The Poetry of the Boss

More than 40 years ago, I was handed my college diploma and, two days later, showed up for work at my first official job. I didn’t realize it until much later, but I walked into the doors of my employer that day carrying an assumption. I believed that people in positions of authority – bosses – always knew what they were doing. Why else would they be bosses?

Slightly more than a decade later, my assumption continuing to take body blow after body blow, I was presented incontrovertible evidence that my assumption had been flat-out wrong.

A group of us were sitting in a conference room, waiting for the news to go public that one of the company’s top products had a problem. The first indication would be the stock market. We all knew the news was imminent, and we had prepared for it as if a tsunami was about to strike, which, metaphorically, turned out to be true. The call came, confirming that the news was public, and for a very brief moment we experienced a silence.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Telling the Truth Upward

A senior executive has made a request, something impossible to achieve. The request is born of a lack of understanding and rising frustration, and it’s passed down until it lands in my email.

I understand the frustration, and I share it. So I respond, politely and with understanding, directly to the executive. I explain why it’s impossible.

One of the people copied on the email stops by with a bit of advice. “You need to be careful saying what you did,” he says. “You could hurt your career.”

This reminds me of the old line about Socrates. He told the truth, so they poisoned him.

But the statement surprises me. Doing anything else other than what I did never entered my mind. What I believed important was to provide the executive with an explanation.

Later, I consider the statement. Why did my fellow employee think that telling an executive the truth would hurt my career?

To continue reading, please see my post today at The High Calling.

Illustration by Fritz Ahlefeldt via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

Poetry of the Boss

Leadership in the workplace is more than a minor genre in business books. For decades, stretching back at least to the 1920swhen “management” began to emerge as a “science,” leadership has been a serious business subject to study, pursue, get a degree in, and apply. (Peter Drucker, for example, began writing on the subject in the late 1930s.)

What workplace leadership should – and shouldn’t – do has changed over the years, much as workplace structures have changed and are still changing. Corporations, for example, approached management in the command-and-control image of the military; consider the origin of “staff” functions we’re so familiar with in organizations today. The military metaphor fit a mass-production economy.

Command-and-control management didn’t inspire much poetry, but it did give birth to a considerable novel of novels.

To continue reading, please see my post today at TweetSpeak Poetry.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Best Boss I've Ever Had

Actually, I’ve had two best bosses. Except one wasn’t a boss.

I had just graduated from college and joined the staff of the Beaumont, Texas, Enterprise as a copy editor. My “welcome to your new job” consisted of “here’s your chair and typewriter, and here are three pages for layout; don’t forget the headlines.” Today it would be called total immersion.

The staff seemed nice enough but was too busy to worry the new kid. When I had my pages done and headlines written, I rather tentatively asked where I should take them. “To the back shop,” was the reply. I did find the back shop, and then returned to my desk to find more pages waiting.

When it was dinnertime (which we called lunch, because our day began at 3 p.m. for the morning paper), one of the copy desk members – the guy designated as No. 2 – walked to where I was sitting and asked me to come to lunch with him.

His name was Richard, and he was about 12 years older than I was. He wasn’t my boss, but he did what a boss should – helped me learn the ropes. At dinner, and we had lots of dinners together, he told me about the paper, what to do and what to avoid, what reporters were totally reliable and what reporters weren’t, what to expect from my fellow copy desk editors, sources I could use to verify information.

I knew him for six weeks. One day he told me he was giving notice and going to one of the newspapers in Dallas. But the time he spent investing in me for those six weeks helped me – and the newspaper – enormously. Because six weeks after that, because of staff turnover, the new kid had become the new No. 2, and effectively No. 1 because No. 1 had a drinking problem.

Fast forward 10 years. I was working in St. Louis, and had just been promoted to a new position in a business division. My boss, a guy named Tom, was totally straightforward: “You should know what you’re doing. If you don’t, ask. If I’m not around, do what you think is best. If you make a mistake, I’ll tell them I authorized it.”

Then he threw me into the pool. And I figured out how to swim. He was always around with a life preserver if I needed it.

He was much like Richard at the Enterprise. Tom had been a reporter for years before becoming a PR guy, and he and Richard shared that no-nonsense, damn-the-torpedoes-full-steam-ahead attitude. I worked for Tom for a year until they transferred him into the corporate division.

Both Tom and Richard knew how to enchant employees. They certainly enchanted me, and made an enormous impact on my professional life.


Over at The High Calling, we’re reading Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. This week’s discussion is on “How to Use Pull Technology” and “How to Enchant Your Employees.” To see more posts on the book, please visit The High Calling.

The High Calling's "Best of 2010"

The High Calling posted the "Best of 2010 Blogs" today, and my post, "Organizations and Bad Bosses" from June 29, is on the list. And you should see the company it's in. I'm surprised and humbled.

The High Calling list is here.

My June 29 post is here.

I've been following The High Calling for almost two years, and became a contributing editor last March. If you haven't visited the site before, you should. It has some of the best writing on work, faith, family and culture around the web.

Organizations and Bad Bosses

I learned very early that organizations will tolerate extremely bad behavior in bosses. I don’t know why, but they do.

Take Evelyn, for example (not the real name, and I may also have changed the gender).

A good writer, Evelyn was in her mid-30s and the speechwriter for the CEO, who valued and appreciated her work. Her scope of responsibilities was broadened to include a general executive communication function, with two writers and a secretary reporting to her. I was selected to be one of those writers, and I was thrilled – it was an elite writing group, and I was all of 24 at the time.

Things went well until the CEO retired. His replacement was very different. For my boss, what had been a warm, collegial relationship with one CEO became frosty, tense, and then combative with the new CEO. (A lesson for those who may not know: if you get into a combative situation with the CEO, you lose. Every time.) Everyone – Evelyn, her boss and even his boss – said this was a clear case of having to work with a difficult CEO.

But Evelyn’s insecurities began to surface. Her team experienced them first. She began to micro-manage everything, making the writing process increasingly painful and then erratic; the edits often made no sense. Then she began to arrive at work late or leave early, and sometimes not show up at all. Sometimes we could no longer wait for her to edit what we wrote and had to send drafts “upstairs” as they were. She never seemed to eat, but whispers about drinking were getting louder.

Her boss tolerated the increasingly odd and self-destructive behavior. It became so bad that I went to him and said she needed help (it was the right thing to do but not a wise career move – it implied that he wasn’t doing his job). He wasn’t pleased and said he was aware and taking care of it.

He wasn’t.

They moved the other writer to another team, but were reluctant to move me and the secretary. We were the department mainstays, and her boss was afraid that moving us would push her over the edge. Meanwhile, her disappearances were lasting longer. The cleaning crew refused to clean her office because of the smell.

Then came the day a senior executive asked where his speech draft was, the speech he was giving in three days. Evelyn’s boss came tearing into my office and asked if I was working on it. I didn’t even know one was due (and we had a calendar for speeches); Evelyn worked on this executive’s speeches herself. So her boss told me to come with him and we went to her office. You can imagine the scene – people seeing the commotion; the two of us entering her office; him shouting at people, including me, and demanding the secretary find the speech; and then the smell when we opened the door. It was ugly.

We tore her office apart looking – hoping – to find the speech. We found the memo from the executive requesting it. We also found old, moldy food and lots of empty beer and liquor bottles stashed in drawers and cabinets. The evidence of a personal tragedy was all around us.

He asked me what could be done; he had to see the executive at 9 the next morning. I took home what research I could find and spent the night writing the speech draft, finishing around 3 a.m. (I remember what it looked like – typed and hand-edited on the dull yellow paper we used for drafting; this was long before desktop computers.) When I got to work, I made a photocopy and had just returned to my desk when Evelyn’s boss arrived, asking if I’d been able to do anything. I handed him the speech draft. He didn’t say a word but left for the executive’s office.

Thirty minutes later, I was called to the executive’s office, with Evelyn’s boss nowhere around, and spent the rest of the morning and lunch working with him to get the speech finalized. His own secretary worked with us, typing his speaking draft. He didn’t trust it to leave the floor.

Another supervisor took over Evelyn’s job. She went on leave to get help. But the damage to many of the people involved, including her, and the damage to the department, was done.

This is what I learned. Never let a problem fester. When someone needs help, get it. Don’t assume a problem will run its course. Move fast. And understand that people who know better will turn a blind eye and hope the problem solves itself. Organizations have high tolerances for problem bosses.


The High Callings Blogs has a group writing project underway about bosses, and a summary will be published next week. If you’d like to write a post about a boss or bosses, you can participate by dropping your link here.