Home » Home » Betsey Nash » Twelve Things Good Bosses Believe: Only Human—By Betsey Nash, SPHR
Betsey Nash Professional Perspective

Twelve Things Good Bosses Believe: Only Human—By Betsey Nash, SPHR

Betsey Nash bubble portraitIn the spirit of the season I tried to knit together “HR’s 12 Days of Christmas,” for this week’s column and failed miserably.
Things like “12 headaches drumming,” “three fresh pens,” and a “five ring binder,” just never jelled. So I didn’t finish. You’re welcome.
But while racking my brain I did recall a list of 12 things that are actually helpful reminders for managers, so I am sharing them here. These are some key beliefs that are held by the best bosses — and rejected or probably never even thought about, by the worst bosses.
The list includes items appropriate for a line manager and those in leadership positions with less hands-on managing. They come from a Harvard Business Review blog about Robert I. Sutton’s book. “Good Boss, Bad Boss,” and I offer them here instead of “four calling cards”, etc…
• I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• One of the best tests of my leadership and my organization is, “What happens after people make a mistake?”
• 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.
• Bad is stronger than good. It is more important to eliminate the negative than to accentuate the positive.
• How I do things is as important as what I do.
• Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk and not realizing it.
When I hosted a radio talk show a few years ago, “The Wonderful World of Work,” I had two regular segments: “Bad Boss of the Week” and “Stupid Employee Tricks.” Sadly, there was plenty of material for both. I offer this list in my never-ending fight to limit that material. D

Betsey Nash, SPHR, is a long-time human resources professional, former president of the Human Resources Association of the Central Coast and a current SLO County Civil Service Commissioner. She can be reached at: . Only Human is a regular feature of Tolosa Press.

Facebook Comments