I’m not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound I’ve seen enough heartaches and strife
Bob Dylan
What constitutes your personal brand?
People often ask me why I write what I write and do what I do. Well, after a lifetime of watching good people get hurt by bad bosses, I am deeply concerned with preventing others from being burned. I am no longer in a position to directly protect people who are being hurt, but I can help them build the resilience they need to stand up, withstand, and still become their best. I can also help those with some pretense to power discover strategies to act as benevolently as possible … or at least to act benignly. That is my personal brand.
The marketing guru and bestselling author Mike Kim in his book, You Are the Brand, presents three simple questions as a way of revealing your personal brand.
1. What pisses you off? (That’s your sense of justice.)
2. What breaks your heart? (That’s your sense of compassion.)
3. What big problem do you solve? (That’s the purpose of your work.)
Where your three answers overlap is your personal brand. I generally aim for my essays to convey the answers to these questions at least obliquely, but maybe direct answers would be more enlightening.
What Pisses Me Off
The short answer is shitty bosses. If you are even a casual consumer of my writing, you know this is probably my most frequent topic. I just can’t shut up about it!
Even when I am not writing about shitty bosses, I am writing about shitty bosses.
As always, I draw a sharp distinction between bosses and leaders since very few bosses are leaders, and many leaders are not bosses. Why does this topic so obsess me though?
Simply put, I have had many, many terrible bosses. My wife has had many, many terrible bosses. Almost everyone I know has had many, many terrible bosses. Recently I met a woman who says that her workday is rather autonomous, and she does not really have to deal with bosses, shitty or otherwise. She is exceedingly fortunate. The simple fact is that many, maybe even most bosses are disasters at their jobs, and bad bosses are a cancer on our workplaces.
And I say all this knowing I was a far-from-perfect boss. As a character of dubious motivations once said though, “But I'm trying, Ringo. I'm trying real hard.”
I once had a colleague, herself a boss (not mine, thank you), who when people spoke about her in private, they’d often start, “she is a really good friend.” Then they would add, “that’s why I was surprised when she…” The rest of the statement generally was something utterly horrifying: “…when she spread false rumors about me,” “…when she screamed at me in public,” “…when she tried to get me fired,” etcetera, etcetera.
I am going to cuss here, so brace yourself. Parents, please remove your children. If you have pets or houseplants, secure them in a different room. Oh, and close the windows.
What the fuck!
These people were her victims and suffered under her relentless bullying, so why would few even admit what was truly happening? They acted like her heinousness was a bug while all along it was a feature, in fact the feature. And, as I have written before, bully bosses are always incompetent!
And yes, bossing is complex, but so is surgery. We would never stand for such universal ineptitude among surgeons, would we? Or bus drivers. Or accountants. Or that inspector who makes sure that teensy chip in your phone is positioned just right. These are all complex jobs that require varying degrees of precision and accuracy, so why are we tolerant and even forgiving of the limitations and fecklessness of our nasty bosses, almost every boss? We act as though it is a requirement that bosses suck. Why?
Man, oh man, shitty bosses piss me off!
What Breaks My Heart
This one is as easy as what pisses me off, and they are related. My heart breaks when I see the damage that shitty bosses do — the people whose careers and even lives bad bosses upturn and the institutions lousy bosses ruin. Shitty bosses thwart so much good that could be in the world. Worse still — and this one both pisses me off and breaks my heart — shitty bosses are self-replicating. They tend to corrupt others, whether peers or underlings, who then go on to be shitty bosses, and the cycle continues. As the saying goes, “Hurt people hurt people.”
Again, bad bossing is a cancer, and, as Edward Abbey observed in a different context, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Just as cancer exists to attack and mutate each healthy cell it encounters, bad bossing spreads by transmogrifying perfectly good individuals into malignant replicants who go on to become bad bosses themselves. That’s some zombie-level evil there. You could make a horror movie out of this stuff. Maybe someone has.
And you almost certainly have seen some version of this relentless metastasis in reality. You have probably lived it. Think of some choice you had to make that was harmful to your wellbeing — be it your relationships, your physical or mental health, your career ambitions, or even just your preferred way of living. It is highly likely you faced this choice due to some demands imposed by bad bosses. If you never have, good for you. My guess is you are incredibly lucky, self-employed, or have made a career out of traveling the Caribbean on cruise ships while covering Jimmy Buffett tunes on your Gibson, and more power to you. Either that or you are self-deluding.
The Big Problem I Solve
As I indicated earlier — it’s almost a mantra — I have set out to rid the world of bad bosses by guiding bosses, wannabe bosses, and their admirers and imitators to become great leaders instead.
I want to be perfectly clear. I am not saying that you are or will be a shitty boss. I am saying you have a choice, one that you must constantly re-up. You must choose to be a leader with the understanding that great leaders always assure that they are held to account by their employees, by their peers, by their own bosses, and certainly by themselves to be the best. I aim to guide every boss and every leader — established, brand new, and aspiring — to make the right choice over and over again between being a mere boss or a great leader.
Although I know my ambitions are bold in a world populated by billions and billions of bad bosses, it can be done. Am I mad? Yes, when it comes to bad bosses, I am mad in every sense of the word. So how to get started?
You have heard this bit of folk wisdom disguised as a silly joke about elephants, right?
Q: How do you eat an elephant?
A: One bite at a time.Heh. Heh.
Anyhoo, the same is true of bosses.
Q: How do you eradicate the race of shitty bosses from the earth?
A: One boss at a time.What pisses you off? What breaks your heart? What big problem do you solve?
You can learn to rid the world of bad bosses, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation and gift.
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