Work Matters

Tag: Boss

  • Chile’s President to Luis Urzua: “You acted like a good boss”

    As readers of Work Matters know, like so many of us, I am quite obsessed with the (now) feel-good story about the trapped miners and their rescue.  I was taken with Luis Urzua's leadership, especially during the first couple of weeks when they were trapped with little food and no knowledge of the efforts being made to rescue them.  I love what the President said to Luis, of course, because I am quite focused on good and bad bosses these days — given that is what my new book is about.  Here is the story and the exchange was reported as follows:

    "A 70-day shift is a very long shift," said Mr. Urzua, standing before Chilean President Sebastien Pinera to symbolically hand over his leadership. "The first days were very difficult." Mr. Pinera told the miner: "You acted like a good boss. I receive your shift."

    Lovely, isn't it?

    I had written a post in early September called "Luis Urzua and the Trapped Miners: A Good Boss, Performance, and Humanity," which  considered the reasons that he appeared to be such a competent and compassionate leader.  That post emphasized how he was a good boss because he understood how to be "perfectly assertive,had  grit, used the power of small wins, understood how to stay "in tune" with the emotional needs of his people, and he "had their backs."   As the stories have been been emerging about what Urzua did in those scary early days, another theme emerges, a set of lessons, that are also worth mentioning.  As I write in Good Boss, Bad Boss and also in my HBR article on being a good boss in a bad economy,  when people are facing stress, fear, and uncertainty of any kind, the "recipe" that good leaders follow reflects four main ingredients:

    1. Prediction.  In crisis situations, the big things — like whether the rescue will happen or the next round of layoffs will cost you your job — are often impossible to forecast.  But a useful palliative is create as much predictability in terms of the small things — when meals occur, what they will be, and other little details of life. You could see with how Urzua rationed the food in the early scary days and in how they used the lights underground — including the headlights of trucks — to simulate 12 hours "days." 

    2. Understanding.  Even when people can't change elements that cause distress, understanding why bad things have happened and the implications for what people should do know is very important.  This not only helps people understand what to do, it gives them a sense of purpose.  Urzua and his team were kept apprised of the details of the three rescuse attempts and instructed what the implications were for how they could themselves and why.

    3. Control.  Along related lines, even when people can't influence the final outcome — including bad ones (unlike the miners). when there are elements of their lives they can have some "Mastery" over, it has a big impact.  You could see it in their efforts to stay in physical shape (I love the story about the miner who ran miles each day), and even in Luis Urzua's expressions of concerned that, although they had cleaned up things as well as possible before leaving the cave, there was a lot grabage that they couldn't get rid of.  Also, the efforts of 62 year old Mario Gomez as the group's spirital guide was important — he organized a small chapel, led the men in prayer, and counseled them about their fears and other emotional issue— both provided a way to introduce predictability in their lives and provided a way they could take control over their time. 

    4. Compassion.  The compassion that Urzua conveyed for his men was evident in his concern for them, and also the concern for others.  He was completely devoted to their safety, physical health, and well-being — as all the reports show.  And I loved that he was the last miner out… it reminded me of the old saying "officers eat least."   I would be very curious to know the more micro-details of his demeanor during the ordeal. The reports thus far is that he was very calm, which is the best possible emotion for a leader to convey and spread during scary times.

    I should also note that prediction, understanding, control, and compassion isn't just a recipe for crises, following these four guidelines can help bosses do a better job of all sorts of mundane but important things, especially when doing management "dirty work" like dealing with employees who are poor performers or are behaving in destructive ways.

    P.S. I am scheduled to be on CNN International tonight to talk about this kind of stuff.  I did get on CNN yesterday, but only for a few minutes.  PRI's The World also aired a fairly detailed interview that Lisa Mullins did with me.  You can download the MP3 of the episode here — the interview comes about 9 minutes in. As I said yesterday, Lisa is a great interviewer.

     

     

  • Good Boss, Bad Boss On New York Times Bestseller List

    We're Number 9! That is, Good Boss, Bad Boss is #9 on The New York Times "Advice, How-To, and Miscellaneous" list, which will be published on Sunday, September 26th.  Don't ask me why they release this so far in advance, I don't understand it — indeed, even after five books, I remain bewildered by the publishing industry. I have a zillion people to thank, but for this post, I will stick to my wife, Marina Park, to whom the book is dedicated to; Marina was not only was enormously supportive while I wrote it, she also taught me much about being a boss because while I mostly just study and write about the craft, she has been practicing it for a long time.  In addition, I was pleased to learn that the new paperback of The No Asshole Rule is #15 on the "extended" paperback bestseller list.  "Extended" means they only list the top 10 in the newspaper, but add five more online and in the pdfs they send around.  Here is the hardcover list.. sorry it is a little awkward looking, but I am not great at this cropping thing!

    Bsl_092610_Page_6

  • Do You Have Their Backs? Or Just Your Own?

    One of the chapters in Good Boss, Bad Boss is called "Serve as a Human Shield" and it argues — and shows how — the best bosses protect their people from idiots and idiocy of every stripe, from overly nosy executives and visitors, to moronic procedures, to meetings that run too long or never should have been held in the first place, and a host of other intrusions, distractions, and needless sources of friction that make it harder to do their work and to sustain good mental health.   I have a Harvard Business Review article coming out in fall that digs into this question, and today, at HBR.org, I posted the 5th point on my list of 12 Things Good Bosses Believe.  It is called: Do You Have Their Backs?  Or Just Your Own?  Here is a taste:

    Robert Townsend might be the poster child for the kind of boss that
    provides tangible cover to his team. He tends to be known at this point
    for having written the most outrageous management book ever published, Up
    the Organization    . It's a collection of 150 or so ruminations
    on business life that are delightful, irreverent, and sometimes
    politically incorrect — all penned in an era before blogs were invented
    and such things were called short essays. But Townsend gleaned his
    insights from his succession of management jobs, notably as CEO of Avis
    Rent-a-car, where he was a widely loved wildman. In contrast to the
    usual hollow rhetoric, he never left any doubt that the people of his
    organizations came first, and that his job as a boss was to serve as
    defender and warrior on their behalf. Once, for example, he fought off a
    request from a powerful Avis board member, National Broadcasting
    Company founder David Sarnoff (aka
    "The General"), that would have been a time sink for his staff. Sarnoff
    couldn't believe there was no accurate tally of all the cars that Avis
    owned, and demanded that one be produced — a task that would have taken
    weeks. In that kind of situation, any of us can imagine rolling our
    eyes, but in a choose-your-battles world, how many of us would have
    refused? Townsend did, because he knew his people had more important
    work to do. "If I don't need it to run the company," he told Sarnoff,
    "you sure as hell don't need that information as an outside director."

    Even more telling, for me, was the time Townsend was stopped in the
    hall by his own boss. This was earlier in his career, at American
    Express, and the firm's Chairman wanted to express his pleasure with a
    "good bond swap" by Townsend's group. Again, how would most people use
    that face time? In Townsend's case, it wasn't to take credit and jockey
    for his next promotion. He replied that he didn't even know about the
    swap, and complained colorfully about how hard it was to get resources
    and better pay for the undervalued people doing such magnificent work.
    He chose to cover their backs, in other words, rather than climb over
    them.

    This topic of bosses as "human shields" is one I have discussed here before a bit (see here and here), but I dig into in much more detail at HBR.org than in the past.  Let me know what you think, either here or there, as I am always interested in the means that good bosses use to shield their people so they can do good work and do it with dignity.

  • Do You Learn More from Working for a Bad Boss than a Good Boss?

    Bad bosses suck, as I often document here.  Of course, you knew that anyway — many of you know it all too well from first hand experience.  But perhaps they do more good than I have given them credit for in the past. Carol Bartz, the feisty, tough, unusually plain-speaking CEO of Yahoo! (see this earlier post or this story), makes an intriguing point about bad bosses in today's New York Times that is weirdly related to my recent post On Noticing That You Don't Notice. Here is the link to the interview, and the argument I found especially intriguing:

    I also think people should understand that they will learn more from
    a bad manager than a good manager. They tend to get into a cycle where
    they’re so frustrated that they aren’t
    paying attention actually to what’s happening to them. When you have a
    good manager things go so well that you don’t even know why it’s going
    well because it just feels fine.

    When you have a bad manager
    you have to look at what’s irritating you and say: “Would I do that?
    Would I make those choices? Would I talk to me that way? How would I do
    this?”

    There are several elements of this comment that made me stop and think. The first follows from my post on not noticing, as the implication is that when things are going great, you don't engage in very deep cognition about them, because little is happening to give you pause or upset you. In fact, this point is consistent with research on cognition and emotion suggesting that people in good moods do not engage in as much mindfulness,deep thought, or self-doubt as people in bad moods. 

    The second thing that intrigues me is as I thought about some of the more interesting bosses I've been reading about and communicating with, I've ran into quite a few who make a related argument.  Perhaps most famous is the late Robert Townsend, author of the still amazing Up the Organization, who argued repeatedly that he learned how to be a good boss at American Express because his bosses were so bad and the company was so badly ran that he learned what not to do — very close to Bartz's point.  Even closer is an amazing comment I posted here a couple years ago from a surgeon, who during his residency at a prestigious hospital, got together with  fellow residents every week to vote on the senior or "attending" surgeon who most deserved the "asshole of the week" award — and wrote in a journal that had been passed down from generation to generation of residents. The great thing about this story is that he his fellow residents all vowed not to be assholes when they became more senior, and all — who now hold prestigious appointments through the country — have all worked to try to keep that vow.

    Now, as much as I love Bartz's thought process, I do disagree with her that when people have a lousy boss and want to escape, she tells them " You have to deal with what you’re dealt. Otherwise you’re going to run from something and not to something. And you should never run from something."

    That bugged me for two reasons.  The first is that, if these complaints are about a lousy boss who reports to Carol, it is her job to do something about it, not to just tell the victims to suck it up and just deal with it.  Indeed, there is so much research showing the damage that lousy bosses do to productivity, commitment, and well-being that Carol or any other boss who learns of a horrible boss below them in the pecking order owes it to their company to deal with it. The "victims" may be learning more, but those lessons come at a high price that hurts both organization's and people.

    The second thing that bugs me is from the victim's perspective, which is that there is so much evidence that bad bosses do damage (recall this Swedish study on heart attacks), that if you care about your physical and mental health — and those of the people you come in contact with, your friends, lovers, children, and so on — that you should escape as soon as you possibly can.

    Clearly, I don't agree with Bartz about everything, but I admire her enormously because she is so thoughtful and so straightforward, a refreshing voice in a world where too many people are afraid to express strong opinions.

    This all raises a great question: What is the most important thing you ever learned NOT TO DO from working for a bad boss?

    P.S. One another thing I agree with Bartz about — in fact a headline of the article — is that perhaps we ought to get rid of annual performance reviews, as there is good reason to believe that they do more harm than good, as I blogged about here and this Wall Street Journal article by Sam Culbert argues. 

    UPDATE: I always appreciate the quality and range of comments that readers make, but in this case, they are even better than usual.  I suggest that you read them carefully.  This post has been up less then a day, so I expect even more good stuff and to change my opinion again over the coming days.  But my initial reaction to the comments is that I (and certainly Bartz) should have emphasized the dangers of bad bosses even more, the damage they do to people and as at least one comment implies, the danger that — just as abusive parents tend to produce abusive children –  the odds are high that bad bosses will teach their followers to be bad bosses like them.  Also, by just talking to people who have survived and learned from bad bosses, and become bosses themselves, we blind ourselves to all the able people who have left companies and occupations because they had the sense to leave, were so damaged that they had to leave, or worse yet, became lousy bosses someplace else applying what they learned — and after doing a lot of damage — got fired and demoted. Yes, there are examples of the opposite effect, of people who have become great bosses by doing the opposite of past lousy bosses, but the psychological forces of imitation, learning, and identification with authority figures all push people in the opposite direction.  Perhaps the best way to learn for bad bosses is to watch and study other people's bad bosses — that way you get the learning without the damage and risk of imitating their incompetent and nasty ways.