Work Matters

Tag: Good Boss Bad Boss

  • Are You In Tune With Your People Or Living in a Fool’s Paradise? Three Diagnostic Questions for Every Boss

    The central idea in Good Boss, Bad Boss, the one that runs throughout the book and that links many things together, is the notion that the best bosses are in tune with what it feels like to work for them and deeply aware of the impact of their words and deeds on others.  And the worst bosses are out of touch and turn inward, focus on their own needs, and are oblivious to the needs of others.  As I have written in several places, including this post at Harvard Business Review and in the Financial Times early this week in an article on "Separating the Best CEOs from the Dolts",  being a boss (especially a powerful and successful one) places any human at considerable risk of living in a fool's paradise. Yet, as I also write in both places, there are also plenty of bosses out there with impressive self-awareness who find ways to avoid such "power poisoning" and the related malady of "success poisoning." 

    I was thinking about this a bit earlier in response to a set of question that Mark Fortier, my publicist for Good Boss, Bad Boss, asked me for the Q and A part of the publicity packet that he is putting together. He asked what are some of the first quick and easy steps a boss can take to evaluate whether he or she is a good or bad boss.  This question reminded me of a truly awful day long meeting I once had with senior leaders of a large company, and how the worst person in the room (and the highest status) grabbed all the talking time, constantly interrupted everyone, and as one of my academic said "Did you notice that he never asked questions?  He only made statements."   Between Mark's question and my memory of that experience, here is what I came-up with for the rest of this post.

    If you want to be a good boss, the
    big question you need to focus on is “what does it feel like to work for
    me.”   If you want to start getting some answers to this question,  bring someone in a meeting that you trust, and have them count
    three things, or even easier (although probably less accurate), evaluate
    yourself on these three questions:

    1.  How much do you talk compared to your
    followers?      This is to find out if you
    are talking too     much and listening too little.

    2. How often do you ignore, interrupt, or
    talk over people who are trying to make a point?      An occasional interruption is fine, but if
    your frequency is high it is a sign that you aren’t really listening and aren’t
    making a real effort to understand your people’s ideas and feelings.  And if you constantly run over people, it is
    a sign that you are not treating them with sufficient dignity and respect.

    3. When you speak, how often do you make
    statements versus ask questions    ? 
    Insensitive and     inner focused and unwise bosses have “strong opinions
    strongly held” and see themselves    (whether they realize it or not) as the
    smartest person in the room.  When you
    only make     statements (and do most of the talking) it is hard to learn a thing
    and you are not inviting your     followers to teach you things and challenge your
    assumptions.  Good bosses ask a lot of
    questions,     attend very carefully to both the words and the emotions they
    provoke, and change their opinions     and actions as a result.  

    Or to put it
    another way, the best bosses have and express strong opinions, but they also
    listen carefully to others, always consider that they might be wrong, and
    quickly update their opinions and actions when they realize they are
    wrong.  This approach to being a boss,
    which I describe as the attitude of wisdom in Good Boss, Bad Boss, is yet another advantage gained by bosses who
    learn to stay in tune with followers and other key people including peers,
    superiors, and customers or clients.

    P.S. Good Boss, Bad Boss is starting to roll into the stories already and will be shipping at Amazon and Barnes & Noble on September 7th or a couple days before.

  • Video and PowerPoints for Good Boss, Bad Boss Keynote at AlwaysOn

    Last week, I gave a keynote speech on Good Boss, Bad Boss at the AlwaysOn Conference at Stanford.  The folks at AlwaysOn videotaped the speech (and use a nice technology where you can follow the Powerpoints as well). You can find a short story by Andrew Bellay and a link to the video and Powerpoint slides here.  It was one of those speeches that was interesting because the audience seemed to start-out a bit disengaged but as time went on, I could feel them get into it.  (Alas, I have had the opposite experience plenty of times).

    P.S. I am introduced by the energetic and very smart Tina Seelig, who among other things things, is the Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and author of What I Wish I Knew When I was 20 — a great book that sold well here but is REALLY HOT in Japan.  I think it reached number #1 on the bestseller lists there.  Now, when I introduce Tina, I get to say, "She is Big in Japan."

  • 12 Things Good Bosses Believe is Still #1 at HBR: The Attraction of Lists?

    I am pleased, and a bit surprised that my now 10 day old post at Harvard Business Review on 12 Things The Good Bosses Believe is still the most read. It is nice to see that people resonate with these topics from Good Boss, Bad Boss and my other writings, but I think something else is going on. I was talking to one of the editors from HBR last week, one experienced in the ways of the web and blogs, and she commented on something I guess I knew but had never quite thought of before: People love lists — they attract attention on blogs and just about any other place in life. 

    As I thought back to posts I have written that have generated the strongest responses, many turn out to be lists.  Certainly people had a lot to say about my updated list of 17 Things I Believe and some of my most popular posts over the years include Places That Don't Tolerate Assholes and Tips for Surviving Workplace Assholes. More recently, my list of 10 Suspect Assumptions from HR  and my short list of the Dumbest Practices Used By U.S. Companies generated dozens of additional suggestions from readers.  For example, Wally Bock had some great ones to add to the list of dumb practices:

    We
    ignore the importance of supervision. We "promote" people into
    supervisory jobs without evaluating if they have a good shot at
    succeeding. Then we give them little to no training and even less
    support. Then we wonder why they don't succeed.

    We hope for magical leadership instead of developing good systems.
    When we do develop systems we favor the engineered and the technological
    over the human and common-sensical.

    So, what is it with lists?  This is a trick you see everywhere that people want to attract attention, from David Letterman's nightly top 10 list to Bill Maher's New Rules and on and on. Why do we
    love to read them, generate them, and add to others?

  • Management Consulting Circa 1960: Booz Produces 125 Feet Of Reports a Year

    Allen

    One of the doctoral students that I work with at the Center for Work, Technology and Organization, the irrepressible Isaac Waisberg, is working on a fascinating dissertation on what management consultants do.  Yesterday, he successfully defended his dissertation proposal and I am looking forward to a great dissertation from him.  Being a thorough researcher, Isaac has been meticulously studying the history of management consulting. In the process, he dug up this wonderful BusinessWeek cover story from 1960.  Note the 1960 stamps from the Stanford library.  The text says, essentially, that James Allen of Booz, Allen & Hamilton leads a firm that produces 125 feet of management reports a year — and I guess the picture provides the proof.

    Of course, the consulting business has changed a lot in the past 50 years.  It has grown massively and I am sure that Booz would be quick to argue that they do a lot more than produce reports (that was probably true then as well).  I also suspect the current metric would be PowerPoint decks per year at many firms.  But in other ways, the key question remains the same and one that drove us to write The Knowing-Doing Gap and is also the subject a chapter in Good Boss, Bad Boss: Are all those reports and the advice they contain a substitute for action or an impetus to action?

  • The Dangers of a Harried Boss

    The always insightful Wally Bock made a great comment in response to my last post, where I asked about the conditions under which performance evaluations actually seemed to work.  Wally, drawing on his research on effective versus ineffective supervisors, reported (in part):

    The result
    was that when time came for the official, on-the-company-form,
    performance review, their sessions were very different from their
    less-effective peers. Top performing supervisors took more than three
    times as long for the session.

    Wally's comment got me thinking because, as I thought about the difference between good and bad bosses, it made me realize that — although good bosses are concerned about using their time well, and especially, making sure not to waste their people's time — that they tend to think and act as if it is more important to do things as well as possible than to do things as quickly as possible.  Indeed, some of the work bosses I can think of always seemed to be focused on finishing whatever they are doing at the moment so they can get on to the next thing.  The result, unfortunately, is that they spend their days rushing around, doing one thing after another badly. 

  • When Do Performance Evaluations Actually Work?

    A couple years back, I wondered aloud here if performance evaluations ought to be eliminated.   This theme has been taken-up with a vengeance by Sam Culbert in his Wall Street Journal article and now his book Get Rid of the Performance Review.  I was thinking about this topic again because Tara Parker-Pope raised the question in her New York Times health blog called "Well" in a post called Time to Review Workplace Reviews?  

    Tara mentions Sam's book and suggests that bad performance reviews may be so distressing that they can damage physical and mental health, as well as productivity.   I am only person mentioned in the article who comes close to defending reviews, but am quoted as saying:  “In the typical case, it’s done so badly it’s better not to do it at
    all.”  I guess I still agree with my quote, but while I think that most performance reviews suck, there are a least a couple companies out there that do them effectively, so perhaps it is going too far to say they should all be eliminated.

    One company  that I know pretty well (the NDA I signed forbids me from mentioning their name) does such a good job of using reviews for both developmental and evaluation purposes, that most people I know who work there report the system is remarkably fair and that it has helped them improve their weak spots (the main complaint is how much effort it takes, but most employees report it is worth the trouble).  And perhaps the ultimate test is that even the people who get negative reviews there and are encouraged to leave the place generally report that it is an excellent and well-managed process.  Now, this company might be as rare as hen's teeth (this is the first time I have ever used this phrase in writing or speaking in my life).  And even in this exemplary company, I have met a few people who complain about the system.

    Yet this and other exceptions raise interesting questions about lessons that we might learn from such "positive outliers," as they call them in medical research and elsewhere:

    1.  Have you been part of a performance evaluation system that actually works?

    2. If so, why did it work? 

    I would be most curious to hear some success stories, given all the failure stories I hear (just look at the 150 or so comments following Tara's post… most are pretty negative…although I am intrigued by the person who reports that being in a place with no performance reviews is even more stressful because people never know where they stand).

    P.S. I also wanted to thank Tara for raising the additional issue of how distressing a bad boss can be and giving a nice plug to Good Boss, Bad Boss at the end of the post.  I am delighted to have a book that The New York Times will actually mention by name, unlike The No Asshole Rule (even though they accepted this advertisement, they called it The No ******* Rule on their bestseller list, and in most stories, they simply say that I wrote a book on bullying and don't list any name).  Although I confess that this (apparently) new found respectability at The Times makes me a bit uncomfortable, as I am always weirdly happy when people from established institutions are offended by my actions. I know it is not a very mature reaction for a 56 year-old professor, but such vestiges of my youth persist.