Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best...and Learn from the Worst

ISBN-13: 9780446556071

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Publication Date: 03-15-2012

Pages: 352

Product Dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering at the Stanford Engineering School. The No Asshole Rule was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller.

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Good Boss, Bad Boss

Business Plus

SECTION I

Setting the Stage

CHAPTER 1

The Right Mindset

Bosses matter. Bosses matter because most employees have bosses, are bosses, or play both roles. There are at least 21 million bosses in the United States, with estimates running as high as 38 million. Over 90 percent of U.S. employees have at least one boss, someone who presides over them in the local hierarchy. Bosses work in over fifty occupations, from top executives to military officers, to ship captains, to head cooks, to funeral directors. Bosses matter to everyone they oversee. But they matter most to immediate followers, those just beneath them in the local pecking order, who bosses guide and evaluate at close range, and who tangle with their virtues, foibles, and quirks day after day. The success or failure of every boss hinges on how well or how badly he or she navigates these vexing and all-too-human relationships.

Early in my career, I saw the difference a boss can make when my friend Corey Billington went to work for Hewlett-Packard. Corey joined the SPaM group, which uncovers and invents ways to improve HP’s supply chains. The group leader (I’ll call him Hector) wowed executives with big ideas and flashy presentations. Unfortunately, Hector spent hardly any time talking to his people and showed little interest in their work or careers. Hector ignored his team for long stretches and then—at seemingly random intervals—rushed in and demanded that everyone work on some urgent project. To paraphrase one SPaM member, “Every now and then, he would ride in on his white horse, lead a charge, kill the enemy, declare victory, and gallop away. Then we wouldn’t see him for a while.” People at SPaM got fed up with Hector’s antics and gave him low marks on the employee attitude survey. To management’s credit, they moved Hector to another job and made Corey the boss.

Corey used a different style. He listened to his people, worked with them to uncover their skills and hopes, and labored to land projects they would enjoy and would bolster SPaM’s reputation. The first years were tough. SPaM had trouble getting good work, an early project failed, Corey made a hiring mistake, and some executives questioned whether HP needed SPaM at all. But Corey persisted, helping his people develop new skills, learn from setbacks, and grow a group of loyal clients inside and—eventually—outside HP. Under Hector, SPaM’s consultants were paid much less than people who did similar work elsewhere and he made no effort to raise their pay. Corey fought for them, because “not getting paid based on our value sucked. I had to create a job family for my organization, which was no small amount of work.” Life slowly got better at SPaM. Within five years, they were doing high-profile work and were named “the best strategy group” by INFORMS (a prestigious academic society)—and about 15 percent of their work was done at “remarkably high rates” for clients outside HP.

Bosses Matter

The punch line of the SPaM story—that the difference between a bad boss and a good boss matters a lot—is bolstered by a pile of studies. For starters, having a good boss decreases your chances of getting a heart attack. A Swedish study that followed 3,122 men for ten years found that those with the best bosses (e.g., who were considerate, specified clear goals, and got changes implemented) suffered fewer heart attacks than those with bad bosses. Coauthor Anna Nyberg reported, “If you have a good boss, you have at least a 20 percent lower risk and if you stay with your boss for four years, you have at least a 39 percent lower risk.” This 2008 study fits a long-standing pattern. Researcher Robert Hogan found that whether a study was done in “1948, 1958, 1968, 1998,” in “London, Baltimore, Seattle, Honolulu,” among “postal workers, milk truck drivers, school teachers,” the results are pretty much identical: about 75 percent of the workforce reports that their immediate supervisor is the most stressful part of their job.

Bosses make the biggest difference when they wield direct and personal influence over followers, such as in teams and small organizations. To illustrate, Robert Keller examined 118 leaders of small (four- or five-person) project teams. Teams with stronger leaders (e.g., charismatic, intellectually stimulating, and set clear expectations) did better work, cranked it out faster, and were more cost-efficient. Keller’s five-year follow-up also showed that better bosses led teams that designed more profitable products and got them to market faster. Keller’s findings ring true to me. In the 1990s, my doctoral students and I observed numerous product development teams in action. The differences between the best- and the worst-led teams were striking. One team (at a now-defunct organization) spent six months talking and talking about what products to develop, and the boss discouraged members from drawing—let alone building—prototypes. She rewarded smart talk, not smart action. This poorly led team never developed a single prototype, even though my student following the team (an experienced product designer) believed he could build a working prototype of the gizmo the team was imagining in just a few hours. In contrast, a well-led team we studied elsewhere built a promising prototype during the first week of a project—which they assembled in about thirty minutes, right after generating the idea.

Sports teams are another setting where bosses work elbow to elbow with followers, and so it is not surprising that managing and coaching skills propel performance. Lawrence Kahn’s eighteen-year study of major league baseball teams shows that the best managers (with better win-loss records and more major league experience) consistently inspired both hitters and pitchers to perform above their career averages; in contrast, the worst managers stymied players so they performed below their career averages. Similarly, studies of National Basketball Association teams show that coaches with strong track records have pronounced positive effects on performance—an effect evident during their first year on the job. Basketball coaches can wield direct and timely influence because only five players are on the court at once and they can choreograph plays (and emotions they express to players) as the action unfolds just a few feet from where they sit or stand during games.

Bosses mattered massively in studies conducted by Gallup’s army of researchers over the past thirty years. Gallup’s surveys of over 100,000 employees in more than 2,500 diverse businesses show that “managers trump companies.” Employees’ immediate bosses have far more impact on engagement and performance than whether their companies are rated as great or lousy places to work. Related research shows that good bosses are especially crucial to employee performance in otherwise lousy workplaces. As leadership researcher Robert Hogan concludes from numerous careful studies, including the Gallup surveys, “people do not quit organizations, they quit bad bosses.” A 2007 Gallup survey of U.S. employees revealed that 24 percent would fire their boss if given the chance. Gallup concludes that crummy bosses are a primary reason that 56 percent of employees are “checked-out” and “sleepwalking through their days.” Worse yet, the most bitter employees (the “actively disengaged” 18 percent) undermine their coworkers’ accomplishments. Gallup has also found sweeping differences between organizations that have many great bosses versus many crummy bosses. In businesses where a higher proportion of employees report that their immediate bosses care about them, employee satisfaction, retention, and productivity are higher, and so is profitability.

Yet the leader of an organization still matters more than the other bosses. The top dog sets the tone for how his or her direct reports behave—which reverberates through the system. I worked with a large company where the CEO did almost all the talking in meetings, interrupted anyone who tried to get in a word edgewise, and aggressively silenced any underling who voiced a dissenting view. The executive vice presidents on his senior team complained bitterly (behind his back, of course) about the antics of their bossy boss. But I noticed that as soon as the CEO left the room, the most powerful EVP started acting exactly like his boss. Then, when that EVP departed, the next highest-ranking boss remaining in the room began mimicking the CEO’s overbearing style. It was fascinating to watch this behavior travel down the local pecking order.

The ways that senior leaders treat direct reports create numerous other ripple effects that travel down and across the hierarchy, shaping a company’s culture and performance. A study of sixty-six of the fastest growing new U.S. firms showed that the best CEOs blended a “top-down” directive approach with a more participative “shared leadership” approach in managing their top teams. This research showed that when CEOs used this one-two punch of directive and participative approaches to lead senior teams, their companies enjoyed superior performance—growing both revenue and numbers of personnel faster than similar firms. Other research confirms that how CEOs manage their top teams trigger reactions that affect the entire organization. For example, when CEOs are given (or seize) far more pay and power than their direct reports, such gaps are linked to weaker company performance—perhaps because domineering CEOs are prone to hubris, and their comparatively powerless underlings can’t stop their overbearing bosses from ramming through bad decisions.

Related research shows that when the CEO encourages other top team members to engage in constructive conflict, better decisions are made, which in turn fuels superior organizational performance. The same message emerges from historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s best seller Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had the courage to place three of his toughest opponents and critics in his cabinet after winning the 1860 election: William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates. Goodwin documents how Lincoln exercised the skills to soothe their massive egos, encourage constructive conflict, and foment cooperation among these and other strong-willed followers in ways that not only created effective team dynamics but, more crucially, generated decisions that benefitted the nation and helped keep it intact during the U.S. Civil War. Even in the largest organization or institution, how the boss at the top of the pecking order treats direct reports spawns ripple effects that can influence the system’s ultimate success or failure.

The upshot of these and so many other studies and stories is that bosses pack a wallop, especially on their direct reports. Bosses shape how people spend their days and whether they experience joy or despair, perform well or badly, or are healthy or sick. Unfortunately, there are hoards of mediocre and downright rotten bosses out there, and big gaps between the best and the worst. Watch and talk to people who answer to multiple bosses: you will see how the same employee doing the same work reacts to good and bad leaders. In the spring of 2009, I was waiting in line at my local Safeway to buy groceries. A check-out clerk got on the microphone and announced a five-minute Easter Seals fund-raising drive was starting; she encouraged donations for children with autism and other disabilities. This clerk also announced to the entire store that she was making this plea as a favor to Dave, her manager. When it was my turn to check out, as I handed her my donation, she said, “I hate most managers; I wouldn’t do a thing for them. But I love Dave and I will do whatever he asks.” I ran back to my car and wrote down her words because, for me, they brought the research to life: when she worked for Dave, she was delighted to do extra work, and her enthusiasm infected colleagues and customers. When she worked for a boss she hated, all that extra effort and good cheer evaporated.

The gaps revealed by these studies and stories persist even though most bosses want to be great and most employees want wonderful bosses, which raises the question: If you are a boss who wants to do great work, what can you do about it? Good Boss, Bad Boss is devoted to answering that question. This chapter shows how the best bosses think. If you are a boss, the beliefs and assumptions you hold about yourself, your work, and your people shape what you do every day and how you (and others) judge if things are going well or badly. The best bosses embrace five beliefs that are stepping stones to effective action.

1. Don’t Crush the Bird

Tommy Lasorda has served the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team as a player, a coach, or an executive since 1949, including a twenty-year stint as manager. Lasorda once said, “I believe that managing is like holding a dove in your hand. If you hold it too tightly, you kill it, but if you hold it too loosely, you lose it.” I call this Lasorda’s Law, as it captures the delicate balance that every good boss seeks between managing too much and too little.

Researchers Daniel Ames and Frank Flynn proposed a hypothesis reminiscent of Lasorda’s Law: managers who are too assertive will damage relationships with superiors, peers, and followers; but managers who are not assertive enough won’t press followers to achieve sufficiently tough goals. So Ames and Flynn speculated that the best bosses would be rated roughly average on terms like competitive, aggressive, passive, and submissive by followers. They asked 213 MBA students to rate their most recent boss’s assertiveness. As predicted, moderately assertive bosses were rated as most effective overall, most likely to succeed in the future, and as someone the MBAs would work with again. Ames and Flynn imply that a sign of a “perfectly assertive” boss is that followers may notice that they don’t notice their boss’s aggressiveness, competitiveness, passiveness, and submissiveness:

Like salt in a sauce, too much overwhelms the dish; too little is similarly distracting; but just the right amount allows the other flavors to dominate our experience. Just as food is rarely praised for being perfectly salted, leaders may somewhat infrequently be praised for being perfectly assertive.

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