Why the best bosses are sometimes bossy

The word "boss" literally means "a person who exercises control or authority", but how do we often interpret it? Does the word itself give them control or authority? For example, in the case of a colleague getting promoted to be the boss. Does she or he now have control or authority over your work? Perhaps, if you view her as capable. If you don't, there's angst. 

What mental model do we apply to a boss? Some people like being told what to do. Others prefer a facilitator. And others only require rare oversight. The control or authority we attribute to a boss is the control that she or he has over us. 

What if you are the one that gets promoted to being the boss? Knowing how others perceive you matters. You can set the tone, but not everyone is listening to it from the same frame of mind.

As a leader, you have to know when to put on the right hat. A boss must exercise control or authority over oneself, one's emotions, one's reactions, one's judgments. It's not just a position of responsibility but also one of accountability, because all of sudden you get to make decisions others don't. Respect that others give you that respect.

Why change is good

I and others just keep on living with the momentum of high school, college and graduate school behind us, accepting the decently-paid jobs that come our way to solve problems we're trained for, but don't necessarily question.

It's when we start questioning the problems themselves that the reasoning starts to falter. Why do we practice law and sell real estate and go to a 9-5 the way we do? Why are we such avid consumers and upholders of individual freedom? So much of it is cultural conditioning that we become self-aware of when we travel to another country, sometimes another state. It becomes clear that norms can be very different and we're surprised by the strange nature of other cultures. What a self-aggrandizing idea! I bet people visiting from other cultures have exactly the same reaction. So there's another layer to combat, the inherent ethnocentrism that emerges when we encounter not just different looking people, but a whole another set of rules we're not prepared for. It's like going through the 5 stages of grief, first there's denial and then anger and eventually we evolve to acceptance. We get the travel bug, spurred by not just wanderlust or a desire to escape, but to be renewed by our surroundings.

What if we could be renewed within our own cultural context? Major change usually occurs when we change our environment or our thinking. Travel ushers the former, but what creates the possibility for the latter? Self-awareness doesn't happen in a vacuum. We often think of meditation as an escape within ourselves, when it is in fact exactly the opposite, it is complete awareness of our present moment. That means we hear, see, smell and accept everything around us as it is. It's almost a hyper-sensitivity to our natural and unnatural surroundings.

The awareness of nature in itself is fascinating, because it can be very limited in an urban environment, but all of a sudden you see a beautiful tree swaying in front of your apartment building that you completely missed! Or you'll be walking in a hurry to a meeting and be stopped by pigeons doing some kind of mating dance in front of you. It's surprising that you could have missed it lost in your thoughts about what you're going to say, do, and think in your next face-to-face.

Nature is constant movement. Trees are never as static as they may seem. Life is happening around us, just asking us to witness it. It makes sense that our awareness sees that movement when we work simply to build up our senses.

What's even more fascinating is how aware we become of our unnatural surroundings, or rather the cultural mores that condition our minds daily to guide our thinking one way or another. If we're truly paying attention in the moment, we can immediately see the effect an advertisement has on us, its repetitive nature seeping into us hoping we'll think of the brand when we go to the store. We start noticing people's ticks and responses and our ticks and responses to other people. We hear the news differently, the intonations that exaggerate and polarize. We notice art in a way we never saw it before, seeing the incontrovertible evidence of the artist's life experience and emotion and reaction to the world embedded within a simple painting. We start seeing through things, not needing the environmental shift to notice how we live and why we live. The acknowledgement of our unnatural surroundings also becomes a constant as we shift to an instantaneous mental acuity of where we are and why we are.

How will we change otherwise?

Allow yourself to be your best guide

At times, after sitting and meditating, a feeling emerges as if you left your keys behind somewhere, or left something undone. As if there is something that needs attending to. It becomes a nagging itch and sticks until we address it. 

Perhaps it is something we left undone months ago that's creeped up, simply an item on our to do list. Or perhaps we feel like getting in touch with our parents, relatives, or siblings. Or feel the need to travel and explore a hidden part of ourselves. Perhaps it's that we need to listen more, or alternatively speak up when we get the chance. 

Whatever it is, that feeling is there now. It exists in your consciousness. Without applying any positive or negative attribution to it, we simply acknowledge it. Give it some time so we can better understand its origin and need for reemerging once again.

Sometimes, we apply labels to it: change, desire, longing, fear, etc. Doing so can turn us off from accounting for it. And even that is telling. What is it that we're applying this emotion to and why? What's behind our agitation or discomfort or hope? Pay attention to that because it's directly related to why the feeling came up in the first place.

Stay with that feeling without judging it. Allow yourself to go down a path you created, in a state of mind when you were most attuned to your inner workings. Recognize it and roll with it. You don't know where it will take you but some part of you wants to get there.

Why you need to see Fruitvale Station

I can't get Fruitvale Station out of my head and I'm writing about it two weeks after seeing it to see if I can explain why. I went to see it at Angelika in Soho and almost bought a ticket  for "Before Midnight" instead.

I had little foreknowledge of the Oscar Grant case and it didn't make a difference either way. The first scene of the film removed any foreshadowing whatsoever and it was more about the character's story than anything else.

Hard to talk about a brilliantly directed and acted film because really you just have to see it.

I'm still bewildered by the senselessness of what happened, shocked at the injustice of the aftermath, enraged by the helplessness I feel about avoiding it in the future.

This obviously isn't a light recommendation and I don't know what you will feel when you watch it. I simply recommend that you do. It's rare these days for a movie to move you so strongly. 

The next step on the ladder

Just because being the boss is the next step on the ladder doesn't mean you should want it or have it. Look among your colleagues and make a judgment call on who'd be a good leader. Who among you can facilitate a project efficiently, is humble but direct, is reliable yet lenient, brings up morale simply by being there, and is respected for handling tough situations well?

Regardless of the salary bump, of the title, or our current equal footing, I'd personally want a person with these character traits leading the charge because they will make me better as well.

Too often, we get caught up in beating out the next person because that's what we're supposed to do. It may not even be up to us, because we've institutionalized the construct that the best worker will make the best leader.

High merit in one skill set doesn't equate to high merit in another. We inherently know this, but choose to forget it just in case we're the one that might be selected, whether or not we want to even be the boss. Better judgment calls require less ego. 

Work on stuff that matters

Here are three video links I've emailed out more times than I can remember about doing work that matters. Ideas include the role of citizenship, creating for the sake of creating, and appealing to the purpose behind your work. Enjoy.

1. The Gardens of Democracy



2. The Clothesline Paradox & the Sharing Economy



3. How Great Leaders Inspire Action

Can you value empathy?

How would you measure the value of empathy?

It's emotional, much like happiness, which we measure using surveys. We sometimes use scales from 1-5, with 1 being the unhappiest and 5 being the happiest, and ask people to rate themselves. Or we qualify the happiness so it's not just numbers, such as are you "very happy", "somewhat happy", or "not happy at all"? It makes more sense to collect this data over a long period of time so you're not catching a person just after they lost their job or got a promotion.

Knowing we can rate happiness, can we rate empathy - in ourselves, in other people, in corporations, in our government?

I'm still working out the "algorithm", if there is one, so I'm going to echo Bob Sutton's post, which inspired this thought process, Felt Accountability: Some Emerging Thoughts. He puts out a 4-part framework for accountability:

1. Authorship
2. Mutual Obligation
3. Indifference
4. Mutual Contempt

The first two represent the positive side of empathy. Authorship is wanting to do a good job because you believe you're the best person for it and spurring others on to do the same. You're an example simply because you showed up and did the right thing. Empathy is contagious by definition and by paying it forward through your skill, you motivate others to do the same.

I have a personal example for mutual obligation. I came into healthcare wanting to build a system I'd want to be a patient in. I wanted to be a part of that change, knowing it would not only give back to me but also so many others. Proverbially, it's what got me up in the morning and as Bob said in his post, got me to "do the right thing even when no one was looking."

Indifference happens when bad incentives make us lose our empathy towards others. If you feel that the people around you don't care, why should you? When the group mentality favors indifference, it's hard to be the author or feel that everyone is mutually obligated to help each other. It's like soda going flat. It just tastes wrong and you can't drink it, so you either find another soda or force yourself not to care about it.

Mutual contempt has got to be the worst. It's the opposite of empathy. You care so little about the person next to you that you begin to despise them and resent them for putting you in this emotional state. It's a self-fulfilling death spiral and the only way I can think of avoiding it is by leaving or at best planning a managerial coup.

I like that Bob Sutton brings awareness to the injustices some people suffer at work so we can begin to recognize them and deal with them head on. In my opinion, finding the value of empathy is a step towards that, because it's in the search for it that I believe we'll find it.