Zen-ish Thoughts About Crappy Bosses

An absence of humility kills productivity and innovation, but is common among highly successful people. Most people transition into management based on technical merit, not management ability, and get no training or mentoring. Most people rise in management based on politics, and on accomplishments achieved despite being a bad manager, and are unfit to manage or to provide management mentoring.

Highly placed managers and hands-on leads very frequently shut down creativity, ownership, and morale on their teams, principally by lacking humility. In the best case, they got to a high position because they are more effective at work than others, and this presumably rests on a combination of domain knowledge, clear thinking, and good judgment. (This is not always the case! It is sometimes much more a matter of bullying and manipulation, or unfathomable luck, but that is a topic for different article.)

If we over-simplify this to "they are smarter than everyone else", as they often do in their own minds, it is easy to understand their disinterest in other people's ideas, and their impatience for their own ideas to be put into action by others without question. In my observation, this is how most "leaders" operate in the real world, and however understandable it maybe, it means they are crappy leaders.

Good leaders understand that they are leading people, not just optimizing spreadsheets. People need to be engaged, not told to stop thinking independently. People need to make mistakes, and learn, and not be punished for taking a reasonable risk that didn't happen to work out as desired. People need the chance to do something in line with how they think, not how the boss thinks, and yet meet with similar or more success than the boss' approach would have. People need to feel that they are accomplishing things, and growing, and this is visible to and valued by others.

Steve Jobs famously said that it makes no sense to hire the smartest people you can find and then tell them what to do, but then he was also famous for being a total jerk and insisting that everything be done exactly how he wanted it done. In an interview, when asked how he handled it when a subordinate disagreed with him he said that he just repeats himself until they get it! He didn't seem to have any idea that this was not the way to follow his own advice.

If you want to get the most out of people, if you want them to add value beyond being flesh-based robots, you have to let them. Indeed, you have to encourage them, and you need to know the difference between actual encouragement and calling it encouragement when you aggressively challenge them.

You have to purposely give them learning opportunities. You have to not punish reasonable learning experiences. You have to praise intelligent experimentation at group or company meetings, and show that we can harvest valuable learnings when things don't go as desired – what part did go well, did discover something new, did this effort open a new line of investigation?

If you are a manager at any level, or a lead at any level, or simply an influential person at any level, enable great contributions from as many team members as possible instead of having your one brain be the bottleneck for every decision, instead of having just one way of thinking available to address a diverse set of challenges.

If you are "worker bee" who is literally being turned off and made into a robot by someone else, consider your options. I'd like to start with "get another job", but this problem is so common that you will probably just encounter it again on the new job, and then your resume looks bad because you are a "job hopper", while the person who is the real problem carries on untroubled and unchanging.

"Wouldn't it be better anyway to discuss this with the robot maker?" you might ask. Maybe, but if someone is so not-attuned to the people they work with, chances of you getting through to them on this point in a discussion are vanishingly small.

I recommend that you get great results in ways that they have not dictated, but very carefully. Only do this on things not on their radar, and then bring them to the boss's or lead's attention. Then, when they task you with something with similar characteristics, "accidentally", enthusiastically cut them off before they tell you how to do it. Show how excited you are that you can leverage what you did on that other bit of work on this more important bit of work. Lots of people will still shut you down hard and tell you to do it their way instead of your way. If that is the usual response, then you really should consider finding a new job. Some few people will gradually see you as someone they can trust to think for themselves.