POLL: Can ILE support a Rolling Being A Boss Thread

I have a small business with 10 employees. Perhaps not coincidentally I found my first white beard hair today.

to talk about boss stuff, being one, working for one, thinking about becoming one, etc.

On these broad terms I think it could succeed. There'd be a certain amount of overlap with annoying co-workers, but that shouldn't be fatal, since there's a lot to cover that isn't of that nature.

One of the nice things about being a fed boss is the balance sheet is all but out of my hands entirely. But I don't want to turn the poll thread into the rolling boss thread itself, so I'll shut up now.

why oh why do I always put my poll end dates way out in "whole television shows will begin and end before the results come in" territory

my brother-in-law is a boss, and it may drive him full-bore nuts before my sister does.

xp Not spending enough time thinking about your specs?

Almost inexplicably I now manage 18 people. I could go for some boss talk. This shit isn't easy.

i'm a boss

teaching is kind of like being a boss

(but when i apply for non-teaching jobs they seem uniformly convinced that i have no 'supervisory experience')

i'm a "boss" but i don't know that i wanna talk about it tbh

rather disappointed that this is actually about being a boss and not BEING A BOSS

wait it's not?

Not on ILE, maybe on (board suggestion provided in response)

yeah this seems like auto-77 business somehow

j. there is a teaching thread on 77 (? i think) which is i think open to all kinds of teaching experience

I have bumped such threads this year

They occasionally give me an intern to tell what to do

I had a vaguely bosslike position for four years and was pretty bad at it. Voted yes.

start the thread! no need for results

What KM said.

ffs that's just the attitude I've to deal with day in day out

I am not a boss, could never imagine myself as one, and wouldn't want to be one. But I am still interested in a Rolling Being A Boss Thread.

you guys def need to do this on 77, and even then i personally would be v. careful about what you discuss.

CAD OTM

Yeah 77 it up imma need these murders not to be traceable

meta-topic, why is it so dangerous to talk about being a boss?

I'll tell u if u start the poll on 78

One more vote for 77

?

*votes then removes bookmark*

Take this as a fact checking mission - we need to get their temperature on the idea.

something something going forward

Christmas party last night oh god

http://i.usatoday.net/communitymanager/_photos/on-deadline/2011/05/04/OBLx-large.jpg

Christmas party last night oh god

go on

I upset the four ladies that were the only other ones left standing at 4am by declining to take them to a stripclub. And one of them spent an awkward hour asking me out in front of everyone and not rly taking any of my various 'no's as an answer.

humblebraggin'

lol. sounds p crazed. do you actually relate to your workmates or are they just distant others?

i had two work xmas parties this week, lunch plus all day drinking on weds/thurs - it was fairly civilised apart from the impressive refusal to go back to the office on thurs.

xpost nv otm

It will have been (note suitability of the usage for once) humblebragging if there's no fallout but I'm off til Thursday so it might be OK.

It wasn't crazed at all the suggestion came from nowhere and with such vehemence it was rly weird tbh.

Prob relate to them more than I should if only there were a thread about mgmt to consult

wait how dyou mean was there just a mutiny re Thursday?

so like weds was party for all the people who do my job in the office, kind of cutting across teams, and thursday was just my team. so that meant maybe 5/6 of the team had been out of the office all afternoon weds too. my boss said he had to go back to the office for a meeting and i think this made everyone kind of think that we all had to go back.

a lot of people stayed after lunch till about 3pm, then we went on to another pub and it was maybe 5/6 left. about 4pm some more left. then it was three of us until 6pm. the best part is that on my way in to get my bag at 6ish, i met my boss on the way out and he said he had no expectation of anyone coming back, then suggested we go for a beer as it was an ex-colleague's birthday. i'm a contractor and he also refused to countenance me not invoicing for either half day, basically said us all getting to know each other is important etc.

all very positive...

is part of the joy of being a boss having to call your employees your "team"?

I try not to. Call them a "team," that is.

i try to avoid talking about "my" peeps tbh, it's the "my" that rankles more than any notion of "team" but our structure isn't really a team imo

anyhoo i set myself a reminder to get mince pies for end of term team meeting on monday, booze v much frowned on round our workplace

I believe in calling it a team, completely. But I've been lucky enough to work in some places where the people there made me feel like I was part of a team.

I actually did the secret santa in my office this year - that's how much I actually like the atmosphere. I did have to discuss it at counselling beforehand but I TOOK PART.

xpost I am not a boss of any sort btw - have been in the past but now am just on the level with most of my peers

I've a team that are my team the same way they'd be my team if I was in the team and didn't own their souls. Fixation on this would seem forced to me.

's not a fixation just feels weird saying it

i feel p normal saying it - like we do work together for a common goal - it is a team. i guess tho if i worked somewhere where the common goal was awful or profit-related or not something people could share, i'd be less inclined to call it a team. in my last job our team meetings were like communal outpourings of laughter/rage at the obstacles around us. a good team!

(like i'm aware of the pernicious way it tends to be overused in situations where you think everyone you work with is the worst)

As I always say to my team, context is so, so important.

I really try to watch the "my" part and replace it with "our" when circumscribing the "team" but sometimes it is very hard because I do really take immense amounts of pride in the people I've hired so it's weird

This paper was quite good btw, I read it on the train this week and intend to use some of the findings in future interviews - although really I was watching out for all of the key characteristics anyway I think because I instinctively hate self-serving bullies, as we all should

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/toxic-workers

Tombot OTM about avoiding "my" team. Unless you mean it as "my country" or "my city" - meaning the one you inhabit and belong to - rather than "my" as in "my vassals" or "my minions."

IMO there's nothing inherently corny about using the rhetoric of teamwork and pride. If knew--jerk cynicism and sarcasm work for you, great - but for me, everything good I've ever seen accomplished has been the result of a diverse group of people striving toward a common goal. This is just as true of a network migration or business proposal as it is of a book, newspaper, play, album, or concert.

Even when the work is unalloyed drudgery, a good boss can find a way to ennoble it. I once managed a dreadfully dull data-entry project by appealing both to the teamwork ethos (help your fellow workers achieve their own success, as they work to help achieve yours), and to a larger-picture goal (this work helps, however incrementally, to create employment for others).

For me, being a boss is rewarding not because I am able to order people around, but because I can hire people who were unemployed yesterday. This allows them to feed their families, pay their rent, etc.

Oh word, hiring is the best part - the second best part is when they get so good you can't keep them.

I lost a dude to a different part of the division just last month and I genuinely consider his exit and promotion to be a signal that I am doing very well, at least as a talent scout.

The other thing I can confirm is that the axiom "bored people leave" is 100% accurate. Every person who has left my our team has done so because they thought they had found more fulfilling work, not for $ differentials or because I was a dickhead. Or at least, that's what I perceive.

(I mean I might very well be a dickhead, but that's not why they leave)

Twice in my career I've asked for a direct report to be promoted above me. Didn't work either time, alas, but I continue to believe those persons would have been better as my boss (more organized, more diligent, more conscientious) than my underling.

One of the perversities of working as an individual contributor (content creator, creative genius, or whatever) is that eventually someone is going to want to make you manage people. Every time I am in a job and I get busy, my bosses' first instinct is to hire me an assistant. But I don't want an assistant, I say. Hire me a boss. Someone to worry about the details of the budget and the schedule and the pipeline; I don't want to manage a group of writers; I just want to keep writing. No dice.

One of the perversities of working as an individual contributor (content creator, creative genius, or whatever) is that eventually someone is going to want to make you manage people. Every time I am in a job and I get busy, my bosses' first instinct is to hire me an assistant. But I don't want an assistant, I say. Hire me a boss. Someone to worry about the details of the budget and the schedule and the pipeline; I don't want to manage a group of writers; I just want to keep writing. No dice.

Yeah, I'm terrible at managing other people. I've never been able to think of things for an intern to do, never mind a salary-drawing employee.

That sounds familiar - I was a manager of a team of one other person once, there was too much work for me and so they hired someone smart as my underling - I was not much good even at managing his work (which was basically the extent of my managing), either too hands off or doing the work myself. I don't think anyone thought that the resultant disfunction was any fault of his, which is something.

And that was it for basically a decade, then I got made Sprint Leader, and at the end of the sprint rang for an ambulance at 2 in the morning because I'd never had stress like that before and thought I was having a heart attack.

I may well join 77 for this thread though, particularly if it is a "Teams: how do they work?", from above and below and beside.

I will never be a boss (I have no people skills, no planning skills, no talent for Bigger Pictures) but I would spy on your boss-related threads. was addicted to http://www.askamanager.org for a while there (caveat: some of the ads there kill my browser now)

Tombot OTM about avoiding "my" team. Unless you mean it as "my country" or "my city" - meaning the one you inhabit and belong to - rather than "my" as in "my vassals" or "my minions."

just to clarify i have said "my team" itt but i am not the boss or manager - just kinda joined the vague derail about deems' xmas party. when i was a manager i never used "my team" as a thing either but i didn't have much of a sense of a team in that job.

IMO there's nothing inherently corny about using the rhetoric of teamwork and pride. If knew--jerk cynicism and sarcasm work for you, great - but for me, everything good I've ever seen accomplished has been the result of a diverse group of people striving toward a common goal. This is just as true of a network migration or business proposal as it is of a book, newspaper, play, album, or concert.

this is completely otm. also like, a team implies fairness, respect, everyone working to a good level. one of the things that bothers me about people being disingenuous or doing really shoddy work is that it means someone else has to do it, kinda subverts the idea of everyone working together.

(again most of my experience is public sector)

Yeah, ideally "I am on a team with you" indicates "I consider you a peer", at a minimum.

This is kind of obvious, but I've seen a pattern a bunch of times as a team grows from "I have been promoted, but am basically doing the same work as the rest of you" to "I am doing nothing but management work", which is a fucker to navigate well.

Ha, also if you have one guy who cares twice as much about everything than anyone else - don't make him the leader.

i'm in grad school right now just so i can potentially BE middle / upper management some day...which i don't have a lot of interest in but there doesn't seem any other way to do a little more big picture / less tedious office stuff, and make a little more money to maybe have a family some day

Yeah, I'm terrible at managing other people. I've never been able to think of things for an intern to do, never mind a salary-drawing employee.

― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱),

my 'management' experiences have kind of been this

Yes, it is a pain coming up with tasks for people who aren't yet ready to actually fly on their own, but who should also be doing something other than twiddling their thumbs waiting for the precise Right Thing.

This is related to one of my current sources of heartburn: my colleagues and I work in a consulting/contracting environment. That means that customers pay for our expertise - by the hour. But they're paying for knowledge work, not something countable like the assembly of widgets. Measuring intellectual labor by hours spent allegedly on-task is problematic for a lot of reasons, but almost everyone does it this way. It rewards people who work slowly, for example. It shortchanges people whose expertise allows them to avoid pitfalls and to work smart rather than hard. And it is also fails to capture thinking time, some of which may be subconscious and take place in the shower as opposed to at the keyboard.

Plus "management" often consists of vigilance and responsiveness as opposed to hands-on direct labor - I'm at home right now, and I may reading Cracked or posting on ILX or fiddling with a guitar or drinking beer. But I'm monitoring e-mail and the phone, and if something were to come up, I would handle it. So am I "at work"? Am I only half "at work," so I should charge for four hours after doing eight hours of this? How honest should I be?

If Person X can do something in two hours that would take four hours for someone less experienced, how many hours should X put down on the timesheet: two (because that's how long X actually spent)? Four (because that's what X's work is worth)? Three (a compromise between the two)? I can't give a good answer for my own time, let alone those of my teammates.

Maybe it's the worst system except for all the others (like Churchill is alleged to have said about democracy).

So like when we get to the end of this poll and start the actual thread, that is exactly the type of line of questioning I look forward to collectively wrestling with.

In the meantime did anybody else go check out the "toxic workers" paper on HBS that I linked?

better management = more precise goals = easier for managers to tell their underlings what to do =======3

some people are good at managing, some aren't. it has nothing to do with how good you are at counting beans.

Xps I've saved the link but fucked if I'm gonna read it on my days off

This is related to one of my current sources of heartburn: my colleagues and I work in a consulting/contracting environment. That means that customers pay for our expertise - by the hour. But they're paying for knowledge work, not something countable like the assembly of widgets. Measuring intellectual labor by hours spent allegedly on-task is problematic for a lot of reasons, but almost everyone does it this way. It rewards people who work slowly, for example. It shortchanges people whose expertise allows them to avoid pitfalls and to work smart rather than hard. And it is also fails to capture thinking time, some of which may be subconscious and take place in the shower as opposed to at the keyboard.

really can relate to this, though not actually due to financial short-changing - we are all on day rates, just the lack of visibility of work and the quality of people's work.

i work in a contracting environment, one with a lot of procedure built to make sure work gets done, like agile etc. and what we do (writing content for civil service) is sort of measurable in terms of output, ie how many pages get done in a week. but even with that i think it's extremely hard for there to be any control or sense of progress. you can have a project manager who seeks targets from people and understands people's different way of working, and they can be good enough to get all the work ready before it's passed on, and deal with kinks in the process etc etc etc.

because the process is difficult and the government experts can be slow or resistant, there's always a sort of frosted glass window in the process which people can kind of hang behind - like a way for less work to be done. i'm not really like old school or a slave driver (and i've never been in charge of a project in this career) but the difference in output in the teams i've worked in is crazy. like some people were basically getting one or two pages published every 2/3 months, in a project of a thousand pages. some people were like this and talked the talk and went to meetings about how to be more agile and people seemed to believe their own hype.

in one case in my last job, the team shed about 5/6 people in june and one person who they were shedding was kept on "to finish" a body of work they'd been on for about 4 months, and roundly fucked up, by lacking the basic skills of the job, having a stubborn attitude towards change, and a belief system which contradicted the purpose of the team "ie to write things in plain english and explain the law for the public".

they ended up staying on for like two months - at public expense, to finish this work. i think in the end it never got finished but i heard they were rehired recently. even at the lower end, this is all for a v signfiicant dayrate, like more than most people i know earn.

like i often a crave a more results and quality-based way of assessing people. i know this would prob lead to bullying or bad practices or offices firing people with wild abandon. but everywhere i've ever worked there have been people completely taking the piss, who end up creating more work for others and are a net minus... even in a contracting environment i've noticed people are loathe to just say "this isn't working out", when that would appear to be the point of contract-based work.

not on ILE, maybe on 77. I struggle with talking about being a boss, it's a position I'm never fully comfortable thinking of myself as occupying.

In actual practice I think most people are assessed by whether they are, or are not, a pain in the ass to work with.

My own metrics suck, when measured by objective quantitative criteria. But people keep requesting me; somewhere along the line I must have accidentally acquired a good reputation (god, that sounds like insufferable humblebragging but it is, in fact, the situation). I suspect it has more to do with non-pain-in-the-assness than with measurable results.

The ability to convincingly explain away non-performance as measured by objective metrics is a p useful one to have nb public sector

In actual practice I think most people are assessed by whether they are, or are not, a pain in the ass to work with.

dunno, don't think so. i think most people aren't assessed at all - bosses are lazy or see change as conflict, understandably enough i suppose.

In before System

Siked

talking about being a boss is the main thing bosses seem to love to do, so go nuts

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

go on then

OK but I think I'll take the 77 advice