Category: Bosses

As an academic, I am pretty lucky in that — although there are people who wield authority over us — we get a great of independence and our deans and other leaders don't push us around very much.  I've also been lucky to have some great bosses since arriving at Stanford, notably I was very impressed with John Hennessy's decisiveness and entrepreneurial spirit when he was dean of the School of Engineering (he rose from Dean to Provost to President in just a few years, so others with a lot more power noticed too) and I a huge admirer of my current dean, Jim Plummer, who also is quite entrepreneurial, and one of the most compassionate and least selfish leaders I've ever encountered. And he has fantastic values, as he thinks and acts like students and young faculty are the most important people in campus because he sees them as the future of the institution and beyond.  I've also mentioned that how I am a huge fan of Joel Podolny, who was never exactly my boss, but I had a lot of contact with him when he was an Associate Dean at the Stanford Business School –Joel  is now the new dean of Apple University. 

In my travels in the real world, I've also met a lot of bosses I admire. David Kelley at IDEO has had a huge influence on me and thinks more creatively about leadership and management than anyone I have ever met (and is one of the most famous product designers and design thinkers in the world). David will say things that just blow me away… like when things are confused and out of control, he will say sure, we need to try to clean up things, but that life –especially innovation — is always messy and you just need to learn to deal with it — it will never go away if you are doing it right. (Indeed, check out this FastCompany story  about all the things that others have learned from David) Or in thinking about how to teach design thinking better (David is also the founder of the Stanford d.school) he wills at stuff like "We are doing good design work, but we aren't telling very compelling stories about … we need to become better storytellers).  Other bosses I admire include Mitchell Baker and John Lilly at Mozilla, and when it comes to bigger companies A.G. Lafley has consistently impressed me. And, who knows if she can turn things around (it isn't going to be easy). But I like what Carol Bartz at Yahoo! is doing and how honest she is being about the challenges and changes.    I have never met him, but I also greatly admired Donovan Campbell's combat leadership after reading the wonderful Joker One.

In looking at this list of diverse leaders, I think that, if there is one thing that all these people have in common is that I always find what they say and do to be authentic, there isn't a bullshitter in the bunch.  So perhaps that is something that is a hot button for me.  There are other qualities that each has as well, like Kelley's compassion, honesty, and simple but spot on creativity and A.G. Lafley's ability to gently and persistently express and implement admirable values and business strategies.  But clearly, I am singing  executive and author Bill George's tune here (another great boss) — check out his book with Peter Sims if you want to learn more.

I've left many folks out, but as I have been thinking a lot about great bosses for both my recent HBR article on How to Be a Good Boss in A Bad Economy and another writing project that I am working on, I wonder if others could might want to join the conversation, I'd love to hear your stories and ideas about:

1. Who is the best boss you ever had, or saw in action?

2. Why? What made him or her so great? 

I'd love your thoughts.

As I was reading
and thinking about bosses yesterday, something struck me.  I realized, or perhaps a better word is
speculated, that in the 30 years or so I’ve spent teaching, studying,
and hanging out with aspiring bosses, rookie bosses, and (both good and bad)
veteran bosses that, although the names change, it seems as if I keep seeing
the same movie again and again.   The journey most bosses take seems
to comprise roughly four stages. 

The
first stage is awe, where the aspiring boss is overly impressed with
anyone who has an impressive title and lead’s others. 

The
second stage is cynicism and disgust.  After working for a couple
years and seeing how lame their boss is (and perhaps seeing seemingly once
great bosses take a fall), they wonder who so many bosses are so lame given how
easy the job is to do. 

The
third stage is how can I be so lame? It sets in shortly after the boss
takes his or her first leadership job.  I once taught a master’s student
who ripped apart every boss he ever had and every boss discussed, but this all
changed when he got his first management job heading a small product
development team. He confessed, “I was always talking about what a loser my
last boss was; now I find myself hoping that I can be as good as him some day.”
 

The
fourth stage (which not all bosses make it to) happens when the boss comes to
believe, this is a damn hard job, but the more I do it, the better get at
it.

I
wonder, does this sound right to you? 
What am I missing or oversimplifying?

Last week, I did a posting about the Selfish Superstar Inventory that I am developing for a current writing project, and I asked people to suggest names and items for this non-scientific scale. I got quite a few suggestions via email and in comments on the post. I think I have dug them all up.  Here they are:

CRASS
— Critical Ranking Analysis of Selfish Superstars

EGOS — Evaluation Gauge for Overbearing Superstars

BRATS
— Basic Ranking of Asshole Tendency of Superstars

BRASS — Basic Ranking Assessment of Selfish Superstars

MESS — Measurement Exam for Selfish Superstars

S.H.I.T. —   Superstar Hubris Indicator Tool (Or Selfish Human in need of Training)

WIIFM — What's In It For Me

Pretty Things for Pretty People

I.A.M. — It's all about me

SPARSE -Superstar Primadonna
Asshole Rating Self Exam

What is your favorite? Also, let me know if you have any other ideas for titles or items on the scale. 

Thanks,

Bob

I am working on a little quiz based on something that Jeff Pfeffer and I have been thinking about since we wrote The Knowing-Doing Gap a decade ago, that continues in The No Asshole Rule, and I am thinking about again right now for my current work on great bosses.  We've thought a lot about the problem of destructive internal competition,and one of the little revelations we've had over the last few years is that one of the best diagnostic questions for determining if a boss or organization is fueling cooperation and information sharing– or stomping it out — is "who they are the superstars here?"  Bosses who reward solo superstars who stomp on others, stab them in the back, and steal their ideas are — whether they want to or not — breeding people and building a culture that anoints greedy and selfish superstars.

In contrast, bosses who anoint people as superstars only when they do stellar solo work AND when they help others succeed too, are creating the right kinds of stars.  I have written a lot over the years about different reward systems.  Hard Facts reviews pretty compelling evidence that organizations that emphasize the differences between the very best versus the "merely" competent and reliable employees may do a better job of holding on to the stars. But they often undermine overall team and organizational performance.   Nonetheless, I have been fascinated to learn in recent years that, although there are huge differences among the compensation systems at places like IDEO, McKinsey, GE, and Procter & Gamble, all are similar in that — to be treated as a star — you need to help others succeed, not just do great individual work.

Along these lines,I am trying to come-up with a fun and instructive way to show the damage that selfish superstars do (for a current project).  I am trying to come up with something as fun and useful as the ARSE (Asshole Self-Assessment Rating Exam), which is closing in on 200,000 completions.  The working title is the SSI (Selfish Superstar Inventory), and I am looking to generate about 20 diverse –  including humorous — items.  This post is a plea for help.  In particular:

1. If you have a better title, I would love to hear it. The SSI doesn't quite sing like ARSE.

2.  I'd love suggestions for items on the quiz.  To give you a sense of the kind of thing I am experimenting with:

People we hire:

Love to brag about their accomplishments.

Say “we” but think “me.”

See their peers as competitors, even “the enemy.”

People who get ahead here:

Stomp on colleagues on the way to the top

Are always loved by their superiors, but often despised
by their peers and subordinates

Ask for help, but never seem to give it

Don’t need to play well with others.

Constantly push
for more goodies for themselves, but never go to bat for colleagues.

Note I am in the early stages of this project, so please don't hesitate to suggest a different structure and, in the spirit of brainstorming, go for wild ideas.  I think I am making things too tame thus far. Thanks! I am looking forward to your ideas

There is a good conversation about the challenges of managing during tough times over at McKinsey.com where people are discussing the video, Good Boss, Bad Times, which is based on my current HBR article. There is an interesting and insightful comment by Wendy (and quite a few others too, I especially like the one by Alan Himmer) about the nuances of leading during tough times.  As I look at the comments, however, I realize that although videos are wonderful, they can't quite contain the nuances of an article.  And, in fact, Wendy makes an excellent point that, although I don't touch on it in the video, is something that comes up in the article, and is something I've been painfully aware of since doing a case of the collapse of Atari over 20 years.  As Wendy put it, 'try to make budgetary cuts in one fell swoop—it is better to cut too
deep than to go back to the troops with more bad news. Incremental cuts
only destroy employee confidence and leave them “stuck” with confusion
and resentment.'

Wendy's advice dovetails with the argument in my article in that, to manage well during tough times, a good boss gives people as much predictability as possible — and especially does everything he or she can to make clear when people are "safe" versus have reason to worry.  One of the worst things a boss or company can do is to make constant cuts at seemingly random intervals, as it causes people to live in a constant state of fear as they wait for the other shoe to fall.  As Wendy suggests, although a single deep cut is hell, it is a better alternative than wave after wave of smaller cuts.  Of course, things these days are unpredictable enough that what may seem like a deep and adequate cut today may later turn out to be inadequate,doing fewer and deeper cuts to the extent possible is a more effective strategy in the long-run.

Right after The No Asshole Rule was published, I wrote a bit about Maureen Rogers' blog Pink Slip and she wrote about the book.  But I had not visited much recently until the other day.  I not only was reminded was reminded of her sharp wit and delightful writing style, I realized that her blog had got even better over the last year or two. I was just delighted by her post Throwing at the Batter about workplace "situations that should result in a return bean-ball, a suspension, or a good old-fashioned bench clearing brawl – but never do" such as throwing team members under the bus and the vile practice of unnecessary fire drills. Maureen blogs mostly about workplace issues, but somehow ties it to everything from Grapenuts to When Hockey Moms Go Bad.

Maureen has a strong and original voice, a sense of fun, and makes creative connections among seemingly unrelated ideas — but after you listen to her, it all makes good sense.  Maureen, I am sorry to have been away so long, but I will be back as a regular.  

Harvard Business Online charges a pretty penny for articles and cases; indeed, although their prices annoy me at times, I also admire them because they produce and publish a lot of high-quality and original content, and actually get people and companies to pay for it — something that many other organizations are now struggling to do.  The author in me likes that, even if the consumer in me does not.  One nice thing they do for authors is to create a link that allows us to give away 100 copies of a PDF version to anyone we want.  As I said earlier in the week, I want to give the copies to readers of Work Matters.  If you want a copy of "How to Be a Good Boss in a Bad Economy," please go here to download it:

http://custom.hbsp.com/b01/en/implicit/p.jhtml?login=SUTT052609S&pid=R0906E

Also, I would be grateful if you limited yourself to a single copy so that more people can get one. Finally, when these run out, you can read the opening of the article and buy the rest here; and if you want to see an interview with me about the article at the McKinsey site, check out Good Boss, Bad Times.

 I've written here about my new Harvard Business Review article on  "How to Be a Good Boss in a Bad Economy."  Right after I finished the article, I was lucky enough to be at conference where Rik Krikland had a camera crew. Rik runs the The McKinsey Quarterly and a bunch of other related stuff at McKinsey; as some of you may remember, Rik was the long time editor of Fortune magazine. Rik asked if I wanted to do an interview about something, and we both thought that the forthcoming HBR was most timely. So we did the interview, which they call Good Boss, Bad Times –you can see it for free if you follow the link.  The article contains more nuances than the interview, but Rik is such a
good interviewer that he gently guided me to provide a pretty accurate
compact summary of the ideas.

In addition to the interview, there was some interesting "inside baseball" with this interview as HBR and the McKinsey Quarterly in some ways compete for attention (although they do have different goals in many ways). But rather than getting weird and uncooperative, Rik and the new HBR editor Adi Ignatius were wonderfully cooperative about the whole thing.  They were colleagues at Time-Warner, as Adi was at Time magazine for 13 years, so that helped.  McKinsey waited to post the interview until the HBR article came-out — and the HBR article links back to the interview (They are acting just like bloggers, kind of cool to see).  My thanks to everyone at The McKinsey Quarterly and Harvard Business Review for playing so well together, and for being so fun and inspiring to work with.

Sunday's Times had an essay by "ethicist" Randy Cohen that made a remarkably black and white argument about when it is and is not ethical to layoff employees.  I had a mixed reaction to the article.  On one hand, I agree that too many organizations use layoffs as a first or early resort and that there are too many times when senior executives slash employee jobs just to protect their own pay –and there is an argument from some research that companies that do layoffs at the first whiff of trouble are at a competitive disadvantage.  But I think that Mr. Cohen's arguments strike me as too moralistic and too naive at times.  This really bugged me:

"This is not to assert that Caterpillar can never downsize. Companies
must be able to shrink as well as grow, to adjust to changing
circumstances. (A restaurant with fewer customers needs fewer waiters.)
But prudent staffing must be part of an ongoing strategy, not a panicky
response to an economic downturn."

The economic collapse that led to layoffs at Caterpillar wasn't predicted most industry experts and economists, let alone by most corporate leaders.  I think that simply calling layoffs at Caterpillar a "panicky response" is sort of like criticizing people for a "panicky response" to Tsunami.  I am sure, in hindsight, that executives might have been better prepared, but I think Mr. Cohen does not show quite enough understanding of how hard it is to manage during times of harsh uncertainty. 

I was also a bit disturbed because,although I think that many companies do not show enough loyalty and humanity toward their workers, Mr. Cohen seemed to saying that any leader or company that did not first try practices short of layoffs was immoral:

"Before adopting the ethics of the overcrowded lifeboat, before tossing
thousands of non-millionaires over the side, gentler — and more
equitable — methods must be tried. Everyone’s hours might be reduced,
diffusing the pain. Dividends to stockholders can be eliminated. Pay
cuts can be instituted company-wide, with the deepest reserved for the
highest paid (that is, those most able to endure them)."

That "must be tried" really bugs me.  In the case of Caterpillar, I wonder whether the workers, shareholders, and analysts would have agreed with the strategy of reducing hours or more severe pay cuts — management works under many constraints that sometimes make such actions difficult.  Also, as Cohen notes, Caterpillar executives have taken some cuts (but perhaps not enough).

I spent much of my early career studying organizational death and decline, and am working on the topic again a bit, especially in my current HBR article.  When I first studied declining and dying organizations in Michigan in the early 1980s, I thought that layoffs were misanthropic and any company that did not spread the pain equally was immoral.  But as I have seen the difficult and complex set of constraints that executives face in organizations of all kinds and sizes, I have learned to avoid pointing the morality finger at those leaders who do layoffs — there too many times when it puts the remaining business at risk or when because of immovable constraints (such as union contracts, work rules, or the nature of the work) cost-cutting short of layoffs is not feasible.  There are also other times when, to save the company, or at least a lot more jobs, a company has too many workers with the wrong skills, and although perhaps they should have realized it sooner, they get in a position where a restructuring is needed to change the composition of the workforce, and layoffs are the only viable path. There are even times when paying no dividend may end-up hurting the stock so badly that layoffs are a better path for the common good over the long haul. 

Layoffs do massive damage to people, I am not defending them as humane acts, but there are too many times when they are the lesser evil.  And if they are the best choice NOW because of PAST managerial incompetence, that is horrible, but life does not have a rewind feature.

I do agree with Mr. Cohen that some CEO's out there are not taking there fair share of the hit, although even then I worry that if we take the finger-pointing too far here that executives won't have the right incentives for managing organizations well on the both the way up and on the way down the economic cycle — and everyone will suffer as a result. 

Finally, perhaps it is my weird bias in life, but when people claim to be more ethical than others, it always makes me squirm because so often they end-up taking the same –or worse –actions than those they demonize.  As my father-in-law likes to say, "when people talk about ethics, I hide the good silverware."  I agree with many of Mr. Cohen's points, but I guess his moralistic tone bothers me above all else. Too many ethical and unselfish executives I know who have done layoffs have suffered mightily as they tried to balance efforts to keep their companies healthy — or at least alive — and to save as many jobs as possible in the wake of the current awful and largely unexpected mess.  Mr. Cohen is mighty quick to trumpet his own moral superiority when discussing executives who did not plan for these extremes or who believe that –for the good of the whole — layoffs rather than spreading the pain more evenly are the best strategy. 

I wonder, if he walked a mile in their shoes, would he be as ethical or as competent?   Morality, like management, is something that is a lot easier to talk about than to get right every time given the messiness and uncertainty of the world as it exists (rather than the world we wish it would be).

I wrote a post last week called "Of Baboons and Bosses" that described the source supporting my assertion that, in baboon troops, the other members of the troop glance at the alpha male two or three times a minute.  I talk about this in my new Harvard Business Review article on "How to Be a Good Boss in a Bad Economy" to help make the point that, when you are a boss, your people watch your moves very closely, especially when fear is in the air.

Julia Kirby over at Harvard Business Review online has added a lovely post on the baboon angle over at the editors blog, called Beware the Baboon Boss. I like Julia's opening:

If your workplace is like many these days, all eyes are on the boss.
The numbers aren't good, the senior team is huddling, and change is in
the air. Everyone studies their supervisor's every move and utterance
for clues to the danger ahead.

It turns out this isn't just a rational response to uncertainty; it's in our evolutionary biology.

Julia edited this and many of my past HBR articles, and perhaps more than anyone else, is responsible for the sequence of events that led me to write The No Asshole Rule, as she wrote me about five years ago to ask if I had an ideas for their annual breakthrough ideas. I said I had an idea, but they wouldn't publish it because it involved publishing a seven-word expletive that would not be acceptable in a respectable publication like HBR.  I also added that it probably was not a breakthrough idea.  Julia seemed undeterred and, although the essay was called "More Trouble Than They Are Worth," it contained the "A word' at least seven times.   The essay was published and it unleashed a deluge of responses — notably hundreds of emails — that led me to realize that the damage done by assholes in the workplace was something that people cared about a lot, and that touched many lives.  If Julia had not supported the idea, and urged me to send her text, the book never would have happened.