Who is the best boss you ever had? What made that person such a good boss? Or, was that person a good boss? After all, better is not necessarily good. Being the best of a bad lot is like being the half-empty McDonald’s container that perches at the very top of the city landfill. Sure, you have pride of place, but so what?
I am lucky in that the best boss I ever had was actually quite a good boss. I am unlucky in that — even taking into account my teenaged years — the contest for the best boss I ever had was not particularly competitive. We’ll call him “Fred.” Fred was a university president, and Fred ran away with the Best Boss title like a thoroughbred against a heard of goats.
To be clear, Fred was not perfect, which is not remarkable, given his persistent status as a human being. Most importantly, Fred was not a perfectionist. He did not seek undue control, nor did he expect an error-free work environment. Indeed, he was open to and capable of identifying error, even his own, in order to learn from it. Lordy be!
I want to be up front and confess that most bosses I have had would not identify me as an ideal employee. For one thing, I have never been a fan of authority, which maybe helped me be a bit of a better boss when I became one. Also, I have a bad habit of expressing impatience with hypocrisy, dishonesty, obfuscation, and incompetence, which all seem to be the congenital traits of the typical inhabitant of Bossyland. To be clear, I, being human and all that, am guilty of all these foibles and faults, but I aspire to identify and eliminate them from my behaviors. In short, I am a lousy employee because I refuse to put up with BS, even my own, and I abhor bullies. Bully-bosses are the worst.
So, aside from a healthy relationship with perfection and not being a bully-boss, what made Fred stand out?
Integrity: Why is this one so hard? Are we so flawed as a species that we regularly elevate and embrace leaders who feel obligated and subsequently empowered to cut corners, avoid responsibility, and promote their own interests first? If you want to know what made Fred stand out more than any other quality, it was his integrity, which was evident on even his worst days. All his other virtues flow from this one. I wrote about the importance of integrity to leadership and the achievement of excellence at some length, so you may want to revisit that essay.
Values: Undergirding integrity is a strong sense of values, the most important being a commitment to basic human decency. If you are not entirely sure what constitutes your workplace values, ask yourself these questions:
What motivates you to action and keeps you going?
What hill are you willing to fight for?
What hill are you willing to sacrifice for?
What hill are you willing to die on?
Note that not being willing to consistently fight or to sacrifice or to die to protect a particular hill is in itself an expression of values. And avoid rationalizations. Not being willing to be fired for defending your values because you “can do so much more good” in your current position may be more indicative of your personal interests and ultimate motivator than it is of your altruism.
Smarts: Yeah, Fred is a smart guy, but he also is natural-born student. As any educator worth two cents knows, intelligence is not predetermined and not set. Just as one can get stupider over time, one can get smarter over time, and the most effective way to do so is by continuing to learn. Ongoing learning need-not mean enrolling in adult courses. Learning merely requires openness, curiosity, and a willingness to change one’s mind. If you are amenable to learning, you will learn. Fred is a learner.
Honesty: It is a bit silly to separate honesty from both integrity and values, but I do so here because Fred is markedly honest. His honesty extends to all aspects of his practice including — as far as I can tell — an ongoing, forthright critique of self. I say “as far as I can tell” because I am not in Fred’s head, but his self-critique appears evident in his actions.
Commitment to Excellence: Again, a dedication to integrity inevitably leads to excellence, but Fred’s focus on excellence was always extraordinary. His leadership team knew not to rest on its past successes as we worked to continually improve. After all, in the deep and wide ocean of life, if you are not swimming forward, you are — at best — treading water … and see how long that might last.
Putting Mission before Ego: Fred’s commitment to excellence was a counterpart to his commitment to the institutional mission. Fred was a university president, and, sadly, many university presidents I have seen think that their interests and the institution’s interests are intricately intertwined if not indistinguishable — a manifestation of their rampant, bestial egotism. Whatever they profess, these preening narcissists would burn whole institutions down if they thought it would benefit them, and some of them do. We see these solipsistic creeps in politics too.
Willingness to Take Risks: This was probably Fred’s biggest shortcoming. You have to understand that Fred is a lawyer by training, and thus chronically disinclined to take many risks. A willingness to take risks — not to act recklessly, but to wisely approach unpredictability with a healthy caution mixed with forward motion — can be key to a leader’s success since the leader’s integrity will assure that his or her core is solid enough to overcome failure. To his credit, Fred may have been resistant to risk, but he was not entirely allergic.
As for all my other bosses stretching way back to my youth in the 1900s, the best of them ranged from okay but disengaged to okay but limited. The rest of them were out-and-out toxic and ranged from utterly inept to megalomaniacal — oh, the stories I can tell! Sadly, Fred and I worked together only for one year due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, but ever since, I have strived to be more like Fred, which is quite a challenge.
So, if you are a boss or a leader or aspire to be so, challenge yourself. Be like Fred.
If you have had a good boss, what made that person so good? Would you give them a Freddie?
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