Managing Family Politics on the Job

Dear Lily, I am an employee at a small company. I work for a husband and wife who often differ greatly in their opinions on the best way to do things. They disagree on what I should do on everything from the best way to approach customer satisfaction surveys, to how to handle file reorganization. I am stuck in the middle, and don't know what to do sometimes -- if I do it the wife's way, the husband gets angry with me. I do not feel comfortable telling them that they need to communicate with each other and come to me with an actual plan of action, not conflicting point of views. How can I get them to realize that I need them to be on the same page in order to do my job?

I can understand why you would not feel comfortable telling your bosses that they need to give you clear directives. To say that they should agree with each other before instructing you would be to tantamount to saying that there is a problem in their marital relationship that is affecting their ability to run the business. Yet, that is the truth. And, if your bosses do not acknowledge and deal with this problem, they will both lose you and jeopardize the success of their company.

It is commonplace for employees of small businesses to find themselves caught in a web of family politics. Oftentimes, I hear complaints from employees who are frustrated that some underqualified ne'er-do-well relative of the president earning executive level pay is goofing off with no apparent consequences. My advice to such employees is that they concentrate on doing their jobs, report any obvious misconduct through the proper channels, and evaluate whether they want to be part of a nepotistic business.

The situation that you find yourself in is more straightforward. Perhaps it will help curb your anxiety about addressing the issue if you think of your bosses not as a husband-wife team, but rather as two managers who happen to share supervisory authority for your work.

Call a meeting of your management team to talk about how to optimize your effectiveness. Do not express an opinion about the reasons why they might be giving you conflicting instructions. Just describe to them exactly what you see. Give them specific examples of times that you have been confused about how to proceed and what the consequences were for the business (delays, false starts, etc.). Then suggest some alternatives. One solution to your problem would be for you yourself to take ownership of how things are done. If your bosses disagree, then evaluate the two options and email them both to explain what you have decided to do, and why. Another solution would be for you to punt issues back to your management team. Literally, e-mail them a description of the task and the two alternative approaches, and ask them to get back to you with an executive decision on how the work should be done. If e-mail is not an effective means of communication in your work environment, then deliver these messages in person.

Assigning an employee to more than one supervisor is never a great idea. Even when the two managers are extremely disciplined about presenting a unified message, there remains enormous potential for miscommunication and conflict over even the simplest of tasks. Like other employees in this situation, your best option is to manage up. If you do not, you will continue to suffer the brunt of the husband's anger toward his wife, waste valuable time, and quite possibly get blamed for operational problems that result from the inability of your bosses to agree.

Lily Garcia has offered employment law and human resources advice to companies of all sizes for more than 10 years. To submit a question, e-mail HRadvice@washingtonpost.com. We reserve the right to edit submitted questions for length and clarity and cannot guarantee that all questions will be answered.