Slashdot Mirror
The Fine Art of 'Boss Science'
BoredStiff writes "NYMag has up an article that explores Boss Science and the minds of American corporate leaders. In the real world, bosses are known to suffer from a long list of social pathologies: naked aggression, credit hogging, micromanaging, bullying, you name it. Leadership research shows that subtle nasty moves like glaring and condescending comments, explicit moves like insults or put-downs, and even physical intimidation can be effective paths to power. Research also shows that employees tend to see the jerk as boss material. The article goes on to discuss some of the science bosses apply to making an operation run smoothly: 'A researcher reported that one law firm deconstructs its HR needs by personality traits. It insists on extremely bright employees who are also extremely insecure. 'They want them to think that working really hard matters,' he explains. Through this prism, personality types can even be mixed and matched to make a team function more efficiently.'"
Or! You can find the best talent there is, treat your employees with respect, compensate them fairly (or very well if they are particularly valuable) and work from the perspective that a place of work is a place of education where people will gather skills and hopefully work to the best of their ability. The danger of this is that they will not stay because they are hired away, but honestly if your employees are not being recruited by everyone else out there, they are not the best and brightest.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Boss Science reminds me of another acronym.. can't seem to remember it, but I'm sure it had something to do with upper management..
Blerg.
"employees tend to see the jerk as boss material."
And voters tend to see the jerk as presidential material.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
It insists on extremely bright employees who are also extremely insecure. 'They want them to think that working really hard matters,' he explains.
Then what really does matter in the workplace?
It's not just your workers, it's what the workers want out of the job. Do they want to be seen as the heros? Do they want the drama? Do they want to it to be done exactly right? Do they want to tell other people to do the work?
There are a number of books focused on that. The Enneagram covers 9 different styles.
Take that and apply the Peter Principle and you have a good understanding of why bosses are such jerks. 8 out of 9 times, they won't have the same goals that you have (and the other time they'll be in active competition with you) and they're not skilled enough to handle the situation.
"In the real world, bosses are known to suffer from a long list of social pathologies: naked aggression, credit hogging, micromanaging, bullying, you name it. "
So that explains everything that Ballmer has ever done. I knew there had to be a logical reason.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Simple. It's been said already. They suffer from a few pathologies. Micromanagement ("look, he's puttng work into the fine details and doesn't ignore the minor things"), credit hogging ("And Smith from dpt. X was again the one who did it"). So who gets promoted? The guy with the toughest ellbows.
Of COURSE it's the jerk. And that also proves true the old saying "Those who can do, those who can't supervise". If they could, they'd be busy doing instead of trying to bully, hog the limelight and putz around with petty details.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Because I can't do everything in my job. I've had good bosses, and I've had bad bosses. The bad bosses made me want to quit my job due to their incompetence and interference with my job. The good bosses made themselves invisible and filtered out anything that would distract me from my job.
Bosses are necessary. Every organization needs leaders (even the most far-out communes have de-facto leaders), because someone needs to organize direction.
And unions do not have anything to do with who makes a good or a bad boss. Come to think of it, I doubt you did more than glance at the first few lines of the article. Otherwise you'd have gotten to the part about changing the system.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I have no patience for analysis. I use cheat codes, defeat the bosses, and win the game.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Your nickname and your comment say it all. Unions are bloodsucking leeches that reward mediocrity.
Now, cooperatives truly provide for all persons working for a business. But then you don't have a Union hierarchy to climb upward so that you can be rewarded for being too unmotivated to find a new job.
It is particularly telling that organized crime is/has been so frequently involved with unions. They are interested in them because they become an effective means of control and of wielding power.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I see this all over the place. WWJD...WWJD...What Would Jake Do... Why does everyone care so much what I would do?
Those aren't the heros I was referring to. I'm talking about the ones who skip steps that they know aren't needed
Drama r0xx0r in advertising and entertainment and fashion and so forth. If you're doing tech, drama SUCKS!
Not when you're managing a nuclear plant. (Which is also a bad match for the heros and drama queens.)
What personality types you want on your team (if you even want a team) depends more on what the job is. If you get the right mix at the right job, you won't even need a boss. But that's extremely rare.
But I think the biggest problem with that article is that it mentions some of the different types
And they only really covered one type: the narcissistic who won't even stick around but hops to a new job as soon as one is available.
Now imagine working for a perfectionist jerk (do it over and get it right this time).
Or a drama queen jerk (watch "The Devil Wears Prada").
Or a hero jerk (nothing leaves his desk until it's a crisis).
Does anyone actually work anywhere that these "boss" stereotypes are real? I've worked a lot of places, and had good and bad bosses, but my immediate managers have never displayed these characteristics (bullying, credit hogging etc). In a real company people who do these things are found out pretty fast and dumped. Surely this is just some weird Dilbert-type fantasy world we're talking about?
When I began my career as a programmer, I got a job with a great, but small company. The boss had built it from nothing. He had built his life from nothing.. .and he LOVED to tell everyone about that. (We would get lecture upon lecture about it, in fact. ;) How if he could do it, anyone could do it.)
;)
But he was a good man. He actually could separate business from personal and he was great when he wasn't in "boss mode". His company got larger and he ended up in "boss mode" more often and that was when people started thinking of him as more of an asshole.
In the beginning, before he got "older" and "comfortable".. (Millionaire maybe now?), he was sociable as well. He took care of his employees and they were happy. He had monthly picnics and ice cream socials. Took us all to baseball games and all sorts of great stuff. He even had parties in his own home! Then, we think he got greedy. (more more more money!) and he started treating his techs like monkeys. (Any monkey can do this.. why pay graduates when we can train anyone off the street and pay them dirt cheap). He started treating the rest of his employees poorly as well. He still tried to keep up the "act" but his heart wasn't in it anymore.. and his employees started noticing that..
I (and others) saw the change coming. I got out of there, but there were tears. LOL (Hey, I'm still a girl dammit). He had taken good care of me and my son, above and beyond.. but that was before... that was earlier. Yes.. I actually hugged my boss on my last day...
So, in this rambling, what I'm trying to say, is that not all bosses are assholes.. and maybe it becomes a learned trait. Maybe the system and society wear them down... maybe they become that way because that is what is expected or maybe they see those who are assholes really moving up the corporate ladder. Whatever the reason, it truly has become a job description for many bosses. And the more people who see it as a means to an end, the more people will pull that out of themselves just to get where they want to go. Yes, there are a lot who were "born" as assholes and never change throughout life (with what we are seeing, what motivation IS there to change?), but it's not a steady progression. It's not all defined under one stereotype... it is my belief that society MAKES the assholes because we allow them to BE assholes.
Kris
Remember when Windows were washed, mice were trapped and UNIX guarded the harem?
First of all there is agency costs. Jerks -- people who exploit people for their personal benefit -- don't confine themselves to screwing their underlings. They just exploit their superiors more carefully.
Come to think of it, buying into the notion that being a jerk makes you an effective manager may explain a lot of things. Like Enron.
The second problem is that there is a much more obvious explanation for why most bosses tend to act like jerks. They're over their heads. Most negative behaviors are defensive behaviors to cover up for the fact that things are out of control. Most people never receive any trainign in leadership. In fact they don't receive much traning in the mnagement tasks they have to do. They're just promoted until they reach a level where their dysfunction is so severe only a moron would promote them any higher. And a few of them work for morons.
Imagine a person in a boss role who happens to be splendidly equipped for that role. He has strong people and communication skills, a knack for organization, a good knowledge of the field he is working in as well as management techniques. Is he likely to be a jerk?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Right... I think a good bit of what really happens is, people join the ranks of "management", and then they discover that they have more control over their payscale than they ever did before. If you're an engineer for example, the best you can probably hope for is that all of your hard work and willingness to pull long hours when needed gets noticed, so you get a few extra percent when your annual raise comes around. But your pay is still pretty much fixed, based on what *management* has decided the range of pay will be for that position.
Once you're part of management, you can position yourself so your team of people beneath you accomplishes goals that you can then at least partially claim credit for, thereby giving you "easy reasons" for your own pay raise. They do the work, and you share in the reward. Furthermore, you have all these other tools at your disposal (in many cases). You get the say-so in deciding if your team should hire on additional staff, or cut back, or simply stay put with a "hiring freeze". When you dislike an employee's personality, you can make him go away. The rest of the team just has to put up with these problems, or else potentially face disciplinary measures including docking their pay! And of course, you can juggle all the numbers to put yourself in the most positive light possible, to further justify your own pay raise. (The rest of the people working beneath you probably don't even have access to those numbers, much less authority to present them to top-level execs.)
I've worked at two jobs where I've seen the reality of bosses to this extreme of badness.
A couple of examples: At the first one, my boss used to walk up and down behind our cubes every five minutes or so to make sure we were at our desks and working. If we weren't, she would start asking our neighbors where we were, when we would be back, etc. (And we were all hard-working professionals.) She even asked me to go to the men's room once to try to track down one of my coworkers. (I refused, and fortunately, he got back to his desk before it got ugly.)
I'll never forget once in a meeting, her boss suggested a change that we make to one of the reports we generated. He wasn't ugly about it, and he wasn't complaining; he was just trying to make it a little better than it was. Right there in front of him and all of us, she said, "I've told them that they're supposed to be doing that. I don't know why, but they just won't." (Of course, this being a new change, she was flat-out lying.)
At my last job, I honestly think my boss was crazy. As in, seriously, mental problems. He would yell and scream at people who were actually trying to help him with something. I'll never forget when he pulled me into a meeting and reamed me up and down because I was doing my job--are you sitting down?--too well. He told me, "This is really great quality work, but great is the worst enemy of good. I really need you to just do what you're working on, you know, good enough, and then move on to other things."
God, how I love leaving that company. He was on vacation when I turned in my notice, and I told the Human Resources lady (who, incidentally, I had talked to on two separate occasions about his behavior with absolutely nothing done about it), "Look, I know this is bad form, and if the circumstances weren't so extreme, I wouldn't do this. But the truth of the matter is that I do not want to ever see my boss again, so I will not be working out a two-week notice. Friday will be my last day."
Fortunately, I've had a couple of very good bosses to compensate for these horrible experiences. My current boss is a gem, and you all should be so lucky to have one like him. I guess we all have our professional ups and downs, and I've had some real doozies on both sides of that spectrum.
Evil will always win because good is dumb!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Sorry but that's a load of apologist tripe. Being a girl doesn't have to mean you let your heart rule over your head. Your boss got greedy and you got out which is the right thing for you and your family. Doing good one day doesn't give you a free pass to do evil the next. No one makes excuses for a serial killer because at one time they were a nice quiet boy.
I've worked for a similar company. The founders (One middle age man and his younger partner were absolutely fantastic during the boom when I was hired. I was employee number 7. Bonuses were something like 15-20%. There were dinners at very expensive restuarants as prizes. There was a free softdrink policy if you stayed back late. The fact that we were working on niche technology didn't matter so much - it was after all a tech boom and work wasn't scarce.
I spent 5 years at the company.
When I left there were more than 50 employees and a low cost (low wage) Asian office training up for support. Forget the free softdrink. Forget any kind of bonus (literally none). Work was one crunch after the other (but I basically worked normal hours. I refuse to work continuous crunches).
What happened? Partly competition and partly the bosses becoming less willing to share what did come their way. The sad thing is a token is all that was needed. I think that yes a company founder may get worn down and that it's a tough job - people abuse your trust, you risk a lot, and the buck stops with you. However that doesn't excuse becoming an asshole. If as a company founder the only way you can make your business survive is to turn it into something you're not proud of yous hould get the fuck out.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer