Bad Bosses

Here's a headline ... there's a lot of bad bosses, managers and leaders in businesses and organisations worldwide.

Well, it's probably not such a headline. It doesn't surprise many of us really, does it?

Does it matter? Bad bosses can still get good results can't they?

It depends ...

Certainly it depends on what and how you measure good results. A bad boss may indeed be able to get some good business results - but not over time, and certainly not in the same organisation.

But the bottom line question is probably, will having good bosses in the business or organisation get better results?

Now, defining what a boss, a manager and a leader needs to do in a short blog is another challenge of brevity. But let's condense the role of a boss into two perhaps overly simplistic generalisations. For this blog's sake, let's assume that the role of a boss involves:

* managing tasks (the "technical" management skills: setting objectives, planning, implementing, controlling); and,
* managing people (the "relationship" management skills).

And let's make another assumption, that the business schools, universities and vocational training providers can do a reasonable job in training bosses in the first of these two roles - technical management.

So my question becomes, if a boss is good at managing people, does that mean that business results will improve?

An article in the Australian Financial Review on Friday 20 April 2007 (page 68) provides part of the answer. The title of the article? 'Staff flee bad bosses, not companies'. (http://www.afr.com/home/)

The article opens by stating:

The historically low unemployment rate that is making it difficult for all sectors to find quality candidates, especially among the small pool of accounting and finance professionals, should encourage organisations to focus on their internal culture'.

In an Australian context, not only is the labour market tight - particularly for young professionals, knowledge workers and specific trade qualified workers - demographics point to the fact that the labour market is only going to become even tighter. The implications should be obvious. Attracting talented workers will be challenging enough, retaining them in a work culture of bad bosses will be impossible.

The executive general manager of Chandler Macleod's Recruitment Solutions (http://www.chandlermacleod.com.au) discussed a recent survey in the Australian Financial Review article that found that a whopping 82% of workers resigned from their jobs because of bad bosses!

How do we get good bosses from bad bosses?

My perspective is that many organisations spend a lot of time either providing in-house training on the technical management and job requirements - or focusing on these skills at the recruitment stage. But, very little time is spent on developing or selecting for the relationship management skills.

To me it's clear. Leadership, team and emotional intelligence skills are critical if an organisation is going to develop its bosses. If the business chooses not to, then its increasingly valuable team members will almost certainly choose to work somewhere else.

What's your organisation choosing to do?