Work Matters

Category: Bosses

  • The Wall Street Journal Asks: Are More Bosses Looking to Reform?

    I was interviewed by Sue Shellenbarger for a Wall Street Journal post on whether or not more bosses want to change their incompetent and mean spirited ways these days, and how they can do it.  The post just came out today, and Sue does a nice job of suggesting that there is more pressure on bosses to reform these days because, as we come out of the recession, retaining good people becomes more important as they have more exit options (see this post) — and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that people quit bad bosses, not bad companies. Sue describes a couple bosses who changed their ways:

    One, a division manager, had a habit of yelling when he was disappointed
    in people’s performance. Like many bad bosses, he had no idea how mean
    and scary he looked when he delivered criticism. Coaching and pressure
    from his own superiors prompted him to ask subordinates for feedback,
    and he gradually learned how to deliver criticism in a more constructive
    way.     

    Another manager was a control freak who also yelled a lot, rather than
    trying to help subordinates develop their skills. It was the adoption by
    his company of a formal performance-review process, whereby employees,
    peers and bosses all offered candid feedback on his destructive
    behavior, that helped this executive see the light.

    Sue also describes my perspective on reform:

    The key to reform, says Robert Sutton, author of a forthcoming book on the
    topic, “Good Boss, Bad Boss,”  is to learn to notice how
    your behavior affects others. Almost all of us fail sometimes to contain
    “our inner jerk,” he says. The key to change is to train yourself to
    notice that you are behaving badly, stop, apologize, and work
    consciously on being less destructive in the future.

    Sue has generated almost 50 vehement comments by asking questions WSJ readers whether reform is possible and how it can happen.  What do you think?  Can bosses reform? Are any of you bosses who have changed for the better?  Or is it one of those things that companies and management pay lip service to because they are naive or don't have the courage to get get rid of these rotten apples?

  • The Wise Boss: More Evidence For Expressing Confidence, But Harboring Private Doubts

    One of the challenges that I write about in Good Boss, Bad Boss and that Jeff Pfeffer and I discuss in Hard Facts is that leaders walk a fine line between exuding confidence while simultaneously making decisions and updating their actions based on the best possible information.  The best bosses, we argue, have what psychologist's call the attitude of wisdom: They act with confidence, while doubting what they know.  I have written about this here before, and perhaps the best example is in this long post about the wisdom of former Intel CEO Andy Grove.  There is a long quote from Andy in this post, and he demonstrates that attitude of wisdom with this great line, advising bosses:

    Act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction, and when your realize that you are wrong, correct course very quickly.

    But perhaps Grove's most intriguing argument is that when you've made a decision you are not quite sure about, you as a boss are still smart to act confident, "to keep up your own spirits even though you well understand that you don't know what you are doing."

    I talk about this balancing act a lot in Good Boss, Bad Boss and in the workshops I do with managers and executives and they usually immediately get it and tell me that this is their lot in life.   But I have received push back over the years from some readers and some managers too who argue I am telling bosses to be less transparent.  I agree with the sentiment, and their arguments make me squirm, but have argued back that, if you as a boss talk about uncertainty too much, the problem is it undermines both your legitimacy as well as the self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, since you will be seen as less competent if you come across as wishy-washy, to keep your job and sustain your follower's faith, you need to act confident, probably more confident than you really feel.

    On a related point, the lovely new book, by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla (you really should read it, it is scary and wonderful), describes a study done of two hypothetical weather forecasters, Anna and Betty.  Anna predicted a 90% chance of rain for 4 days in a row.  Betty predicted a 75% chance of rain 4 days in a row. The experimental subjects were told that it ended-up raining three of the four days, so Betty was an objectively perfect forecaster — her probabilistic estimates were exactly on target .  Yet still, nearly half of the subjects said that Anna was a better forecaster, because she was more confident in her predictions (even though Better was more accurate).  Chabris and Simons also report related research on confidence; for example, doctors who consult articles and books before making a decision are seen as less competent than those who do not, which the authors take as another sign that we human-beings tend to reward and believe people who act confident, independently of whether that confidence is justified or not.

    When I take all this into account, the best advice I can give bosses is to develop wisdom, to express confidence in their decisions (to sustain legitimacy and inspire people to action) and yet to keep doubting what they know and are doing in private and in backstage discussions with their trusted advisers.  But my advice makes my own stomach turn a bit as, although it explains why our leaders are smart to bullshit us, and that it might even be for own good at times, it is still an argument for deception or at least exaggeration and less transparency.

    I am thinking about this because, in a few days, I am going to be writing point 6 of my list over at HBR of 12 Things That Good Bosses Believe: "I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge,
    but humble enough to realize that I am often going to be wrong."

    In light of the complex forces here — the weird pressures to act confident but to avoid falling prey to evils of overconfidence and the apparent tension between being completely honest and being seen as a competent boss — I would be extremely interested to hear your advice, reactions, and examples of how a good boss navigates through these complex forces. 

  • Strategic Use of Swearing in the Workplace

    HBR editor Dan McGinn has a great post called Should Leaders Ever Swear? that has generated a lot of comments and is very thoughtful. He ends with a great question "Is it appropriate to use it as a bonding device or a way to motivate
    people? Do smart bosses use the f-bomb as a tool? What do you think?"

    As the author of a book with a mildly dirty title, I have probably thought about this question too much and have blogged about all sorts aspects of it here.  But I guess despite my use of profanity in my book and as a regular part of how I talk (although having children did lead me to swear a lot less at home and everywhere else), I do have some thoughts about Dan's great question:

    1. If you are not sure, don't do it.  There are people who are very offended by what I would think of as even mild obscenities.  As a result of having students pull me aside in early in my career, and ask me not to swear (I swore a lot in class when I was a brand new professor), I now rarely swear unless I am quoting someone when I am teaching executives or Stanford students.   The one big exception is when I say the name of my book, The No Asshole Rule, or teach a session on it, as it is impossible to do it without saying the word "asshole" a lot.

    2. There is a big difference between "backstage" and "front stage" norms.  In many places, swearing is private meetings is fine, but is unwise when you are being observed front stage.  You can see these norms at play if you listen to the amazing tapes made by both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, as they swore constantly backstage, but not in public.  Of course, you have to be careful not to slip, as when  George Bush — who thought the microphone was off — commented that a New York Times reporter was a "major league asshole" at a campaign rally.

    3. Swearing on rare occasions can be very effective for the shock value.  If you swear constantly, then people will barely notice it.  But when you do it rarely, it can have a big effect.  In fact, this phenomenon helped get me interested in The No Asshole Rule.  Years ago, at my department at Stanford, one of my colleagues — who rarely if ever swears at meetings — had a big impact on our group by arguing that we should not hire a renowned but difficult researcher because we did not want to ruin our group by bringing in "assholes."  From then on, the no asshole rule discussed as a hiring criteria.  I believe that if he was the kind of guy who swore constantly, we never would have heard it.

    4.  The norms of the group or organization are crucial.  I have worked in some places that if you DON'T swear you are looked upon with suspicion because, well, that is how everyone talks and it you don't swear, it means you are not part of the group.  For example, when I was a teenager, my dad owned a company that sold and installed furniture and the like on U.S. Navy ships, and I worked for him now and then.  Everyone in the business swore like crazy, and if you didn't you were seen as an outsider.  Other groups are opposite — I was once pulled aside and told that a CEO was offended by my use of the word "crap" during a speech.  And then there are national differences, as what is clean and innocent in one place may sounds dirty in another. As I blogged here a couple years back, when I was doing PR for The No Asshole Rule on BBC, the presenter told me that saying "asshole" now and then was fine, but she asked me not say "arse" as it would offend many in the UK, especially her mum! 

    5.  Finally, there are times when you may want to offend people.  Perhaps this is my inner asshole speaking, but as I discuss in my chapter on the virtues of assholes, there are occasions where people are incompetent, insensitive, clueless, or mean spirited, that to get their attention and perhaps even to dish out some punishment they deserve, that barrage of angry expletives can be quite effective.  Of course, as a strategy, this should be used in small doses and with proper precautions, but I remain rather proud of a strategic temper tantrum that I aimed at a group of clueless and arrogant Air France employees some years as back. As reported in The No Asshole Rule:

    Consider an experience that my wife Marina,
    our kids Tyler, Claire, and Eve had with Air France     in the summer of 2005, while we were traveling home from Florence, Italy and had a stopover in Paris. When we arrived at
    the airport in Florence    ,
    the Air France agent told us that she could not give us a boarding pass for our
    Paris-San Francisco leg (we were later told by another Air France employee that
    she could have, but was “probably just to lazy”).  Our flight to Paris     was so late we had less than 30 minutes
    to make the long trek through the massive airport, make it through multiple
    security check points, and get five boarding passes    .

    We made it to the transfer desk with about 15
    minutes to go. There were perhaps eight employees behind the desk, there was no
    line, only employees talking to each other. After spending several minutes
    politely trying to get them to pay attention to our plight, I turned to my wife
    and kids and said, “I have to start yelling at them, I have no choice, I will
    stop as soon as they start helping.” So I just started hollering about how late
    we were, how badly we had already been treated, and that they needed help us right
    now    . I was really loud and nasty. When they actually started paying
    attention to the problem, they realized how late we were and started
    scrambling. As soon as they started helping, I shut-up, backed away from the
    counter, and apologized to my kids – explaining to them again to them that it
    was a strategic temper tantrum. My calm, nice, and rational wife Marina then
    dealt with them (so there was a bit of good-cop, bad-cop too). They produced
    the boarding passes quickly, pointed at the gate and said, “run as fast as you
    can, and you might make it.” We barely made it, but we did make it.

    I see that I did not mention my swearing during the Air France episode. I definitely dropped some f-bombs, and seem to recall suggesting they were "fucking idiots."  Looking back at this experience, I still have no idea what else I could do to get their attention as they were ignoring us so aggressively. Perhaps screaming at them without swearing would have been equally effective! 

    I am curious about your thoughts on the wisdom of talking dirty, especially the strategic use of foul language.

     

  • Enough With The Big Hairy Goals — Also Any Ideas About Assertive AND Effective Bosses?

    I am continuing to dig into the details on my list at HBR of 12 Things That Good Bosses Believe.  My post on point 3 appeared today, Having
    ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to
    think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable
    my people to make a little progress every day. 

    Or, as HBR editor Julia Kirby called the new post, "Hey Boss, Enough With The Big Hairy Goals." Nice title, the main idea is that yes, big goals matter, but the best bosses devote most of their time and energy to the small wins, the little steps required to achieve them as that is only path to doing so, breaking them down into bite size pieces stops people from freaking-out and freezing-up, and it enables people to experience more pleasure in the process. 

    My next post at HBR will be on "One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to
    strike the delicate balance between being too assertive and not
    assertive enough."  If you have any nominations of bosses who are especially good — or especially bad — at striking this balance, I would love to hear who they are and what they do. 

  • Why Does Having Multiple Siblings Make You A More Effective Boss?

    I just did a post about a new study that shows, among other things, that the best bosses are more self-aware than the worst.  The press release had one tantalizing finding that intrigued me.

    Here it is:

    People with multiple siblings tend to be better
    leaders.         Executives with more siblings were rated highly
    in their ability to manage people and drive result    s.     "No one says it
    better than the Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, who's quoted in USA Today
    saying, 'Having seven siblings [gave me]… a unique background in
    understanding what competition is.'    "

    This finding is interesting but the example from the Bank of America guy bugs me because it places so much emphasis on competition — having multiple siblings also had other advantages as it forces you to learn to cooperate and learn that the world does not swirl around you — plus to return to the strongest finding form this study, siblings usually give each other unvarnished feedback, making it tough for any of us to live in a fool's paradise.

    I'd love to hear your thoughts about siblings, as I found this to be a cool finding, but I bet I missed a lot of reasons why having them may help bosses be more effective.

  • The Best Bosses Are The Most Self-Aware: More Evidence

    Good Boss, Bad Boss delves into many different hallmarks of great (and awful) bosses.  But when people ask me what the central idea is, I say that the good ones are self-aware and the bad ones live in a fool's paradise (See this recent post at HBR for more discussion of this point)– the good ones know what it feels like to work for them, are aware of their weaknesses, and constantly make little adjustments in response to the moods and moves of the people around them, while the bad ones are remarkably clueless (a huge hazard of being a human-being, check the new book The Invisible Gorilla if you want evidence of how overconfident and clueless most of us are most of the time).

    As such, I was interested to see a press release yesterday of a long-term study done a consulting firm called Green Peak Partners of 72 executives. Here is the summary, which they call "When it Comes to Business Leadership, Nice Guys Finish First." I was pleased to see their findings that "bully traits" and poor interpersonal skills where hallmarks of bad leaders, given that it provides more fodder for The No Asshole Rule.  But I was even more interested to see their finding that:

    Leadership searches give short shrift to "self-awareness," which should
    actually be a top criterion    .     A high self-awareness score was the strongest
    predictor of overall succes    s. "Executives who are aware of their weaknesses
    are often better able to hire subordinates who perform well in areas in which
    the leader lacks acumen."

    This is not the first study to make this point, but it is interesting to see how the drumbeat for self-awareness and how tough it is to achieve for any human-being, especially those in power keeps getting louder.

    P.S. In the name of evidence-based management, I should point-out that the description in the press release makes it pretty hard to tell what they did in this study, as they don't provide much information about the sample (I think it is a non-random sample of 72 folks), about how they measured performance (I couldn't always tell if they were talking about executive performance or organizational performance or both), or the nature of the instruments they used to measure the predictors like interpersonal skills and such.  Sometimes consulting firms develop proprietary methods and won't tell you about it — that is what I like about academic research, you have to show this stuff or it does not get published.  Also, never forget confirmation bias, that we all see what we want to see — and I like the findings of this research, it supports my book, so the flaws may bother me less because it supports my perspective. 


  • My job is to hold the umbrella so the shit from above doesn’t hit you. Your job is to keep me from having to use it.

    This quote comes from a boss named "gschaadt " who wrote a comment in response to my post (with the great picture) on A Shitty View of the Pecking Order.  The complete comment is

    I always
    tell the people who work for me the same thing:

    My job
    is to hold the umbrella so the shit from above doesn't hit you.

    Your job is to keep me from having to use it.

    I think this is  brilliant because there is so much wisdom on so many levels.  First, it is really funny, especially when paired with the picture in the post.  Second, there is deep wisdom there about the relationship between a good boss and good followers — these are mutually supportive relationships, not one way. Even the best boss can't do everything.  This boss —"gschaadt "– is more than willing to go to bat for his people.   But the implication for him or any other boss is, if people keep creating conditions where he or she constantly has to protect them, say, from superiors that they piss-off because they do shoddy work or break too many rules or anything else– a point comes where the difficult employee ends-up undermining the boss's reputation, the reputation of his or her team, and ultimately hurting everyone involved. 

    This especially struck me because, as I said in my last post, I am working on an HBR article on how good bosses serve as a human shield, protecting their people in all sorts of ways, but there comes a point where a follower has messed-up so much that smart bosses don't open the umbrella to protect that one troublesome person because, otherwise, he or she –and the rest of the team — will all get in such deep shit that they will never be able to dig out.  At the same time, walking this line isn't easy because some of the most creative and productive people are also sometimes the most difficult, weird, or annoying. 

    This is yet another example of why the best bosses realize they are always doing a balancing act.  It reminds me of Marc Hershon (co-author of I Hate People and also the guy who named the Blackberry and the Swiffer) and what he said after reading some early chapters of Good Boss, Bad Boss. Marc suggeste another name for the book could be "Top Dog on a Tightrope."



  • Boss Posts Ranked First, Second, and Tenth on HBR’s Most Read List

    As I wrote here a couple weeks back, I started blogging (again) over at Harvard Business Review a couple weeks ago and I kicked things off with a list of 12 Things That Good Bosses Believe, and will spend the next few weeks digging into each of the 12 things in a separate post there — as I love lists (and apparently so do a lot of people), when these dozen are done, I will add them to this blog on the side.  So far, I have added a post on how good bosses know that they are at risk of living in fool's paradise and on what every new generation of bosses has to learn –which are linked to the first and second beliefs. Quite a few of these ideas are themes from Good Boss, Bad Boss, but many touch on other topics.  In fact, the point about what every generation needs to learn is inspired more by Hard Facts and a great book called Beyond the Hype than by Good Boss, Bad Boss. I especially had fun writing this paragraph:

    Cries for the reinvention
    of management     and claims that we have to discard
    old models     are made by every generation of gurus. But really, the
    ideas that work aren't that complicated, and most of what is called new
    is really the same old wine in relabeled bottles. If you want to read a
    great book on this point, check out Robert
    Eccles'     and Nitin
    Nohria's     Beyond
    The Hype    . When I read it for the first time, I realized that a
    big reason every generation thinks that its solutions are new is
    because it thinks its challenges are brand new. People can't
    quite bring themselves to believe that managers of the past faced
    remarkably similar problems, found frustration and satisfaction in
    similar sources, and came up with similar solutions. Just as teenagers
    discover sex and can't imagine that the fundamentals were the same for
    their parents, managers are convinced they are encountering forces and
    feelings that haven't been seen before. And management theorists do
    little to disabuse them of that notion

    So far, I have been delighted and quite surprised by how many people are reading this stuff given all the people who blog on HBR.  The 12 Things post was number one on the most read list (the list is on the landing page to the right), and and right now, the fool's paradise post is ranked first, the 12 things post is second, and the every new generation post is ranked 10th.  I appreciate all the readers of Work Matters who will be checking things out and, as I hope you can tell, this remains the blog that is dearest to my heart. Also, as I have 10 more posts to write over at HBR on items 3 to 12 of the list of 12 Things That Good Bosses Believe, I would love to hear your suggestions about what I should write on any of those points.

  • Is GM’s Culture Really Changing, Or Is It Just More Hot Air?

    The BP fiasco has made many of us even more cynical about the difference between what executives and their spin doctors say about their management styles and organizational cultures versus what is actually happening.  With that caveat in mind, I was still heartened by a story in the Financial Times a couple days back about the cultural changes that CEO Ed Whitacre is apparently implementing at General Motors (note you can read it for free but have to register).  I was sent this article by Alison Beard, an editor I am working with at Harvard Business Review on article for the September issue, which presents and develops some of the ideas in Good Boss, Bad Boss about how the best bosses serve as "human shields" and take steps to protect their people from intrusions, misguided procedures, and idiots and idiocy of any stripe that undermines their performance and dignity.

    I have been extremely critical of GM here as both the public record and my own more haphazard but extended experience with the company convinced me that they had — at least before they went bankrupt — some of the most dysfunctional and inefficient programs, group dynamics, and leadership styles I have ever seen.  I am not surprised they went bankrupt, I am only surprised that it took so long.  You can see my rant about their "No we can't" mindset where I argued that their core competence was justifying why they couldn't do the right things and Mat May's amazing story about the dysfunctional power dynamics at GM and how he confronted GM executives with them.

    At least on the surface, a lot seems to be changing at GM.  The story in the Financial Times listed numerous encouraging things that new CEO Ed Whitacre is doing that strike me as reasonable antidotes to the old GM diseases.  Whether or not these are enough to change what the thousands of other people at GM for the better is another matter.  But there are encouraging signs other than the 1.2 billion dollars that GM made last quarter. A few quotes from the article are intriguing:

    1. The new CEO has little appetite for the PowerPoint presentations that
    have long been a staple of internal GM meetings. He has delegated many
    decisions and honed in on aspects of the old GM’s bureaucratic way of
    doing things that he sees as ripe for the cull. At one meeting in April,
    he questioned the number of websites GM ran – nearly 3,000, two-thirds
    of which were internal and many of which were not updated regularly.
    “Why on earth do we need this many?” a colleague recalls him asking.
    Many have since been closed.

    2. Mr Girsky has chopped the number of regular reports compiled by GM’s
    research group from 94 to four. He may dispense with some of these too,
    after deliberately not e-mailing them to the usual 150 recipients and
    finding that only a handful missed them. If executives give forecasts or
    dates of something they plan to do, Mr Whitacre makes clear they will
    be held accountable. “Everything is a bit more immediate,” says one
    executive.

    3. He regularly lunches in the RenCen’s food court, clearing his tray
    afterwards    .

    Comment: GM top brass have traditionally been treated like royalty — this is not trivial.   The best book on GM culture is very old  — One a Clear Day You Can See General Motors — and is about a guy who got busted a giant drug deal he got involved in to save his new company, John DoLorean –who in some ways was the Elon Musk of is era.

    4. At all levels, Mr Whitacre asks managers to take more risks. When
    subordinates request money for a new initiative, his response is
    typically to ask whether the amount is within their existing budgets. If
    so, they are told that the decision whether to spend it is theirs. “You
    don’t have to wait for that monthly meeting,” says Ed Welburn, GM’s
    design chief, citing a recent decision to change the rear-seat design of
    a new Cadillac model.      (But there is also bad news here.  The article says that "He has also made it clear that the flip side of extra responsibility is
    accountability, with few second chances."     When people are terrified of losing their jobs, they avoid risky behavior… if he is creating… or perhaps revising… a culture of fear, he needs to accept that there will be failures… see Diego's great post on this point).

    5. Mr Welburn, one of the handful of executives still in the same job they
    held two years ago, recalls that prior to the new regime, “half of our
    people were spending all of their time preparing presentations, instead
    of designing great cars”.

    This last quote — which is very consistent with my experience at the old GM — suggests that indeed some heads needed to roll. Perhaps Mr. Whitacre can now introduce some stability and psychological safety– Jack Welch, for example, was known as "Neutron Jack' early in his career because he did so many layoffs and got GE out of so many businesses, but after that phase, he developed a series of programs to engage employees and to make them feel safer, while still improving performance, notably Work-out. 

    So, what do you think?  Is there real hope for GM?   Is this just PR?  If you were advising Mr. Whitacre, what would you tell him?

    I am rooting for him and GM, as returning this company to greatness would help so many people's lives in so many ways, especially in Midwestern United States.

  • 10 Wise Comments from Wally Bock

    As I was writing my last post about lists, I ran into some great
    comments from Wally Bock and wove them into the  post.  Wally is an experienced consultant, coach, speaker, and management writer and he writes a great blog called Three Star Leadership.  Reading Wally's comments related to my most recent post inspired
    me to look through the dozens of wonderful comments that Wally has made
    here over the past few years. I can't quite figure out how to get an exact count from Typepad, but there are well over 100 and the average quality is just wonderful.  The first comment was in 2006 and the last this week.  I picked 10 — I guess I am into lists this week — but there are many more gems and I can't promise these are the best. These ten are all Wally:

    1. We believe that creative people are different and therefore crazy in
    some way. So when anyone who is, by definition, "creative" acts like a
    jerk, or doesn't bathe, or insists on eating dessert first or bringing
    his pet iguana to work, we shake our heads and say, "Oh, well, you know
    he's creative."
    All of which is nonsense.

    2. There are three factors that make it hard to stay realistic, let alone
    humble, as you climb the ladder of success.
    The Reality Distortion Field effect. The higher you go, the more people
    tell you want you want to hear instead of what you need to hear. Result:
    You only hear "news" that agrees with you.
    The Ass-Kiss Factor. People will jump to do things to please you. "The
    wish of the commander has the effect of an order." Result: you smallest
    wishes are instantly gratified.
    The Competitive Advantage. Most folks who climb high on the corporate
    ladder are competitive by nature. Often they're too competitive and
    need to win all the time, even when discussing things with subordinates.
    Result: people don't push hard, because you have power over them and
    you get the idea that you're always right.

    3. There's a supervisor's corollary to "Nothing strengthens authority as
    much as silence." It is "You support what you allow."

    4. Great organizations like the Marines or GE try to inculcate in their
    leaders that they have two jobs. One is to accomplish the mission. The
    other is to care for their people. If you're going for long term
    competitive advantage and profitability you need both. If all you're
    after is short term financial results, the "care for your people" part
    doesn't matter as much.

    5.  I have three questions I use to get a quick handle on the culture of an
    organization.
    What kind of people get promoted around here? The behavior and
    performance you reward is what you'll get more of.
    What "bad" behaviors are tolerated here? This is good for patterns of
    behavior.
    What kinds of stories do people tell each other? Stories are the
    carriers of culture. Beware if all they tell are "dumb boss" stories.
    Understand that service is a value if what you hear are "heroic service"
    stories.

    6. When I studied top performing supervisors, we found that there were a
    few behaviors that they did differently from their less-effective peers.
    They showed up more and had more informal conversations with their team
    members, including conversations about changing behavior or
    performance.
    That enabled them to catch problems early, when they're easier to solve.
    Thus, they had fewer cases where they needed to do documentation and
    formal conversations. Their team members had a good idea of how they
    were doing because they got frequent and usable feedback.

    7. There are good bosses and bad….. But there are also
    ineffective behaviors from good bosses and effective behavior from
    overall awful bosses.
    What seems important to me is that a lot of a boss's behavior is picked
    up unconsciously and practiced without conscious choice.

    8. The key to your advice and Wendy's is "during tough times, a good boss
    gives people as much predictability as possible." It's important when
    times are good, necessary when times are tough.

    9. I love the quote from Woody Morcott, CEO of the Dana Corporation: "Why
    did we hire 55,000 brains and only use three of them?"

    10. Thankfulness is important. Among other things, it helps you stay
    balanced in a world that exalts the quest for "things." One of the
    easiest ways to show gratitude is to send thank-you notes. I try match
    my mother's performance of at least three a day. Once I asked her what
    she did if there was no one to thank. She gave me her "mom-look" and
    said, "Wally, there's AL    WAYS someone to thank.

    On that note, a big thanks to Wally. And these ten quotes only scratch the surface.  Check out his blog and the extensive comments here as well. I find #2 to be especially striking as it is a pretty good summary of hundreds of peer reviewed studies.

    The web is still strange to me. Wally is the wisest person I never met. Don't miss Wally's bio here, I love this quote from when he joined the Marines:

    A Marine Major was in charge of
    that panel. He enlisted during World War II and landed at Iowa Jima.
    That adventure gave him a scar that started above his hairline, ran
    across his cheek, and disappeared down into his collar. He fixed a
    steely glare on me.
    “Don’t worry
    too much if you don’t make it all the way, son,” he said. “You’re
    seeking promotion to the most important job in the Marines. Those
    Generals may win a battle or two, but it’s Sergeants that win the wars.”