How to Identify a Great Boss

As you're out there looking for a job, it's important to know that the majority of people leave their job as a result of their immediate boss.  If you have a lousy boss, you won't achieve your career potential and will be unhappy in the workplace.  If you have a great boss, you'll soar higher than an eagle.  So, how do you identify a great boss?  Below are the 12 things all good managers know from the Human Capital League.  Use these things to build questions when interviewing to determine if it is the RIGHT opportunity for you. 

Do you have an experience where you picked the wrong boss or right boss?  Share it so others can learn.

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12 Things All Good Managers Know

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.

From the Human Capital League by
Gautam Ghosh
on
06/06/2010