Good Bosses are Good, Bad Bosses are Better

I recently read a quote on Facebook which reads: “A bad job with good boss is better than a good job with bad boss.” This quote was liked and endorsed by a large number of people, which shows that most people think that the quote is right. I however, disagree with the quote. I have learned from my experience that you grow best when you work with the so called bad bosses. Let me explain why?

WHO IS A GOOD BOSS?

There is no universally accepted definition of good or bad boss. Usually we consider a boss good, when we ‘feel’ good working with him. A boss is good for us when he may have following qualities.

1: Think Similarly:- When you and your boss think alike on most matters, you consider your boss to be good because there is little chance of conflict between you and you always feel good working with him. 

2: Interfere Rarely:- If your boss does not interfere in your work, you are very happy with him and call him a good boss.

3: Kind Unconditionally:-If your boss has the reputation to being nice and kind to everyone all the time and never punish anyone, he is bound to be extremely popular and rated as a good boss.

WHO IS A BAD BOSS?

A bad boss is one who makes you ‘feel’ bad. If your boss is not good all the time, you consider him bad. If your boss has helped you hundred times but punished you only once, you don’t remember those hundred acts of goodness, but remember that one punishment. However, it may be a blessing in disguise to work under such a so called bad boss. Let us examine why?

1: Think Differently:- When the thoughts of your boss does not match with your own, you are always uncomfortable working with him. You face conflicts with your boss internally and externally. Yet the strength of your character and your ability to follow your conviction is tested only under such bosses. It has been my experience that I have learned most under such bosses because there has always been an opposite point of view from the boss, which I was often forced to accept and even implement. I always believe in giving my frank view even if that is overruled by the boss. Eventually either I or my boss would be proven to be right. I have never found my views to be always proven right or the view of the boss always proven wrong. If my views are mostly right, often the boss would start giving more importance to my views and if the views of the boss is mostly right, I would develop more faith on his decision-making and also learn a couple of new things from the boss. Hence in the process, both I and my boss learned from each other. 

2: Drive Forcefully:- If a boss does not interfere with the work of anyone, soon many power centers are created in the organization, where everyone thinks that he is the boss.  This leads to chaos in the organization where everyone is pulling everyone else in his own direction. Soon the organization loses its direction as all its energies are dissipated in internal conflicts.  A leader must have a vision for the organization and courage to implement it. However, every action produces reaction from people within and without, who are adversely affected by such action. An effective boss has to ensure that everyone falls in line for the benefit of the organization, which is bound to antagonize some people.  If you are one of them, you are sure to feel bad working under such bosses and even hate them. It is better to use such opportunity to get out of your complacency mode and march shoulder-to-shoulder with your boss and prove that you are better than the rest. I can assure you that you will soon become a better leader working under such boss.

3: Discriminate Effectively:- If your boss is good for everyone, he is usually good for none. You tend to lose motivation working under such bosses because he fails to appreciate your good work and punish others for their bad work. Imagine a boss who gives 10/10 to all subordinates because he has to be good for everyone. Such a good boss is actually a timid boss who is scared of annoying anyone. Alexander the Great once said, “I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.” If you work under such bosses, you will soon become a sheep yourself even if you had been a lion earlier. A boss who discriminate good and bad officials is usually unpopular because good people are always in minority in most organizations. If you are on the ‘wrong’ side of such boss, it is the right time to introspect. Instead of cursing him for being inhuman and unfair, focus on becoming better than what you had ever been and create excellence for the self and the organization. 

THE BAD-BAD BOSS

There are of course some bosses who are bad for everyone and it is a torture to work with them. Thankfully, such bosses are rare and they are usually fired in a good Corporate and shunted to insignificant position in government organization if firing is almost an impossible option. 

It is always a pleasure to work with good bosses but one who can perform only with good boss leaves himself at the mercy of others. Let us not pray to work only with good bosses but pray to become stronger to excel with even the bad bosses. When you are able to produce great results with good as well as bad bosses, you take control in your life in your hand and become the master of your destiny.

Let’s remember the words of Jim Rohn, an American entrepreneur, author and motivational speaker.

Don't wish it were easier; wish you were better.

Don't wish for less problems; wish for more skills.

Don't wish for less challenges; wish for more wisdom.

Keynote Speech of Mr N Ram on the Book Launch Function of “The Secret Red Book of Leadership”

The first thing about this book is that it is interesting. It is interesting in the theme, or rather the web of themes, it takes up; in the questions and dilemmas it examines and, where necessity confronts without inhibition or cant or self-consciousness; in its freedom from play-it-safe, much –to-be-said-on-both-sides conventional thinking, And it is interesting also in its assured tone and voice, its ability to engage general as well as specialist readers and, from time to time , surprise them with its findings., hypothesis, and assertions.

It is no idle boast that the book title makes when it promises to reveal the secret, or rather the webs of secrets, of that fascinating mix of the abstract and the concrete that is commonly known as leadership. Awdhesh Singh drills straight into his subject without fuss or the kinds of oversimplification combined with jargon-filled equivocation that management gurus seem so fond of when they seek to impart domain wisdom in print. Listen to the author’s no-nonsense definition of his subject matter in the Introduction:

Leadership is a game that you must learn to win by using all means at your disposal. In leadership, winning is everything. It is not about principles, but only results. It matters not what a leader does, as long as he is effective. On the contrary, if you fail to achieve visible success, you are not accepted as a leader despite all your talents and commitment to the cause.

I used the terms, ‘web of secrets’ and ‘web of themes’, advisedly. Leaders, the author asserts, are “quite mysterious” creatures; they “hide more than they reveal,” including mortal danger “like an iceberg.” The challenge therefore is to “understand the leaders for what they are, inside out.” As for the web of themes, the Contents pages list so many subjects that you start the book by wondering if the author is going to roam too freely across too wide a field. But reading the book, you discover that this is an ambitious work of analysis, of philosophizing, and of exposition with the aid of concrete examples, anecdotes, and some striking quotations drawn from a variety of fields. And the surprise at the end of the book is that it does deliver on the promise of the title, by yielding a debatable and testable model of what constitute leadership, what leadership is about, “inside out.” I use “debatable” in a positive sense, of course.

I think The Secret Red Book of Leadership works, against the odds, thanks to the clear-headed and hard-nosed way in which the author approaches a much-studied subject and also thanks to the overall plan and organization of the book. The author presents his analysis , hypothesis, findings and reflections in 34 chapters grouped under six interconnected parts, (1) The Need of Leadership, (II) Dilemma of Leaders, (III) The Necessary Evils of Leaders, (IV) The Façade of Leaders (V) Developing Leadership, and (VI) Practising Leadership

I found myself drawn particularly to Part (II), “Dilemma of Leaders” There is a very interesting discussion of the ‘”eternal” philosophical questions of ends and means, ends versus means, ends over means, ends as means, ends leading to other ends in a never-ending historical process. It is central dilemma for leaders. Listen to these passages from “The Secret Red Book of Leadership”

“You have to decide if a ‘good end by evil means’ is better than ‘good means that lead to an evil end’. This is a difficult decision, but unavoidable in the real world. It is tough to win fairly when your opponent is using all types of unfair means….In real life, every end is actually a beginning for another end. Hence, there are actually no ends; each end is nothing but a means to the next end. Therefore, if the end is good, it implies that the means are also good.”

“A wise leader knows that ends are more important than means. It does not imply that leaders have to necessarily travel on an evil path to achieve noble ends, but if they have to traverse that route for some time, they would not hesitate to do it for a noble end. This is the ultimate sacrifice a leader must make. For a leader, there is nothing good or evil; he tries to stay above these distinctions. He aims only at the result and achieves them for his followers—by all means, be it good or evil”.

These are provocative assertions; you may agree or disagree with the author. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, a great leader by the standards of any age, had a quite different view of the matter, as the author points out at the outset. But the point is that you need to approach this perennially debated issue on its own merits, by closely examining the principles at stake as well as their relationship to the real world. You can test the prepositions advanced in this book in relation to the life histories of great leaders, transformers of institutions and societies such as Henry VIII, Oliver Cromwell, Robespierre, Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Deng Xiaoping, Gandhi, Nehru, Netaji and others from more recent times. But you cannot resolve the problem by falling back on conventional wisdom, especially when it comes to figuring out how great or true leaders have thought about and handled this perennial dilemma.

Equally interesting is The Secret Red Book’s examination of the connectedness, and indeed inseparability, of good and evil and what it means for leadership, “inside out”. To understand the background to this fairly brief chapter, you need to read to another publication, a slim volume comprising twenty essays by the author titled “Good and Evil: Two Sides of the Same Coin” and published earlier this year. But let me not give away the argument here, nor the reasoning leading to the conclusions presented in the other chapters, on key questions revolving around the constitutive elements of leadership such as “Burning desire to Lead and Achieve”, “The Hunger for Power,” “The Propaganda War”, “Developing Imagination,”, “Developing Courage”, “Creating Trust,” and so on.

What’s left, you might wonder. What’s left, in a figurative as well as literal sense, is what has possibly been the defining question for leadership down the ages, “Leaving a Legacy.” The qualifier “great,” or its equivalent in other language, is one of the most overused and misused words in any language. But no one, I think, can reasonably dispute the author’s conclusion that “a leader become great when”—and let me emphasize, only when he or she—“leads large number of people to a common goal based on a common ideology… Great leaders leave great legacies that influence future generations.”

I hope these remarks have kindled in you a real interest in the web of themes, questions, and dilemmas brought together and examined in the book being launched today, and a desire to buy the book and read it seriously and critically. 

(Mr N Ram delivered this keynote speech during the  launch function of "The Secret Red Book of Leadership" in Chennai on 18th December 2014. Mr K Srikkant (Former Indian Cricket Captain) and T S Krishnamurthy (Former Election Commissioner of India) were the Honorable Guests of Honour for the function. )

 

About Mr N Ram

Mr. N. Ram, Chairman of Kasturi & Sons Ltd., Publisher, The Hindu and Group Newspapers, and former Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu, Frontline magazine, Business Line daily, and Sportstar weekly of The Hindu group of publications, has been in the media field since 1966.

His areas of special journalistic interest include Indian politics; aspects of India’s foreign policy and nuclear policy; external pressures on India’s economic and political sovereignty; issues of corruption and abuse of power; the challenge of communalism and fundamentalism in India; the Sri Lankan ethnic crisis and India’s interaction with it; freedom of expression issues, and the role of media in society.

Ram led The Hindu’s investigation into the Bofors arms deal corruption scandal; and before that (in 1980-81), did an extended investigation and analysis of the conditionalities of India’s controversial SDR 5 billion Extended Fund Facility (EFF) arrangement with the International Monetary Fund.

His investigation of the Bofors scandal, in association with Chitra Subramaniam and others in The Hindu, was recognized by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism during its centennial celebrations in 2012 as one of  ‘50 Great Stories reported, investigated, produced, filmed, edited, photographed, anchored, and/or tweeted by Columbia journalists’ over the century (http://centennial.journalism.columbia.edu/50-great-stories/).

Honours and awards include the Padma Bhushan (for journalism), 1990; the Asian Investigative Journalist of the Year Award from the Press Foundation of Asia (1990); the B.D. Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism (1989); the National Citizen’s Award (1995); XLRI’s First JRD Tata Award for Business Ethics (2002); and Sri Lanka Ratna, Sri Lanka’s highest National Honour conferred on non-nationals (2005).

Ram is co-author with Susan Ram of the biography, R.K. Narayan: The Early Years, 1906-1945, Penguin India, New Delhi, 1996; and the author of Riding the Nuclear Tiger, a Signpost publication, LeftWord Books, New Delhi, 1999. His research publications include studies of ``The Nuclear Dispute: An Indian Perspective’’ and ``An Independent Press and Anti-Hunger Strategies: The Indian Experience,’’ the latter published in a book, The Political Economy of Hunger, Volume-1: Entitlements and Well-being, ed. Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990. A 15,000-word essay, ``The Great Indian Media Bazaar: Emerging Trends and Issues for the Future,’’ has been published in India: Another Millennium? edited by Romila Thapar, Viking, Penguin India, New Delhi, 2000. 

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