Someone's Been Put In Between My Boss and Me
Dear Ron,
I have a good working relationship with my boss but recently a new person was inserted between us. I had gotten used to working directly with my boss, and it's a bit of a pain now to have to go through someone else. What should I do?
First of all, you need to find out why this person was inserted between the two of you, and who put him or her there. If it was your boss, you need to figure out if it's because your relationship has changed and he feels less comfortable with you in some way, or simply that the organization has grown and more bodies are needed. And if it is a trust issue with your boss, you need to schedule a meeting with your boss to get some feedback and shore up that relationship.
As for working more effectively with this person, try to see if there's some way you can align your goals with those of this new person and your boss so it's not as difficult to work together. For example, in your mind you may start to think of the three of you as a team in which if they win, you win, too, and where ideally there are enough rewards to go around for all of you should the team be successful. If you're good at what you do, you'll be valuable to them no matter what their motives.
That said, there are some cases when a new person is inserted against your boss's wishes for political reasons, and you may discover this in the course of doing your research into who put this person into that position and why. In this case, you need to evaluate how strong this new person is and what kind of backing they have, in case they wind up trying to cultivate your support. It could well be that this new person is being groomed as an eventual successor to your boss.
In one case, I knew a senior manager at a consumer products company who was doing very well when somebody who was on an accelerated development track at his company was inserted as sort of an executive assistant to his boss. When the manager saw who the person was and the kind of support she had, he realized she was being groomed for bigger things. He remained supportive of his boss, but worked very hard to align himself with this emerging star. And over time, he became a part of this person's growing base of people, and they proceeded to move up within the organization together. His boss held his position, but these two went to another division and he was able to cement a nice alliance for himself.