Who's really the problem? The boss or the employee?
choke a horse. "Fixing the boss" assumes that the boss is the problem.
As a recovering Idiot Boss (iBoss), I confess that I have been the idiot husband, the idiot teacher, the idiot student, the idiot boss, and--yes--the idiot employee.
I've been an equal-opportunity aggravation to more people than I care to
count. So I hesitate to throw stones at bosses until they are proven
guilty. But in western civilization, bosses are assumed to be guilty
until proven innocent--so stones tend to fly with every boss-sighting.
In a culture where we are socialized from early childhood to rebel
against authority, it's hard to accept that rebellion is not necessarily
the most effective response to not having our expectations met. That's
the behavior we tend to most frequently associate with authority
figures; they stand between us and the expectation we have for something
they never promised us in the first place.
We Americans have rebellion in our DNA. The United States was born by
kicking its mother country out. We grew up listening to our parents
complain about their bosses. We were raised on songs like "Take this Job
and Shove It" and "I've Been Workin' on the Railroad" (which, if you
look it up on Wikipedia, is not the most pleasant story).
We go to movies like Nine-to-five, Office Space, or Horrible Bosses,
and munch popcorn while we watch bosses "get what's coming to them,"
and laugh at their pain. We work all day in offices that we hate, then
go home and watch reruns of The Office.
After listening to our parents kvetch about their bosses, we go to
school and embark on a life-long journey of rebellion which begins with
declaring war on our parents, our teachers, and our school
administrators. When they won't allow us to stay in school any longer,
we finally get jobs and spend the rest of our working lives taking our
unresolved adolescent rebellion issues out on the most visible,
available, and socially-acceptable target: The Boss.
Just when you thought it was safe to attack anyone and anything with
institutional authority and thus invoke your hard-earned iconoclasm
(natural hatred for authority), along comes Dr. Hoover saying, "Don't
screw up your long-term options." What I mean by "long-term options" is
this: the sooner you can stop assuming the boss is the problem, the
sooner you might repurpose that anger and become a more nimble, agile,
and fluid navigator of complex corporate waters.
Why would becoming a more nimble, agile, and fluid navigator of complex
corporate waters be a good thing? Because while everybody else is
bashing their bosses, you could be sailing to the head of the pack, top
of the heap, star of the show, penthouse suite. You should want to hit
the executive floor eventually, and be granted all of that executive
authority--if, for no other reason, so you can be a good and gracious
boss who bestows good things on the employee population.
You'll never become Glenda the Good Witch of the office by boss-bashing.
And never forget that the one thing all the bad bosses you ever had
have in common...is you. So ask yourself: Am I truly a victim of my boss's cluelessness, or am I a volunteer?
In any dysfunctional workplace relationship, there are at least four
factors in play. (Okay, there are more likely a million, but we'll just
deal with four.) We'll assume because you chose to read this article
that your boss faces some issues vis-à-vis being an effective leader.
That, as they say in Vegas, is a "safe bet." That means that some part
of the problem is your boss.
But if you stop there, you're missing a big piece of the truth--and therefore, any possible solution to the real problem: How to fix the problem you are having with your boss.
To some degree, you are part of this problem. Again, do your own math,
but don't give yourself a hall pass and expect to come up with a real
solution.
Then consider circumstances and systems. Your luck may have gone south
for the winter, and/or the whole system you're operating in might be
broken; both of which will make it look it look like your boss is just
unbearable. But before you reach for your boss bat, try this formula:
Subtract the Dysfunctional Employee (you) from the Dysfunctional Boss
Factor. From that number, subtract the sum of the Bum Luck Factor and
the Busted System Factor. How bad does it look now?
I don't know what values you ascribed to the four primary factors, but
the mathematical result should mitigate your anti-authority emotional
coefficient to some degree. If everything is equally bad, you might be
caught in the perfect storm where the poison pill is your only hope.
Doesn't that sound silly? Really? Before you approach every workplace
relationship with the assumption that the boss needs to be fixed, which
will poison your working environment, make it a mutual-sum game. If the
total score is 100, how many numbers are in each of the four circles?
Chart: John Hoover
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