Its “that” time of the year in India and some of us (Still!)
have bosses to deal with at the end of the day. Personally I have never had a
smooth relationship with most of my (mostly Indian) bosses in my 19 year work
history. I find myself at the receiving end most of the time of the year. So i decided to document just what is it about
THEM that bothers ME......for a change. Lets start with The boss’s
Algorithms of the trade
Take credit
In one of my past jobs a boss would routinely
ask me to do his presentations, documents, budget sheets, customer development
plans and so on. He would insist that he needs to review these. He would then
detach these, make necessary ‘changes’ like editing the author name ;) and send
it along to the CEO/Client etc. What
struck me was that he would not keep me in CC/Bcc while he shamelessly touted
the work as his own. On one occasion a customer actually noticed and asked me
if i had written the proposal! The customer then proceeded to forward the proposal
to me and lo and behold, it was my work verbatim but without any credit given
to me by the boss in question! I worked for this guy for many years before we
had a showdown one day (finally!). It was an end to a long suffering. On
another occasion I was hurriedly invited to a Presentation that was given by a
sales guy to the CEO and again, Lo and behold it was something i was asked to
create 2 weeks prior. Needless to say the Sales guys name appeared on the
Powerpoint. On this occasion the CEO
asked me if i agreed with the presentation. To which i said “I agree with 95% of it” The CEO then proceeded to ask me
what 5% do i not agree with and yours truly blew the whistle on the author name
field. On this occasion the salesperson (mind you he called himself the
Customer Relationship Owner) simply vanished from the company after the 2 week
notice. Not before angrily calling me up to lecture me on (his definition of )
Teamwork J
Morale: You win some you lose some.
Shoot the messenger
Another trick up a bosses sleeve was to
outsource the firing of unwanted people, for whatsoever reason to me. The blood was on my hands. It’s not that i
regret firing several of these folks. However the folks rarely saw the hand
behind the hand and would blurt out bad stuff about me in their exit
interviews. I like to call this the shoot the messenger Phenomenon. Needless to
say my bosses were aware of this phenomenon and though I was too, I was mostly
in no position to retaliate.
At the same time this boss would insist on doing
the final round of interviews for senior folks especially even my reportees. I would wonder why initially. But the logic
was simple. People often even “Reward the messenger” of good news and look up
to him as a Messiah. So if the final go ahead for a hire (formality) was done
by the boss the candidate would see him as the figure of authority and look up
to him during their tenure in the company.
Blame
This is an "Extremely" huge topic and i will post one incident only as “Blame” can become a
separate blog by itself. Taking it on the chin without falling apart is the
hallmark of a good mid-manager and yours truly has been there done that!. On
one occasion a manager would routinely call me at the end of an appraisal cycle
and tell me in a booming voice (with his cabin door wide open) “This year the
appraisals have not been done well!” The fact of the matter was that though I would
do the appraisals as diligently as possible, this guy would go into the
normalization meetings without even knowing all the folks names on the teams.
During my last year in this company I decided to give him back a taste of his
own medicine and told him in a booming voice in the hallway that “Though the
appraisals were done well this year the normalization was substandard” Needless
to say, I left soon after, Phew!
Explaining Existence
I have wondered how some of my bosses explained their TIME and EXISTENCE to
Their bosses! Wonder no more. They Explain their time as being spent on YOUR development!
LOL!
Lastly if many of the
bosses reportees figure out all his
algorithms then.........
ITS RE-ORG TIME!!!!!!!!
I have several more Algos that i can think of
Do you have a "Bossy Algorithm" to share? Do comment... Lets give power back to the real knowledge workers!
Regards
Milind Thombre
