#BadBosses #leaders #managers
The Peter Principle is alive and well in many companies.
In a nutshell: A person becomes very talented and skilled in a certain area. He is promoted to manage that area. He becomes a terrible boss.
Jeff Vrabel discusses this in an article about bosses in the August 2015 issue of Success magazine.
“Some people are natural-born leaders. Others are cruel, inhuman monsters,” reads a sub-headline over Vrabel’s article.
We’ve come to expect, and Vrabel’s article points out, that those employees who perform well are rewarded by moving up to management. In most organizational structures, that is the only way to move up. But a good engineer, a good technician or a good marketer doesn’t always make a good leader. Too often, the opposite is true.
It’s important here to understand the difference between a manager and a leader. Managing is learned. Leadership tends to be natural.
So what happens? The promoted employee is given a list of procedures, a system, if you will, to learn. So he learns to be a manager. And, he or she isn’t even that good at managing.
“Leadership is personal. There’s no single way of leading, no silver bullet,” Vrabel quotes Deborah Ancona, faculty director of the MIT Leadership Center. “We can’t be perfect at everything. So if you’re someone’s boss, the trick is to find out what you’re really good at and what you need to ramp up on, and getting better at both,” Vrabel quotes Ancona.
As a boss, you could be doing everything YOUR boss is telling you to do, but your staff may still hate you. It’s human nature to like some people better than others. It’s also human nature to give more positive attention to some employees, and more negative attention to others.
When you mix the two traits of human nature, it can sometimes turn toxic. You may have a good employee, but, for some reason, you may not like him or her as well as you like some others. The employee senses that, and feels as if he or she is not being treated fairly. That puts added stress on the good employee, and that could manifest into the loss of that employee, or discord within the organization.
More importantly for the employee, he or she may not advance as far as he or she would like, or is capable of. That, too, could ruin a good career.
Managers have to work at treating everyone underneath them as fairly as they can. Leaders have to lead in their own way, as Ancona put it. It’s great to have high expectations of your staff. But if they don’t see you as having those high expectations of yourself, you won’t get the production or cooperation you want.
Many organizations foster competition among employees, rather than cooperation and teamwork. A good rule of thumb: If you are after the same goals, competition wastes energy. If each person or group in the same organization has different goals, it’s a recipe for disaster.
Have you been, or are you still, being frustrated by bad bosses? Are you feeling stuck under the duress of someone who doesn’t inspire you? You may have to look at developing a way to eventually fire that bad boss. There are many such ways out there for anyone. For one of the best, visit www.bign.com/pbilodeau. Who knows? You could turn into the leader you’ve always wanted, or wanted to be.
The best players almost never make the best coaches. The best employees don’t always make the best leaders. If you run a company, look for ways to reward your good employees without taking them away from what they do best, and most love to do. If you are a good at your job, and love what you do, don’t be afraid to say NO to a job you don’t want, even if it pays more. There are many other ways to add money to your coffers.
Leaders, often quietly, make themselves apparent. For instance, beware the person who wants to take credit for everything. Look for the person who wants to always GIVE credit to someone else.
Peter