Why Are Bosses So Bad?
great post from vache folle:
Every boss I have ever had has been a terrible manager. I have never met anyone who praises his boss (at least when he is not actively engaged in sycophancy), and I am pretty sure that I have been more or less a failure at bossing whenever I was put in charge of people. With experience, I think that I got better over the years and that I did this by simply doing less. Whenever I left productive people alone, they became even more productive. [...]I often think of working at McDonald’s back in the 1970s when ordering a hamburger with no pickle would bring the whole hamburger distribution system almost to its knees. Back then, we took orders and added up bills with a pencil on a pad, so those of us with good mental arithmetic skills were in high demand and could make management cut us some minimal slack. Still, the whole process was completely dehumanized, and management was evidently under the impression that job satisfaction was a form of employee theft.
ha! so true about good bosses leaving you alone. the only good boss i ever had in the traditional business world was a woman i often wouldn’t see for days or weeks. she had supreme confidence in me, and i honored that confidence with work that would make her look good. and if i ever had a problem with office politics or the like, it would disappear with a word to her. was very sorry to see her go. (she left because she got nowhere near the level of support from her boss, a laughably spineless male tool, that she gave me and the others in our department.)
Another problem inherent in bossing is that anyone who wants to be a boss in a hierarchical organization is probably already a power hungry prick. Otherwise, he would find the whole bossing idea distasteful. If he is at all a reluctant boss, his higher boss will see any non-bossiness as evidence of weakness and lax management. If his unorthodox non-bossing yields results, the higher bosses will have to find a way to sabotage this. [...]
i was always astounded when i would see in real life the archetypical idea snatching of some bosses. one dude tried to steal my ideas so often in meetings that even other people were busting him on it. as tired a joke as it is in movies and sitcoms, there really are people who will hear you posit a solution, wait a couple of minutes, and then announce that they’ve a brilliant idea — yours theirs — sometimes rephrased, but just as often not.
July 28th, 2005 at 20:40
I just lost my team leader. She wasn’t really my boss, but her job was to organize my workload. She did an excellent job at that, while mostly leaving me alone to do the work. She would occasionally notice a large stack of task folders on my desk and take it away, get rid of the ones that were done or belonged to somebody else, and bring me back a much-reduced pile. She let me do the programming work I’m good at and took care of the organizational stuff that I don’t do so well. I was sad to see her go.