GOOD BOSS BAD BOSS: SERVE AS A HUMAN SHIELD

GOOD BOSS BAD BOSS

How to be the Best… and Learn from the Worst

ROBERT I SUTTON, PhD

SECTION II

WHAT THE BEST BOSSES DO

 

CHAPTER 6: SERVE AS A HUMAN SHIELD

The best bosses let the workers do their work.  They protect their people from red tape, meddlesome executives, nosy visitors, unnecessary meetings, and a host of other insults, intrusions, and time wasters.  A good boss takes pride in serving as a human shield, absorbing and deflecting heat from superiors and customers.

A big part of the job is shielding followers from unnecessary and destructive worries, hassles, procedures, ingredients and intruders and idiots of every stripes.

Great bosses avoid burdening their people.  They invent, borrow, and implement ways to reduce the mental and emotional load.  Meetings are notorious time and energy suckers.  Too many bosses run them in ways that disrespect people’s time and dignity.

Using arrival time (arriving late) to display and grab power is an ancient trick.  A related move is to insist that people stay beyond the scheduled ending time, making them late for other meetings or friends and families.  Sometimes staying late is necessary because of a pressing deadline.

If you want your people to have more time to do work, be treated with dignity, and be proud to work for you, start and end meetings on time.  You can glean some prestige from having productive and grateful followers.  Don’t feel compelled to use all the scheduled meeting time if you can wrap up early.  Rather than automatically scheduling a meeting, ask yourself if you really need it.  The key lesson is that the best bosses keep hunting for little ways to use everyone’s time and energy more efficiently and respectfully.

Good bosses doggedly protect followers from outsiders.  Work is more fragmented now because emails and instant messages mean we are bombarded with important and more often enticing but trivial interruptions from anywhere in the world at any time.  A skilled boss shields his or her people by intercepting and dealing with many messages, problems, people and assignments so the people can focus on their work.  Research shows that it takes people an average of 25 minutes to recover from an interruption and return to the task they had been working on – which happens because interruption destroy their train of thoughts and divert attention to other tasks.  Bosses also protect the people’s time by buffering them from organizational practices that are annoying and excessively burdensome.

Wise bosses also remind themselves and their people that orders and procedures imposed from on high that seem idiotic occasionally actually turn out to be useful and necessary.  Good bosses dig into facts, follow the fate of fellow bosses who have implemented the apparently crummy ideas before deciding whether to adopt or resist a new directive.

The best bosses find the sweet spot between acting like spineless whims who always do as they are told versus insubordinate rabble-rousers who challenge and ignore every order and standard operating procedures.  Good bosses try to cooperate with supervisors and do what is best for their organizations.  Sometimes a boss can avoid open disobedience by simply ignoring a supervisor’s idiocy and just doing what is best.

“Anything worth doing is worth doing well.”  There are times when smart bosses do a lousy or half-assed job on purpose.  Good bosses focus their attention, and their people efforts on small number of things that matter most.  The best bosses learn when they can and should ignore the least important demands from others.

Good bosses protect their people from destructive and despised outsiders, from enemies up the chain (especially bosses who undermine their chargers ability to get work done and make them miserable).  Remember, it is wiser to be subtle and civilized, but fight for your people just as hard.

When you are the boss, part of your job is to protect your people when they screw up.  It is painful but often effective.  Bosses who take the heat for their people build loyalty.  People need to feel safe to learn new things, take risks and act without undue fear.  Figure out what you learned so you can avoid making the mistake again, announce and implement the resulting lessons, and in doing so reinforce beliefs that you control the fare of your team or organization.

to be continued....