Someone politely said, "My boss doesn't have the foggiest idea what he's doing." In most cases, it's not just sour grapes from the mouths of disgruntled employees but rather the truth. The reason is simple; many bosses are just plain incompetent. Yet, in bosses' defense, there are some logical reasons for such incompetence that are seldom considered by employees.
"YOU MEAN MY BOSS ISN'T GOD?"
The first assumption many of us make is thinking that bosses are deities. Today, it seems archaic, but you'd be surprised how many people grew up thinking that way.
The simple facts of working life included making an ally of your boss, doing what you're told, not getting on his or her wrong side, and whatever you do, do not questioning the boss's judgment. Remember, he is the boss and that means he has special power which makes him right by his lofty position alone. Back then, they didn't know about empowerment, self-directed work teams, and the psychobabble taught in business schools about building harmonious working relationships between managers and employees. All of that express-your-inner-feelings, build-good-relationship stuff didn't exist. It was simply the boss is the boss and your job is to shut your mouth, not question authority, and do what you're told. Take it or leave it. If you have complaints, then find another job.
If you were trying to build a life during the Depression, this career advice made perfect sense. The goal was not finding a challenging job that you loved, with built-in career potential and great benefits, but rather finding any job that paid a decent salary. In those troubled times, every job was the job. If you were lucky enough to find a decent job, you held onto it for dear life whether you liked it or not. As for your boss, it didn't matter if he acted like Attila the Hun and carried a bullwhip in his belt to motivate lazy employees. The goal was to do what you were told and get along with this per son. As for loving your job, fellow workers, and the boss, these were inconsequential factors. If by some stroke of good fortune, you loved the whole shebang, you scored a touchdown.
In most cases, workers like my father learned to grin and bear it. They kept their mouths shut, did their jobs, and if they had a serious beef with their boss, either squelched their feelings or vented their frustration outside of the workplace. Transferring your hostility to your dog always worked. But airing your gripes to your boss face-to-face was definitely not a cool thing to do. In fact, it was a good way to get axed: "What do you mean I'm insensitive to your feelings and am not motivating you by giving you challenging, problem-solving tasks? Clear out your desk and turn in your keys. You have fired!"
In defense of those less than democratic, pre-World War II working conditions, millions of workers still managed to build harmonious working relationships and formidable careers. By a combination of sheer will and luck, they managed to hook 'Anyone Can Be a Boss-Even You' up with decent bosses who took them under their wings and helped them realize their potential. But most people were not so lucky and had problems stemming from either their boss or the job itself.
Whoever said bosses know what they're doing; it's not all their fault either.
The second dangerous assumption is thinking bosses actually know how to manage people. Mention the word boss, and we immediately think this person has some special abilities or training. When bosses make bad decisions, or even fools of themselves, we're horrified, amused, and pleased all at the same time. "Can you believe this guy is the boss, and he doesn't even know what he's doing? How did he ever get the job? Why, I could do better!"
Maybe you could. But there are logical reasons explaining how bosses get their jobs. How many people do you know who went to school to become a boss or dreamed of being a boss when they were kids? Many people grow up fantasizing about running their own business, but being a boss or manager? Perhaps it is not so. Consider the following facts about bosses.
The Job Carries No Qualifications
There are rules and training programs for every job conceivable from sanitation engineer (garbage collector) to nuclear physicist, but there is no set curriculum that teaches you how to be a boss and no universal standards have been developed outlining how to perform this job. Ninety-nine-pound weaklings don't become football line backers, and ungainly klutzes rarely become tennis aces. It takes exceptional athletic ability to become a superstar athlete. Similarly, it takes special abilities, whether they be conceptual, creative, analytical, or computational skills, to be an engineer, mathematician, or architect. But there is no concrete set of skills necessary to be a boss. There are thousands of jobs that offer certification programs for advanced practitioners. But there are no such standards necessary for being a fair-minded, egalitarian boss.
While many large and mid-size companies provide training seminars and lectures for supervisors and middle managers, the majority of companies offer no training for bosses. And most of the so-called training programs are halfhearted attempts to teach specific managerial skills such as how to delegate authority, get feedback, and work with difficult employees. These programs are usually superficial. Can you teach someone to be a nurse, physical therapist, social worker, or psychologist in only 2 days? Imagine if there was an intensive 3-day program in cardiac surgery. Complete it with honors and you get a certificate that allows you to do state-approved open-heart surgery. Now there's a frightening thought.
On the corporate front, many accelerated training programs are just ploys by senior management to make the company seem progressive and in tune with the times. To do so, companies bring in high-priced management consultants who have written a couple of books to pass on their secrets on progressive management. The results are dismal.
A middle manager of a major pharmaceutical firm had this to say about his company's management seminars: They amounted to an expensive joke. We learned nothing concrete that would help us be better bosses. But as corporate outings, they were wildly successful. No expense was spared. At least once a year, the 3- or 4-day seminars were held in a special location. One year, it was an expensive resort in the North Carolina woods, another time it was a tiny island off the Florida coast, and last year, the company rented a luxurious ski lodge in Colorado. Wherever the location, they're always lavish affairs where 300 managers are flown in from all over the United States. Three hours a day, a prominent management consultant lectures us on improving productivity or techniques for bringing out the best in employees.
Some managers don't even bother showing up, and those who do seldom take notes. Many are so hung over from drinking the night before that they hardly remember anything that s been said. The majority of the managers who seem like they're attentively listening can't wait to get out in the sun to ski, golf, swim, or just have a good time. In short, our management seminars are no more than free drinking and eating orgies. We chalk the whole experience up to one of the fun perks of working for a Fortune 500 company.
Then there are the MBA-type professional managers who business schools love to brag about. They have praised as the new breed of managers. They're smart, schooled in the latest trendy management techniques, and supposedly tuned into the fast-paced workplace of the 1990s. While MBA training programs get great press, in actuality there aren't that many of them.
When you look at the country as a whole, the MBA ranks are quite small. What does it matter how much the MBA graduate bosses know? Ninety-nine percent of the bosses will never enroll in an MBA program. What's more, most bosses don't even have a bachelor's degree. And slick business magazines like Fortune and Forbes, which are targeted at MBAs and other highly educated professionals, ignore many of the bread-and-butter issues facing the majority of bosses. The average boss couldn't tell you whether Peter Drucker or Tom Peters are management gurus or serial killers. Nor do they care.
Bosses Have Incompetent Role Models
Bosses are not trained to be managers, and most had inadequate or poor role models. It can be likened to parenthood where we learn by example. Parents swear they're not going to make the same mistakes as their parents, yet most of them wind up doing the same things. We learn by example. It's the same story with bosses. How can anyone be a good boss if their role model was a high-strung megalomaniac who managed a department as if it were a military battalion?
John Trepan, manager of a 50-person department in a small Wyoming forestry firm, says he learned all the wrong techniques from his boss. Even worse, Trepan didn't realize he wasn't a good boss until morale suffered and he lost three of his best workers to competitors. He says: When my boss moved up the ladder and promoted me to his former job, I did whatever he did and assumed it was the only way to run a department. I found out otherwise. He was an authoritarian who was distant, demanding, aloof, and he rarely communicated with any of the people under him. He gave an order and expected it to be executed with no questions asked. If a task wasn't completed properly, rather than sit down with a worker and show him how to do it correctly, he humiliated him in front of other workers.
I am ashamed to say that I did the same thing. When I took over the department, my coworkers expected me to be an improvement from our former boss. I disappointed them by pulling a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde number. One day, I was one of them; the next day, I was their boss, a mean-spirited son of a bitch. Six months later, I realized that a good boss doesn't rule with an iron fist, but rather with understanding, compassion, communication, and shared goals. When morale and productivity fell and my big producers suddenly quit with only a week's notice, I knew I had a problem. A couple of weeks after one of my best workers left, I accidentally ran into him at a local shopping mall. Upset about his leaving, I asked him why he took another job. Secure in a new position, he unloaded the truth on me. It felt like he had opened fire with a shotgun at point-blank range. Pulling no punches, he told me I was abusive, inconsiderate, inconsistent, and had lost all sense of compassion for people I had known for years. In the space of a few months, I managed to alienate everyone who worked for me. At first I was sorry I spoke to my former employee, but afterwards I was glad I did it. I thanked him, apologized, and we went our separate ways. Until he told me the uncensored truth, I had no idea I was a horror-story boss.
After Trepan had that heart-to-heart discussion, he started mending his ways. It was reminiscent of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, in which the sickly Tiny Tim taught Ebenezer Scrooge that he was a mean and miserly man who didn't care about anyone but himself. To his workers' surprise, Trepan changed his behavior the very next day. What's more, he started reading management books and enrolled in management courses at a nearby business college.
Unfortunately, not all bosses experience this fairy-tale like catharsis. Most bad boss scenarios end with employees either being canned, quitting, or on a few rare occasions, beating 'Anyone Can Be a Boss-Even You!' their bosses to a pulp. A handful of evil bosses have been murdered by disgruntled employees, a course of action this writer discourages. No matter how much you hate your boss, winding up on death row is not a good solution.
Bosses Misuse or Abuse Authority
From the cited true story, it's easy to see how bosses can abuse authority. One day, you have just another worker taking orders and griping about the power chain; the next, you're a boss with people reporting to you. Not only must employees now take orders from you, you're also the one they must please. It doesn't matter whether you have in charge of 1 or 100 people; as soon as a per son has to report to and answer to someone else, you have a boss-employee relationship. Any first-time boss will tell you that the first surge of power is a pretty heady feeling. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger described power as "the great aphrodisiac." In The Light and the Dark, writer C.P. Snow had this to say about power: "No man is fit to be trusted with power... Any man who has lived at all knows the follies and wickedness he's capable of."
One of the best descriptions of the boss-worker relationship can be found in 'Power' Michael Korda's indictment of power-hungry corporate cultures. Says Korda, "The average corporation functions as a kind of broker, providing those who want power with a certain number of people over whom they can exert it. This costs nothing; every organization always has plenty of people so unimportant or easily replaceable...that it is simply enough to satisfy the power cravings of even the most incompetent executive by giving them someone to tyrannize. For years, this has been the real function of secretaries in the minds of many men."
Over the past two centuries, there have been countless cases of bosses terrorizing their secretaries. When not bullying them, they're demanding sexual favors in return for job security even today, with widespread awareness of diversity issues, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission legislation, and a plethora of publicity about sexual harassment, women often still pay a mighty price for prosecuting their bosses. Although they receive well-earned satisfaction in fighting back, the majority of whistle-blowers wind up losing their jobs in the bargain. It's easy to let power go to your head. Many bosses use it as a weapon to compensate for their inadequacies, frustrations, and failures; others use it to cast a spell of fear and anxiety in the ranks. It happens in all companies, but especially in small ones. This is where you find the prototypical big fish in little ponds that couldn't cut it in larger organizations with complex and strict reporting relationships. In small companies, however, these petty bureaucrats, many of whom have been victimized by tyrannical bosses, can be king of the mountain, wreaking fear, panic, and emotional suffering on every one in their charge. They get off knowing they're dreaded, and their employees' jobs depend on pleasing them.
Bosses Often Operate with Complete Autonomy
If you have worked for any length of time in a company, it's easy to understand how bosses get away with tyrannical behavior. If you think there are checks and balances on most of them, you're dead wrong. The majority of bosses in small companies have almost complete autonomy. They're like feudal lords, free to run their fiefdoms as they please. They can be enlightened despots, vicious dictators, or democratic leaders considerate of their troops. It's the luck of the draw.
Small companies, in particular, are guilty of producing more bad bosses than their mid-size and large company counterparts. That's because the average small company, which has fewer than 500 workers, is a tightly run, yet often under staffed, operation. The chain of command is not concerned with monitoring its managers but simply with boosting productivity.
Tom Perry, an admittedly tough supervisor in a Philadelphia apparel company, described how the reporting relationship and power structure worked at his 130-person company I have been with the company 18 years. I started out as a stock clerk and worked my way up through the ranks. I found my stride when ' Anyone Can Be a Boss-Even You!' I was promoted to a sales job. When the president saw that I had selling ability and could capture accounts, the waters parted and I was given increased responsibility. When I was named the biggest producer in my region, I was promoted to regional sales manager in charge of 20 salespeople and three administrative staff members. Until then, I had never been in charge of one person, no less 23. I saw this as my opportunity to make a name for myself and boost my career. By pounding on doors selling, I knew that the key to keeping my job and hopefully moving up was getting the "numbers" [conquering new accounts]. I never actually thought about the people reporting to me. All I knew was that they were a reflection on me. I saw them as an extension of myself. If they did well, I looked good. I never thought about whether they were happy or treated well. When my salespeople returned from the field with new accounts, 1 was delighted. If they returned empty-handed, I was furious. I didn't want to hear excuses. All I cared about were results, and I didn't care how they got them.
Perry's boss wasn't much different
Tom continues: My boss never told me how to manage people, nor did he ever look over my shoulder and give me pointers. He reasoned that if he figured out how to run a company, I could certainly learn how to manage a small department. The only time I heard from my boss was when he commented on my department's performance. When the numbers were up significantly, I was praised, and when the numbers were off slightly, I was told to boost them. He never asked about the people reporting to me. It was almost like they weren't human. It sounds horrible, but that's pretty much how I related to them. My employees were tiny cogs in the company machinery. If they stopped performing well, I replaced them without any second thoughts. Everyone was expendable, including myself. Like the other managers at the company, I was looking out for number one: myself.
Perry is a coldhearted guy, yet he is no different from thousands of other managers. They have all playing their own variations on the survival game. To protect their jobs, there are going to be casualties. Naturally, they don't intend to be one of them.
Bosses Operate in a Vacuum without Feedback from Employees
I have spoken to dozens of people who report having excellent relationships with their bosses. Most of them work for progressive mid-size companies that pride themselves on cultivating open communication lines between managers and employees. Curiously, many are second- and third-generation family-owned companies that were founded by the boss's father or grandfather, many of whom had barely completed high school, no less college. Many were traditional authoritarian managers. Most were tough and demanding, but fair.
Their progeny, however, went to business school to learn modern management techniques so they could take over the firms and successfully pilot them into the twenty-first century. Many sound like they walked out of the exclusive Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. A fair share of them has MBA degrees. Ask them about their management techniques, and they will sprinkle their conversation with buzz terms such as "empowered workers" and "self-directed work teams.'' They have their own spin on TQM (total quality management) and how to achieve it, and they have all read books by the leading gurus of modern management. Five days a week, they religiously skim, if not read, The Wall Street Journal, while "New Age" managers are in the minority, most of them have chalked up impressive results. By applying the theories of Michael Hammer, Robert Waterman, and Tom Peters and by forging a partnership between workers and managers, they not only boost productivity but create democratic working environments where employees actually enjoy their jobs.
Yet most bosses don't know about or care about progressive management techniques. They insist it smacks of phoniness and are content to remain in the Dark Ages. One old-line manager in a 50-person New Jersey metal fabricating plant put it this way: "What's the point of using all those stupid management techniques? I don't want to know what my workers think. I've got a good relationship with my people. I'm not about to ask them their opinions about anything. I call the shots, and that's the way it's always been. It's just plain old, Anyone Can Be a Boss-Even You!, respect. The workers like it that way. The proof of the pudding is we do good work and we have been doing it for 25 years. Like they say, if it hasn't broke, why fix it?"
But even bosses such as this manager would change if they were able to see themselves through their employees' eyes. Similar to the Scrooge like John Trepan cited earlier, their behavior might embarrass them into mending their ways.
What happens to bad bosses? Answer: Not Much
Just as there are no set training programs for bosses, there is no universal solution for dealing with problem bosses who are brought to the attention of company owners or chief executives. Unlike delinquent drivers compelled to attend driver clinics to learn safe driving techniques, there is no sanitarium for bad bosses.
Bosses that perform well can practically coast through their entire career wreaking havoc among employees. The only time bad bosses are called on the carpet is when they embarrass their boss by doing something stupid (such as making fools of themselves at a company event), when named in a sexual harassment suit, or when embroiled in corporate politics. Typically, the first two cases are handled with a mild slap on the wrist. Getting blotto at a Christmas party might draw a disapproving, ?'Jean, your people are going to stop respecting you if you pull a stunt like that again" or 'There were a couple of important clients at that party. Please curb your drinking next time and think about the poor image it creates for the company." A sexual harassment suit is more serious. "Pete, we have got a problem here. I've turned the matter over to our attorney who 's confident this situation can be handled out of court. It's going to cost us money to keep this thing quiet. We can't have this happen again."
A high-performing boss who is caught up in corporate politics may be handled differently. Small-company heads often use discussion, arbitration, or mediation so warring factions can find a common ground leading to a harmonious working relationship. The trend among mid-size and large companies is to hire executive coaches to shadow the boss and work one-on-one, fine-tuning the boss s interpersonal skills. Many companies pay between $35,000 and $80,000 to upgrade their bosses people skills. It sounds like a lot of money to squander on teaching skills the bosses should have possessed before they were hired. As one high-ranking executive at a thriving mid-size company explained it, 'Its bottom-line reasoning all the way. If a top manager is bringing in a million dollars of business a year, it's worth it to quell disharmony in the ranks by hiring an executive coach. If there is a fire burning, a crisis of confidence, or a tremendous rift in the management team, the brass will do everything possible to hold on to a top producer. You can't blame them."
In an effort to build superstar bosses with CEO potential, some large companies send their fast-trackers away to leader ship or management camps for several days. There they learn how to take "Teed back" and ''synergize." The nonprofit Center for Creative Leadership in Colorado Springs, for example, charges $7400 for a 5-day course. Executives get ''360-degree feedback" in which a manager s strengths and weaknesses are evaluated through lengthy questionnaires filled out by bosses, subordinates, and peers.
If you have wondering how they stomach 12 hours of psychobabble a day, a well-stocked bar and a six-figure salary make it easier.
Four reasons for people becoming bosses
Once you understand how people become bosses, you'll understand why demon bosses aren't fired so quickly. I hate to Anyone Can Be a Boss-Even You! Smash icons, but most people don't become bosses because they have proven managerial skills. Rather, they get ahead for one of the following four reasons.
- Politics. Some of us are better than others at playing organizational games. Many bosses, especially high-ranking ones in large companies, are masters at it. Read the biographies of superstar CEOs--the likes of Lee Iacocca, Andrew Carnegie, and Henry Ford--and you'll discover that they were visionary politicians. They played people as they would pawns on a chessboard, strategically and thoughtfully planned. They had a knack for analyzing organizational maps and piloting themselves to the executive suite. They befriended the power players and cautiously stepped over dissenters and trouble makers on their way up. On that long, steep road to the top, they captured more and more power.
- Nepotism. A close cousin to politics is nepotism, the practice of paying back a favor or a good turn with a job or a promotion. Nepotism has been practiced since the beginning of time. Your best buddy turned you on to the company that hired you. Three years later, you have been promoted to vice president, and you need someone to take over your old job of running a 40-person office staff. So you call your friend, who just happens to be out of a job, and ask him if he is interested. Naturally, he jumps at the opportunity. Favor repaid. What does it matter if the friend never managed an office staff in his entire career? This wasn't an issue for the newly appointed vice president. His feeling was, "He'll learn on the job, the way I did." Nepotism is a powerful force in any organization. The frightening part is that extraordinary jobs carrying enormous responsibilities are given away because of it.
- Special abilities, skills, education. Special skills have never been more important. Technical skills, especially, are critical to all companies. Consider the experience of software wizard Howard Slone.
Slone was hired by a Los Angeles computer game company because he was a talented programmer. At the time, the company knew nothing about his creative abilities. Eight months after starting, Slone knocked on his boss's door, begging for 15 minutes of time. He told him that he just developed what he thought was a neat Star Wars-like game for computer buffs. It could be easily loaded into any computer and was the kind of game that's addictive because it tests the player's reflexes.
Slone's boss wasn't thrilled about interrupting a report he was working on, but he felt obliged to comply because he had heard good things about Slone. Slone loaded the game into his boss s computer and then asked his boss to follow the simple commands. At first, his boss grimaced politely. But hardly 30 seconds later, he is immersed in the game. He was addicted. He pushed aside the report he was working on and practically forgot that Slone was looking over his shoulder watching him play the game. Twenty minutes passed before his boss spun around in his chair, smiled broadly at Slone, and said, "This is brilliant, Howard. Its hypnotic; its extraordinary. It'll make a bloody fortune."
The topper was that Slone told him he developed the game on his own time. On several occasions, he worked straight through the night programming it. Suddenly, Slone became a prized commodity. On the very next day, he was pulled off his project and asked to head a team that would prepare the game for mass production and design the promotional package that would sell it. Six months later, Slone's game was sold in computer software stores throughout the United States. When the game racked up revenues of $10 million, Slone was made chief software designer in charge of 10 programmers. His technical skills catapulted him to a managerial slot.
Slone was a brilliant software designer, yet he fell far short of the mark as a boss. One of his early hires, a fresh-out-of-college programmer, had this to say about him: If someone had warned me about Howard, I would never have taken the job. Looking back, it seemed like I walked right into hell. I should have known the moment I met Howard that problems lie ahead. The man had no social graces. Calling him a bore-- Anyone Can Be a Boss-Even You!--was a compliment. Why, he barely shook my hand before asking me a battery of questions. What I thought would be a friendly information exchange turned into a stress interview. Before he could even get a reading on my personality, he was trying to figure out what I could do. He didn't see me as a human being, but as a piece of equipment or an extension of a computer. I was human software. I could understand his wanting to find the right skills, but I found it odd that he didn't want to get a sense of me as a person.
It was during my first week on the job when I realized Howard was ruthlessly obsessed about getting results. Biweekly staff meetings were like being back in school with a tough professor who drilled us and made us squirm if we didn't return the right answers. The programmers sat around a long conference table while Howard stood at one end and fired questions to see how much we knew about a certain problem. If he had circulated a memo telling us something about the problem, we could have prepared ourselves.
But that wasn't Howard's style. Instead, he delighted in putting us on the spot. He loved to watch us sweat and turn beet red with embarrassment when we didn't know the answers. If someone returned what he thought was a ridiculous answer, he'd embarrass them by saying something like, "Are you sure you have a degree in computer science? Did you sleep with the dean?"
When he was finished making jokes at our expense, he gave us the specifications on a project, assigned tasks, and set deadlines. The way it worked was each of us had a piece of the project. It was kind of like a jigsaw puzzle. Each piece had to fit into the next, so timing was critical. The point is that Howard never gave us enough information. He could have made our lives easier by pro viding guidelines, tips, and shortcuts. Instead, he delighted in making us uncomfortable and creating enormous anxiety. The irony was that we were supposed to be working as a team brain storming for a common goal. Instead, we each went our separate ways to solve our own piece of the puzzle. Howard was a sadist who delighted in stumping us. He was exceptionally talented and expected everyone to perform at his level, which was ludicrous. Inevitably, we had to ask for extensions on projects because they were always too difficult.
The game we played was seeing how much we could take before we quit. One programmer boasted that he endured Howard for 3 years. He figured that was worth an entry in The Guinness Book of World Records. After 1 year, I left for another job. I remember turning crimson on my job interview when asked about my prior boss. I skirted the issue by talking about the type of assignments I was given and the pressure of meeting tight deadlines. Before I could get into details, the interviewer knew I was avoiding talking about Howard, who had already ascended to legendary status in the industry. He was known as one of the worst bosses in the soft ware industry.
How does Howard Slone keep his job? Simple--The president adores him because he always gets results, even if he almost drives his employees to the brink of suicide.
- Hard work great attitude. Finally, the combination of hard work and a great attitude is another powerful reason why some people become bosses. All employers want loyal hard working employees on whom they can count. These are serious career-minded people who don't gripe about putting in extra hours. In fact, they willingly volunteer to do so. If there is a tight deadline, if a couple of staff members are out sick, or if a rush presentation has to be developed, they'll work through the night or give up a weekend to get the job done.
Put it all together and you have left with an obvious conclusion: Anyone, including yourself, can be a boss; pretty scary.
