Things Good Bosses Believe

I am not sure I agree with this one, not in the technical field. I think in software in particular, our overall goals (provided they are well-selected) inform a lot of the little decisions that translate into small wins. I think one of the roles of a good geek herder is to keep these things at the forefront of their mind, so that those small wins don't end up leading you down a blind alley.

Let's have an example. Let's say your team is doing project X and one of the goals of X was to be OS-agnostic. However at the shop you only have two or three related OSes - say Linux and Solaris. Now everybody has been working on X for years, the goals are a distant memory... and then something breaks, and the developer rolls out a quick fix that will only work on Unix clones.

It is the boss's job to turn down the small win and say "no you can't do it this way". It is their job to think of this, when it doesn't occur to anybody else. Somebody has to keep the big picture in their head - whether that person is called the boss, or the technical lead or whoever.

1. My people have a flawed and incomplete understanding of how valuable I am to them.

2. My success depends largely getting obvious and mundane things done, in spite of my people's shortcomings.

3. Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to expect my people to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that maximize my own bonus.

4. One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to strike the delicate balance between being a jerk and appearing not to be.

5. My job is to serve as a human irritant, to bombard my people with external intrusions, distractions, and idiocy of every stripe - and to avoid letting them think for themselves.

6. I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge, but to appear to be humble even though I am not. I aim to fight as if I am right, and appear to listen as if I am wrong, even though I never am. I protect my job by teaching my people nothing.

7. One of the best tests of my leadership is "how quickly do I reprimand someone when they make a mistake?"

8. Innovation is crucial in order for me to take credit.

9. So my job is to encourage my people to get off their lazy asses and do some work.

10. But it is also my job to fire them when they don't.

11. Good is stronger than bad. I am good. My people are bad. That's how I got to be the boss and they didn't.

12. How I do things is no one's business. I am the boss. Now stop reading this and get back to work.

I'd like to add one more. My job as manager is to provide the support necessary so those working for me can do the best work possible. My job is to enable them, not to use them to support myself. At the end of the day, they're the ones doing most of the implementation; if I want the implementation to be successful, I've got to set the stage for it.

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.

Why reject most good ideas? Seems like that would discourage innovation, not encourage.

Does it mean that people don't care whether there is an exercise room if they are not being paid well? Or am I looking at it the wrong way?

> My success depends largely getting obvious and mundane things done, in spite of my people's shortcomings.

You mean managerial success depends on managing the power point slides instead of making sure that your server-side is architected to properly streamline asynchronous tasks?