How to be a good boss

What Do Bosses Actually Do?

Given my line of work, I get asked by almost everyone I meet how to be a better boss/manager/leader. I get questions from the people who worked for me, the CEOs I coached, the people who attended a class I taught, or a talk I gave. Questions also come from the harried parent sitting next to me at the school play, the contractor who is frustrated when his crew doesn’t show up on time; the nurse who’s just been promoted to supervisor, the business executive who’s speaking with exaggerated patience into his cell phone as we board a plane, snaps it shut, and asks nobody in particular, “Why did I hire that goddamn moron?”; the friend still haunted by the expression on the face of an employee whom she laid off years ago. Regardless of who asks the questions, they tend to reveal an underlying anxiety: many people feel they aren’t as good at management as they are at the “real” part of the job. Often, they fear they are failing the people who report to them.

While I hate to see this kind of stress, I find these conversations productive because I know I can help. By the end of these talks, people feel much more confident that they can be a great boss.

There's often a funny preamble to the questions I get, because most people don't like the words for their role: boss evokes injustice, manager sounds bureaucratic, leader sounds self-aggrandizing.

I prefer the word boss because the distinctions between leadership and management tend to define leaders as BSers who don't actually do anything and managers as petty executors. Also, there's a problematic hierarchical difference implied in the two words, as if leaders no longer have to manage when they achieve a certain level of success, and brand-new managers don't have to lead.

Richard Tedlow's biography of Andy Grove, Intel's legendary CEO, asserts that management and leadership are like forehand and backhand.

You have to be good at both to win.

Having dispensed with semantics, the next question is often very basic:

What do bosses, managers, and leaders do?

Go to meetings? Send emails? Tell people what to do? Dream up strategies and expect other people to execute them?

It's tempting to suspect them of doing a whole lot of nothing.

Ultimately, though, bosses are responsible for results. They achieve these results not by doing all the work themselves but by guiding the people on their teams.

Bosses guide a team to achieve results.

The questions I get asked next are clustered around three areas of responsibility that managers do have:

1. Guidance

    

2. Team-building

    

3. Results

Guidance

Guidance is often called “feedback.” People dread feedback— both the praise, which can feel patronizing, and especially the criticism. 

What if the person gets defensive? Starts to yell? Threatens to sue? Bursts into tears? What if the person refuses to understand the criticism, or can’t figure out what to do to fix the prob lem? What if there isn’t any simple way to fix the problem?

What should a boss say then? 

But it’s no better when the problem is really simple and obvious. 

Why doesn’t the person already know it’s a problem? Do I actually have to say it? Am I too nice? Am I too mean? 

All these questions loom so large that people often forget they need to solicit guidance from others, and encourage it between them.

Team-Building

Building a cohesive team means figuring out the right people for the right roles: hiring, firing, promoting. But once you’ve got the right people in the right jobs, how do you keep them motivated? 

Particularly in Silicon Valley, the questions sound like this: why does everyone always want the next job when they haven’t even mastered the job they have yet? Why do millennials expect their career to come with instructions like a Lego set? Why do people leave the team as soon as they get up to speed? Why do the wheels keep coming off the bus? Why won’t everyone just do their job and let me do mine?

Results

Many managers are perpetually frustrated that it seems harder than it should be to get things done. We just doubled the size of the team, but the results are not twice as good. In fact, they are worse. What happened? 

Sometimes things move too slowly: the people who work for me would debate forever if I let them. Why can’t they make a decision? 

But other times things move too fast: we missed our deadline because the team was totally unwilling to do a little planning— they insisted on just firing willy-nilly, no ready, no aim! Why can’t they think before they act? 

Or they seem to be on autopilot: they are doing exactly the same thing this quarter that they did last quarter, and they failed last quarter. Why do they expect the results to be different? 

Guidance, team, and results: these are the responsibilities of any boss.

This is equally true for anyone who manages people— CEOs, middle managers, and first-time leaders. CEOs may have broader problems to deal with, but they still have to work with other human beings, with all the quirks and skills and weaknesses just as apparent and relevant to their success in the C-Suite as when they got their very first management role. It’s natural that managers who wonder whether they are doing right by the people who report to them want to ask me about these three topics.