Great Bosses

Here’s one from the achieves. I was cleaning out some old folders on my computer and came across this Harvard Business Review post from 2010. I don’t typically keep these “top ten lists” (in this case top 12) as they usually are more fluff than substance but this list must have really resonated with me. I saved the list as a pdf and also started writing a post about it. As I look over the list from the perspective of a more experienced manager, an employee, and a person who has gone through some self-evaluations, it continues to resonate with me. I hope you find value in the list; the top ten have links to a full post where Robert Sutton expands on the topic. All are worth a read for new and experienced managers alike. We can all learn and all need to be reminded of our place in the world.

1. I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.
2. My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.
3. Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable my people to make a little progress every day.
4. One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to strike the delicate balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough.
5. My job is to serve as a human shield, to protect my people from external intrusions, distractions, and idiocy of every stripe — and to avoid imposing my own idiocy on them as well. 
6. I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge, but humble enough to realize that I am often going to be wrong.
7. I aim to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong — and to teach my people to do the same thing.
8. One of the best tests of my leadership — and my organization — is “what happens after people make a mistake?”
9. Innovation is crucial to every team and organization. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. But it is also my job to help them kill off all the bad ideas we generate, and most of the good ideas, too. 
10. Bad is stronger than good. It is more important to eliminate the negative than to accentuate the positive.
11. How I do things is as important as what I do. 
12. Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it.

Taken from 12 Things Good Bosses Believe by Robert I. Sutton: https://hbr.org/2010/05/12-things-that-good-bosses-bel – Harvard Business Review, May 28, 2010.