Tough to be a boss

While reflecting on some of the awful bosses I have had in my lifetime - and few have been any good - I remind myself of my own experience supervising the work of people and how hard that was. Besides working as an editor and having people under my purview, I was Director of Sales and Marketing at Semtronix in Ottawa for three years and after one of the partners was shown the door, I was called upon to look after the work of several employees. This included the office administrative assistant/receptionist and the main electronic technician.

Not long after I assumed these duties, it occurred to me that this was challenging work... responsibilities that were not for just anyone. True, there ARE in fact people who are born to be leaders of men (and women)... I'm sure Genghis Khan didn't need to take any courses to lead one of the most massive and successful hordes in history. Harry S. Truman inherited an atomic bomb program that certainly placed him in charge of men who were able to end the Second World War in a rather vivid manner. Martin Luther King Jr. put a new face on civil rights... although his tenure as a boss did not end so well for him...

But you get the drift. Being a boss is about much more than inhabiting a snazzy office, barking orders at people and letting them take the fall for your inadequacies and failures. And for the most part, the only good thing most of my bosses have been good at has been, well, bossing. Not leading by example. Not showing generosity and tact. Not knowing the sometimes very subtle difference between pressuring and motivating employees.

Sometimes the bosses I have had have been downright immoral. As a young man, I had a boss who would come onto my then wife sexually whenever I was not at my desk and he intercepted her phone call. He actually told her how he wanted to tie her up and described vividly what he would do to her. I was young, newly married and terrified of losing my job. And truly it is experiences like these that have given me the cojones to not put up with anything abusive against me today, from anyone... certainly not from a boss. Really, I wish I could time travel back to that decade some 30 years ago, take this guy aside and instruct him how to address a lady, whether she be a wife of mine or anyone else's.

What I also learned is that being a good boss is about constant work... and education. There are courses in motivating employees, psychological tricks you can utilize to get them to devote some passion to their work because they want to, not because they fear you.

Anyone wanting to read about a guy you'd really want to work for should pick up the recent book Warren Buffett's Management Secrets, regarding how the richest man in the world views his most important asset, his employees. I'd work for this man in a second. I should be so lucky.

Just know, however, that your likely unhappiness with your boss is a shared state of mind. I am sure that there are few good ones out there today, mainly because bosses are so fearful for their own jobs in a depressed market with shrinking budgets that they simply forget to be good managers. Self preservation is part of the human condition and when you've got a family to feed and work is about "you" versus "them"... well, how many of us would put the "you" first, or would instead handle a situation so deftly that both "you" AND "them" come out unscathed?

Would I be a boss again, if given the chance? The answer is yes and I think I'd be a darned good one, due to the experiences I have had with the bad ones. Then again, you get to an age where employers don't seem to value you so quickly anymore and, surprise, surprise, your life experience enables you to do things you could not properly do when you were young, vain and thought you had all the answers.

Not that there aren't some younger leaders of men (and women) who do a terrific job. They are, however, few and far between, too glutinous with self-approbation to realize that their staff is the key to their success to begin with.

So if you are heading off to work today and are in a position of managing a group of people, just remember a guy named Julius Caesar. There's always a Brutus waiting in the wings, with a long knife hidden beneath his robes.

Whether he uses it or not is totally up to you.