I’ve seen at least three separate pieces of research in as many weeks that suggest around a third of us don’t particularly like our CEOs. And? Aren’t we supposed to dislike our bosses? At least a third of us probably should, because we all look for different things in what makes a good boss. Some people wish their boss wasn’t so aloof; others wish he or she would just stay away. Some like a boss who takes tricky decisions in their stride; others mark somebody down if they seem trigger happy or clinical.
The recession, I believe, has fundamentally changed our perception of what makes a good boss and what’s really interesting is how our criteria have changed. What makes a bad boss in a recession is probably starkly different to what makes a bad boss in boom-time. In good times, what we might dislike about our boss will be more to do with objectionable personality traits. In a recession it’s the opposite. It’s the bad boss not caring what kind of person they are, as long as they don’t sink the company or unnecessarily lose people their jobs, which may rub us up the wrong way.
Take my boss. A little odd, a little idiosyncratic but largely harmless in boom time where qualified people are largely left to manage their own roles and the business ticks along nicely. In a recession, however, blind panic set in and a nosedive never seems far away.
- Is a bad boss somebody who goes missing in action? I wish. A bad boss can just as equally be somebody who assumes he or she must take total control and bring an incomplete skills set to bear on areas of the business that could have been fine, thank you very much, without meddling.
- Is a bad boss somebody who makes unpopular decisions such as making redundancies? If only. A bad boss in my experience is somebody who dodges the trickiest decisions in favour of tinkering with the trivial and lets the bigger issues fester, untouched.
- Is a good boss somebody who plays the popular card, takes staff for a beer or tells you to go out and get drunk? No, because that’s merely a vote-winning tactic to distract you from the underlying panic.
- Is a good boss somebody who has the luxury of caring about their popularity? Almost certainly not. They’ll ultimately be more effective and more successful by meeting difficult decisions head-on, even if their conclusion is unpopular.
