When should the boss be demoted?

Every once in a while a person has to be away from work temproarily or even leaves the organisation for good. Normally planned and enough notice period is given when people go on vaccation, reisgn or are sacked, it is not always possible to have a replacement available or in the required time time. This results in a sudden shortage of peoople to do the job.

Many organisations resort to asking a junior to fill in for the position temproarily " until further notice".

Most junior people are happy to perform at a higher positional levels within an organisation even if temproarily, believing they are making progress and are rising in the heirarchy and readily agree to the new position. The additional authority can also be very exciting.

It is appropriate that organisations review this practice.
With additional authority also comes additional responsibility. Often people are not yet ready for that additional responsibility and falter if not fail. This is neither good for the individual nor the organisation.

How often have you faced the situation where everything goes for a toss because the person handling critical matters is not available and all hell breaks loose?

Here is a guidleine I found very effective.

If the temporarily vacant position involved;
1. When dealing only with internal elements,and routine work i.e. people and functions within the organisation like operations, then it is normally appropriate that a subordinate team member fill in the position left vacant temporarily until a replacement was found.

2. When dealing with external elements such as customers, suppliers, government regulators, or third party agencies then it is essential that the superior team member fill in the vacancy. This infact means that the boss is temproarily demoted to handle both his or her own responsibilities and that of their junior. This is also applicable when dealing with the critical functions of design, development, purchasing, finance etc.

Sometimes the arrangement that worked best is to assign responsibility to the senior colleague and also ask the junior to assist him. This way the junior gets exposure and the senior and junior both are not extremely overloaded.

This had worked well for us.