Winning - Jack Welch [104]
That may sound like a lot of stuff to do, but there are no real shortcuts.
Along the journey, you won’t get every promotion you want when you want it. But if you take the “long way,” eventually—and sometimes sooner than you expect—you’ll reach your destination.
18
Hard Spots
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THAT DAMN BOSS
I’VE NEVER KNOWN A PERSON who didn’t light up at the memory of a truly great boss. And for good reason: great bosses can be friends, teachers, coaches, allies, and sources of inspiration all in one. They can shape and advance your career in ways you never expected—and sometimes they can even change your life.
In stark contrast, a bad boss can just about kill you.
Not literally of course, but a bad boss can kill that part of your soul where positive energy, commitment, and hope come from. On a daily basis, a bad boss can leave you feeling angry, hurt, and bitter—even physically ill.
If you’re like most people, over the course of a forty-something-year career, you will have a handful of great bosses, many more that are pretty good, and one or two total jerks—people who are so consistently awful they make you want to throw it in and quit.
Bad bosses come in every variety. Some grab all the credit, some are incompetent, some kiss up but kick down; others bully and humiliate, have mood swings, withhold praise and money, break promises, or play favorites.*
Occasionally, there are bad bosses who display several of these characteristics all at once.
How do these people ever get ahead?
Well, sometimes they happen to be very talented. They deliver the numbers or they’re extremely creative. They can have shrewd political alliances or maybe even a family member in high places.
Bad bosses, incidentally, tend to have longer lives in some industries rather than others. On the creative side, very talented writers, artists, and producers who get promoted to run projects are often given a pass on bad behavior because they are “geniuses.” Wall Street is also often a safe harbor for bad bosses. Top moneymakers are often thought of as irreplaceable, and they know it, making some of them even more insufferable.
But never mind industry specifics. The world has jerks. Some of them get to be bosses.
This chapter is about what to do when one of them gets to be your boss.
Now, this chapter won’t provide any hard-and-fast answers because each bad boss situation is unique. But it will walk you through a series of questions that hopefully will surface the right approach to your bad boss situation, “right” in the sense that it fits your goals in life and at work.
Before we look at those questions, though, let me state the overriding principle behind this chapter.
In any bad boss situation, you cannot let yourself be a victim. That theme has come up before in this book—most recently in the chapter on mergers and acquisitions—and, for many of the same reasons, it applies here too.*
I realize that a bad boss (like a merger) may make you want to bitch and moan to your coworkers, whine to your family, punch a wall, or watch too much TV with a drink in your hand. He may make you want to surf the Web or call headhunters, looking for jobs anywhere but where you are.
All in all, he may end up making you want to feel very sorry for yourself.
Don’t!
In any business situation, seeing yourself as a victim is completely self-defeating. And when it comes to your career, it’s an attitude that kills all your options—it can even be the start of a career death spiral. I have a friend, a financial analyst at a Wall Street firm, who bounced from one crummy job to another after he had a falling out with his bad boss and quit in a huff. Out in the market, with no recommendations, all he had was an “I was screwed” story of woe to tell prospective employers. Ultimately, five years later, he ended up with the same job he had started from, only at a less-respected firm and at about 60 percent of the