Ten Ways to Be a Better Boss

I have had more than two decades experience in management. I have personally learned a lot of valuable lessons on leadership, many of them the hard way. I also have had many bosses. Due to the weirdness of corporate banking, I once had 8 bosses in a 12 month period. I have had excellent bosses who engendered loyalty in their people, and I have had horrible bosses who drain the very life out of people. Good leadership can free employees to do amazing things. Poor management can only get the bare minimum out of people, if that.

Today’s challenge to you, the reader, is to comment with a story about the worst boss you’ve ever had. We’ll see who has the worst.

1. Treat Your People Like They are People – This is imperative. Employees are not “cogs in the machine,” they are real people with real dreams, ideas, and frustrations. Be friendly with them, but not overly so. Let them know you value their input.
2. Surprise Them with a Break – I once had a boss who came in one Thursday and told us to dress casual for the next day with clothes that would be comfortable outside. The next day, he shut down the department for an “offsite meeting” at noon and took us all across the street to Tempe Diablo Stadium where we enjoyed an afternoon of spring training baseball. What fun. He built loyalty that day and next time he needed us to work late for a deadline, we were all onboard. As a manager, I used to periodically bring pizza in to the department, just as a thank you for their work. I also awarded employees who performed well with time off, maybe an afternoon, or sometimes a whole day.
3. Public Praise, Private Punishment – If an employee has done well, trumpet it in front of other employees and even customers. If they do poorly, deal with this in private. The quickest way to kill morale is to switch these around. Of course, there is nothing like a good public caning once in awhile.
4. Give Them Family Time – When I have an employee with a child or spouse in the hospital, I don’t blink, I tell them to go be with them. I tell them. As long as this isn’t abused, it makes a big difference. If they are trying to work while worried about their family. In most cases, a good employee will go take care of their family and come back and redouble their work effort. Don’t make the corporate-America mistake of thinking the company is family. A good reading of Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol” might help. You don’t want to be responsible for Tiny Tim’s death now, do you?
5. Pick Their Priorities – It is not the employee’s responsibility to decide what their priorities are. This is the single most common mistake made by managers. They will assign two or three things that must be done at once, but only give time to get one of them done. The employee is left to figure out how to make it happen and absorb any negative reaction if they choose wrong. The manager should be the one to say, this is the first priority and must be done by this time, this is the second priority and must be done by such and such a time, and so on. As an employee, I always push this back to my boss.
6. Lead by Example – If you expect your employees to put in extra hours, then so should you. If you expect them to take a pay cut, then so should you. A leader should lead from the front. Unless of course you are a politician.
7. Know Your Employees – Do you know the names of all of your employees, even the least of them? Do you know the names of their kids? Do you know what the employee does for fun in their free time? How is their marriage doing? What are their career goals? What do they value? Do they wear kilts in their off-times? If you can’t answer these questions, then you won’t be able to properly motivate them.
8. Let Them Learn – The first thing cut in most budgets is training. Many new employees get thrown into the business with little or no preparation. What a terrible mistake. Well trained employees are more effective employees. This goes for outside training. I strongly advise sending your better employees to seminars and training sessions to get better and better. Weaker employees can be given additional training too. Tuition Reimbursement is an excellent way to improve your people. An even better form of training is mentoring. If you have an exceptional employee that is a prospective for promotion, have him or her sit alongside someone who is doing the new job well. Let them learn by following in the footsteps of someone older and more experienced.
9. Don’t Chase Management Trends – Working in corporate banking, I saw trends come and go. I was given the gift of the goose, empowered, TQM’ed, SalesTech’ed, 3 R’ed, 5 P’ed, had my cheese moved, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitem. We were reorganized again and again. Consultants came and went and then more came in, each with a sharp suit, a new idea, and a fake smile. We did teambuilding events, and dissection debriefs, and seminar after seminar. What we never seemed to get done was any real work. Pick a business plan and go with it. Give it time to work. Build your people up and give them the training and tools to get the job done. Reward them well when they do well. Then get out of the way and quit bothering them with Dilbert-style goofiness.
10. Fear and Shame are Short Term Tools – There is an old adage, “You’ll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” I’m not sure why you need to catch flies, but let’s apply the lesson here. A leader will encourage his people, building them up, having faith in them. A poor manager (dictator) abuses his employees. I once worked for a man who would hold ‘come-to-Jesus meetings’ to deal with problems. Here’s an example: A customer called in angry that he didn’t get the correct items in a timely manner. Bossman calls the sales person into his office and demands an instant explanation (without giving the person time to get answers). Sales person, in the process of hemming and hawing through his excuse mentions that production had told him the parts would be ready. Bossman instantly interrupts by picking up his phone and calling the Production Manager. Production Manager and Salesperson are now in his office. Production manager tries to explain about an engineering problem and Bossman promptly interrupts again, calling the Engineer in. The engineer then tries to explain and mentions the Customer Service Manager in who then mentions Project Management and so on and so on. Soon, a third of the company is in there sweating as they are yelled at and denigrated by the Bossman. Bossman would then mention all the errors and assign blame in front of everyone at the next company meeting. Not only was this ineffective at solving the customer’s problem, but it tore down the morale every time. Fear and Shame can be effective tools if you must rush to get a single job done and will never see the employees again. In all other instances, please don’t consider them to be useful leadership tools.

I once calculated that it cost our company more than twenty thousand dollars to train a new technician. I then showed this number and how I calculated it to the owner of the company (one of the worst bosses I’ve ever had). I tried to demonstrate how much better it was to treat people well and keep them versus treating them as disposable and losing them to other companies. He saw the numbers and agreed with them, even suggesting that they were much higher when you considered loaded costs. Yet, ultimately, he never changed and continually chased off some of the best people we ever had.

A good leader who treats his people well is an incredible boon to a company. A bad boss makes everyone’s life worse and will ultimately be a drain on company resources.

Feel free to send an anonymous copy of this blog to your boss.

My Bad Boss Story (not naming any names)

I had a boss who was extremely paranoid about his employees wasting time by checking personal email or surfing the internet, because this cost the company money. So, he had software loaded on every computer that allowed him to look at anyone’s computer screen at any time from his desktop computer. He then spent large amounts of every day watching his employees computer screens. It never occurred to him that, at the highest salary in the company, he was costing the company much more money by wasting hours watching employee computers than he ever saved from keeping them from spending a few minutes checking personal email. His paranoia extended to perceived loyalty. He also paid for accounts on several employment search websites like Monster.com so he could search for resumes posted by his employees. If he found your resume out there, he got rid of you. He was soooooo paranoid and angry, that there was a palpable tension in the office when he was there and an almost visible sigh of relief when he was not. It was demoralizing to work anywhere near him.

This post is Number 6 in a series of Ten Top Ten Lists on improving yourself. This series will be posted daily.

Tomorrow: Ten Ways to Be a Better Interviewee