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By Root 743 0

just by my experience with bosses, but also by what I've learned from being one. What I've come to see after fifteen years of having people report to me is that the earth mother tends to produce a certain type of worker: slugs If you are too nice or too generous or too lenient, your employees will gradually stretch the rules because they know they can get away with it. They arrive late, leave early, make personal calls, eat lots of messy snacks at their desks, chat with friends, disappear for what seems like hours, and hang posters of Fabio at their work stations. They may also gradually lower their work standards, figuring that if you didn't say anything the first time you won't now. Like children, they keep pushing to see how far they can go.

Messy desks and Fabio pictures aren't the only problems. If you're an earth mother to your charges, they will soon be finding ways for you to take care of more and more of their needs. They will take up your time talking endlessly about their dilemmas (personal as well as business). They will ask you to solve their problems, and hand in work that you must finish or fine-tune.

A good girl worries that if she isn't real nice, she'll be viewed as too tough, mean, perhaps even bitchy. Someone once said that a guy earns a description as ruthless for bombing a small country; a woman earns it for not returning a phone call.

And yet people crave a certain “bossiness” from their bosses, even female ones. Without it there's a lack of excitement and momentum, no healthy sense of reward and repercussion “The truth is,” says sociologist Pepper Schwartz, “people want to be directed. It relaxes them to know that someone is leading them. Without that authority, you make people nervous.”

Be thoughtful, but don't be a pushover. Be fair, but ultimately do what you want, based on what you think is best A few other pointers:

1. Create house rules. Employees actually like having rules. I don't mean hardass, obnoxious rules but sensible basics about expense accounts, vacations, protocol. You should periodically send out refresher memos or changes in the status quo. These memos are not only titillating because everyone analyzes them, but they also convey a sense of order.

2. Don't always aim for consensus. Linguist Deborah Tannen, Ph.D., author of You Just Don't Understand and Talking 9–5, says that men are driven by a need to achieve and maintain the upper hand, while women seek to confirm and support—and to reach consensus That's certainly the good-girl way. You strive for consensus among those who work for you so that everyone will feel happy, “empowered.” and committed.And yet any bold, gutsy idea is bound to have dissenters. If you try to make everybody happy, you will end up diluting the idea or throwing it out.Nothing has taught me more about the danger of consensus than creating magazine covers. You soon learn that some of the best-selling covers are those that people scrunch up their noses over. One of my most successful covers at Child was a shot of a little boy I discovered in the lobby of my apartment building. I thought that the picture the art director and I selected captured him looking a little perplexed and tender as he crawled across the floor, but five people I showed it to at the magazine announced, to my complete chagrin. “He looks grouchy.” Fortunately, I wasn't influenced by their opinion.If you've got a great idea backed up by solid research, present it to your staff with confidence and don't look to them to “approve” it for you. That doesn't mean you want only yes-men and -women working for you. I've had several bosses over the years who didn't want to hear any negatives, and, in the long run, they suffered because they got no feedback on the ideas of theirs that didn't work. In the early stages of an idea you always probe to find the possible downside. But once you've made your commitment to a concept, present it to your staff as a fait accompli. There will be people who scrunch up their noses or look miffed; simply thank them for their input and move on. Psychologist Judith