Winning - Jack Welch [105]
Obviously, you shouldn’t always stay with a bad boss. Sometimes you need to get out. Regardless of your decision, avoid the pervasive victim mentality. You know what I mean. We live in a culture where parents sue fast-food restaurants for making their kids fat and cities spend millions of dollars a year to settle claims for injuries caused by uneven sidewalks and potholes.
Please!
Like every other unfortunate or unfair event that befalls you in life, working for a difficult boss is your problem and you must solve it.
To do that, ask yourself the following series of questions. The answers will help you navigate what is undeniably a painful situation. Painful—but yours to accept, fix, or end.*
The first question is:
Why is my boss acting like a jerk? Sometimes the answer to this question is a no-brainer. Your boss is acting like a jerk because that’s the way he is. He may be fine with customers and fairly reasonable with his own bosses and peers, but he treats everyone below him with the same kind of bad behavior—be it in the form of intimidation, belligerence, arrogance, neglect, secrecy, or sarcasm.
It is an entirely different situation if your boss is just impossible toward you.
In that case, you need to start asking yourself what you have done to draw his disapproval. That’s right—you need to ask yourself if you are the cause of your boss’s behavior. Generally speaking, bosses are not awful to people whom they like, respect, and need. If your boss is being negative to you—and mainly you—you can feel pretty confident that he has his version of events, and his version concerns your attitude or performance.
You’ve got to find out what’s going on.
Start by asking yourself that question, but know that self-assessment is difficult, to put it mildly. Even with a huge amount of maturity and a cast-iron stomach, it is hard to see yourself as others do.
I know of an HR executive at a training center in the South who spent ten years administering 360-degree feedback programs and then delivering the conclusions to the individual being evaluated. “Seven out of ten people are completely stunned by what they hear,” she said. “When they get their feedback, they think I’ve mixed up the forms. They are convinced their colleagues must be talking about somebody else.”
The problem, the HR executive said, is that people generally overrate their performance on the job and their popularity with the team—most often by a factor of two or more.
Know that, then, as you conduct what is an admittedly difficult “mirror test.” Think hard about your performance, and press yourself for the ways you may have fallen short. Think about why your colleagues might not consider you a team player. In a state of forced self-loathing, gauge your personal productivity, your face time in the office, your contribution to sales and earnings. Maybe you open a lot of deals but never close them. Maybe you close a lot of deals but boast too much. Maybe people weren’t really “OK with it” when you blew a big account a few months back.
Finally, face into your attitude toward authority, because it just might be that the source of your problem with your boss is that you are, at your core, a boss hater.
Boss haters are a real breed. It doesn’t make any difference who these people work for, they go into any authority relationship with barely repressed cynicism. Who knows why—upbringing, experiences at work or home, political bent. It doesn’t really matter. Boss haters usually exude constant low-level negativity toward “the system,” and when they do, their bosses feel it, and they return the favor.
I’ll never forget a group of boss haters we had at GE headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut—a half-dozen or so guys who ate lunch together in the cafeteria every day. They labeled themselves “The Table of Lost Dreams.” Each of these employees was very talented. One had a real knack for turning just the right phrase. He had a background in journalism and worked in PR. Fortunately, the media found his cynicism appealing. Another was a labor-relations specialist who