and used to being managed and treated like adults.

My old boss’s shoes are big shoes to fill so I get that new boss is trying to establish and assert herself. But she is aggressive, angry and does not listen. If you dare to disagree or challenge her in any way she will bite your head off and I would consider the words used to be negative and intimidating at best, bordering on disrespectful and belittling.

The issue I am really stuck on and would be interested in other perspectives on is around goal setting for this year. We agreed 4 goals - the norm is 2-3, but I am happy with my 4. I proposed all 4 we talked them through and she was happy with them. I put them in our system and all was fine.

This morning I received an email from new boss out of the blue that said verbatim ‘I have decided to add an additional goal, add the following new goal exactly as written below please’. And the goal written is essentially saying do more and do it faster, develop metrics to demonstrate you are doing it significantly faster. Whatever ‘significant’ means.

Now the reason this has been added is because new boss is determined to show she can resolve some process delays better than old boss, which again I understand where she is coming from. But the reason for the process delays she is referring to is that I have lost 2 key team members and I have not been allowed to replace them. So we are down 30% on resource. She pushes and pushes on this everytime we talk and I have really tried to engage her in a can we backfill our open positions? can we stop doing x, y?, can we do this differently to free up time? what can we deprioritise? - conversation. Her response is always angry in words and tone - ‘you people need to stop asking for more resource, you are not getting any more resource’, ‘you need to work harder and get everything done’ etc. It’s awful, unsupportive and very destructive.

So I am really not happy to have a goal forced on me without any discussion that basically means my team and I who already work like dogs have to work well beyond reasonable/contracted hours or be denied their bonus this year. If we need to do more with less people then something needs to change and the business’s commitment to do that should be wrapped into the goal.

New boss will explode if I decline to add the goal verbatim before we have discussed and expectations are reasonable and clear.

How would you handle this. And yes the answer is find a new job, but that’s a longer term task.

I would reply:

'Alas, I'm not going to be able to do that pushymanager. As you are aware, I am two key staff members down and have not been allowed to replace them. Simple logistics mean that we are all currently working at full capacity. You and I have already agreed 4 goals as opposed to the 2/3 that have previously been the norm and I am therefore not able to add an unachievable fifth one. My team are currently working above and beyond their contracted hours, and if the business feels that even more is needed then this is something that I am happy to discuss in a meeting with those at the very top level of hierarchy. Kind regards @heyDiddleyHiDiddleyHiDiddleyHo

I would love to send that. It’s 100% fair.

But I am pretty sure I would be fired before the end of the week.

Perhaps add that you need two extra staff as a condition to agree on the goal otherwise you believe it's counterproductive to set unachievable goals with the resources you have.

You are quite within your rights to refuse to add this as the reasons you have outlined are valid.

goals are supposed to be specific, mensurable and achievable.

I would request a meeting to discuss the reasons and if she is not prepared to listen I would request that HR have a representative attend a further meeting.

You'd have an excellent case for unfair dismissal then.

If they're really that vague ask for SMART objectives - 'significant' is not clear enough.

Urrrgh leave & give yourself a pay rise. You sound too good for that place

It's your manager's responsibility to support you to achieve goals, so you go back and ask her what she will do to support you to ensure you are successful. That pushes it back on her.

I agree you also need specific measures and not something as loose as 'significant'.

This and via email trail so you can attach it to the goal along with the measures being used to score them at the end of the year.

I love this. Thank you!

If you're a fairly senior manager, I'd approach it in a way that shows you're taking the lead.

1. if you have 4 goals, and now a 5th one is being added, you could do one of two things. Either: do an assessment of all goals and if 2 of them are similar, you could combine them, adjust the wording etc (I've done that before and it has worked well) Or: you could make your management judgement as the SME to place the 5 goals in priority order and recommend to your manager that x goal (whichever is at the bottom of your list) isn't a must-do, it's a nice to do this year.
2. you need metrics/measures to evidence improvement. So start with the baseline, what is the current level of the service - presumably you have some way of counting or calculating and assessing the current situation eg Service Requests, incident volumes whatever your business does to gauge the service it delivers. These are your Lag Measures because they measure past performance. As you go through the year, consider any improvements to the processes - it's amazing once you start doing some analysis how easy it is to pick up inefficiencies and blockers, just by focussing on the work being done. Target towards making 1 or 2 improvements, and your Lead Measures (these measure your future performance by the end of the year) should show some improvement. Significant could be a % such as time to resolve service requests (focus your team on resolving the tickets in your system quicker, even if it's by 1 or 2 working days, it's still an improvement.)

Make a plan, identify the opportunities and take that to your manager as your proposed approach.

Data such as Lead and Lag Measures to create comparisons, is the powerful thing, they cant argue that you haven't tried. Also highlight that any improvement made, has been achieved with fewer staff.

Plus, bear in mind a new leader has a right to focus their team in a different way and hence I don't see a problem in them setting you a new goal, that's their prerogative. They will expect you to come back with a strong rationale as to why the focus of other goals may be less relevant or need to be adjusted to the new context.

to the point upthread about "pushing the problem back to them", I don't agree that this is a good way to start to build rapport with your new manager.

What marks out an average leader from an outstanding leader is to think creatively, not necessarily blindly follow exactly what their manager tells them to do, but challenge positively with strong rationale to back up the 'argument' which you do by giving options and recommendations. Don't be afraid of the conversation even though it may feel scary with a new manager, they need it as they find their feet in role and they'll respect you a lot more for your expertise as you've been doing the job a lot longer than they have!

ETA
It’s awful, unsupportive and very destructive totally get that their approach comes across as aggressive. It sounds like it comes from a position of frustration in response to you saying what you can't do. So can you change your approach so that it's a bit more "can do" rather than just presenting all the problems....

@heyDiddleyHiDiddleyHiDiddleyHo you can't be fired for sending a polite email.

Well done!

I would make suggestions of what could be done differently/dropped etc to achieve a goal similar to what she wants.

More resourcing
Not doing XYZ
Resourcing to implement a new system

And so on so that the target is linked to her decision on how it can happen.

Good luck on the job hunt

Good practice in this area talks around the use of the SMART framework. As PP said, push back on your manager for support and possibly use this framework to ground your discussion. Communicate all this via email so you have an audit trail of your conversations in your back pocket if you need it!

This is spot on advice.

A lot of the advice here seems appropriate for people in very junior roles (e.g. basic office admin), with an "I can't possibly!" helpless attitude. The OP sounds like she is in a more senior role, where these responses would be entirely inappropriate.

As @daisychain01 says, the welcome challenge here should be to think about how to do things more efficiently (usually a processes or structures solution). The implement something and demonstrate improvement using metrics. More resource simply can't be the answer to every question. OP, you need to be thinking about this more positively, and challenge yourself and your team to see how you can work smarter, not harder.

To add to what others have said I'd consider 'develop metrics' and 'improve performance' as 2 separate goals. It seems you are being overloaded.

I think pushing back asking for the priority goals is fair as currently you have 4, adding 5 and 6 which are unachievable without additional resources is counterproductive.

Completely fair to ask for making objective conditional on more staff if they want to improve and have open roles to fill. I'd document by email but also ask for a separate meeting.

To be honest leaving is looking like the best option. Can you do that?

I would look at it as negotiation and use the weekend to work out what you can do / how you can meet boss halfway and deliver.

I had similar sit with roles not backfilled
it's crap but honestly there are normally efficiency gains to made.

I worked around it in a few different ways.
I automated some processes, stopped a couple that had poor value-add, moved responsibility of one process out of the team (we essentially had to check another teams work... the execs were slap dash and it took my team time to give feedback as they knew wed sort it. i moved it fully back to them and if it was wrong they had to face the music with the client). I also cross trained a couple of people which gave more flex on overall workloads.

Thank you @daisychain01 This is solid advice and would work with a supportive and mature manager. The challenge I have is that I have already been through a lot of point 2. I have plenty of metrics and these show that delays have increased hugely since our resource has decreased. With the best will in the world, if something typically takes 3 days to complete when fully resourced and is now taking 4.5 days because it has to sit in a queue waiting for resource to be available to pick it up, there’s just no way to eliminate the delay. Every suggestion I make for consolidating, deprioritising other tasks to free time up is met with, no you need to maintain service levels for everything else and reduce the delay.

More resource has to be in the table or I am just being set up to fail.

@heyDiddleyHiDiddleyHiDiddleyHo your most recent response speaks to that "I can't possibly!" mentality I spoke about above. Of course there can be process efficiency gains and other ways of working that will improve the situation. I find it quite embarrassing to hear an attitude like yours coming from someone in a senior position (though I may have misread the situation, and you are a relatively junior team lead?).

Don't be ridiculous, since when does being a senior equate to superwoman .
OP sounds very mature and measured to me , she is talking through possible options and potential difficulties, this to me indicates a strong knowledge of her team and area .
A less senior person would be bullied into agreeing everything and just not deliver .

@DoorPath is being a bit blunt it's her language but her idea is sound.

If you take 4.5 days to do something which used to take 3 days why is that?
Is there something that only some of the team can do that everyone could learn how to do to minimize the wait for that aspect to be done?
If inputs from other teams are needed can you put an SLA in as to how quickly they need to provide that after being asked?
Could you use better tools to track where things are in the process?
Could you identify the high priority/ most visible items in the queue and focus on getting those done in three days while the lower priority items will then take 5 days? That's same workload but improves satisfaction of the team's performance as the really important work is done faster.