Thankful for the Bossholes®
Join us on this special Thanksgiving 2024 episode of The Bosshole® Chronicles as we promise you'll uncover the art of transforming interactions with challenging managers into invaluable growth opportunities.
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The Bosshole® Chronicles
"Thankful for the Bossholes®"
Original Publish Date: 11/26/2024
Host: John Broer
John Broer: Welcome back to the Bosshole Chronicles everybody out there in the Bosshole Transformation Nation. And, by the way, happy Thanksgiving. It is the Tuesday before Thanksgiving 2024 and I thought I would offer up just a little bit different episode this week, simply because people are winding down and preparing for the Thanksgiving holiday and I hope you are able to take inventory of all the amazing and wonderful things in your life. And since we talked so much about Bosshole prevention and Bosshole intervention on this program, I figured let's give thanks to the Bossholes out there, and I know that sounds pretty weird, but, just as we've heard in previous episodes, there is always something to be learned from a bad manager, and I just wanted to share some of my lessons with you, thinking that maybe this is a time for reflection for yourself and what you've learned from your boss holes. So let's just jump into this one.
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2024. What an amazing week we're going to have and I hope you all have the opportunity to decompress a little bit, slow down, reflect and again think about all of the fact that I get to do this amazing work with amazing people at Real Good Ventures. All of you out there that have been listening in and making the Bosshole Chronicles more of a real tool for people in business to help them get better at what they do, especially if they're in a management or a supervisory role. But today I wanted to take a moment, keep it a little bit light but at the same time reflect on the managers that I've had in the past and what I've learned from them, specifically the boss holes in my career. Now, I don't know if any of my previous managers listened to this program. I'd love it if they did.
But as I was thinking about this particular episode, one of the things that came to mind is how we emphasize that a manager, the real and most important role of a manager is to develop other people. And then I was reflecting and thinking how many of the managers in my history, in my professional history, were developers of people, were good coaches, were good instructors, who were the ones that were on the sideline, just to use a sports analogy but to be on the sideline calling the plays. We trained hard, we practiced, we worked on our craft and then, when game time came, they let me do my work. And as I thought about it, unfortunately I had very few managers that were like that. But I think that's also why we've done this podcast, because for decades and decades we have reinforced this old framework command and control type of manager. We've put people in management positions without sufficiently training them and giving them the tools to literally develop other people. So we're working very hard to break that cycle. But that isn't to say that I haven't had people in my career who were coaches, who were developers, who expressed a vested interest in me and demonstrated such great generosity in teaching and development, who just wanted to see me be successful. And not all of them were managers and we have those stories.
But I just thought, I thought for fun, I'm just going to do a little, a little walk down memory lane of some of the managers I've had through my career. And now I got started in the steel industry, I moved into the chemical industry, I worked in a couple of different segments of the marketplace which were very interesting and very enlightening, if you will, in terms of how business gets done. Before I actually started my own business, my own consulting practice which I've been doing for a long time now, but not without some real great foundation laid some great ground that I was able to cover, really understanding how to get better at doing business. And man did I make a lot of mistakes and learn from those mistakes.
So I'm going to go back. I'm going to go way back to my early days and I'm not going to use any real names. I'm going to use some fictitious names just because out of respect for these managers who again, this isn't about criticizing them because, as we know, nobody is born to be a boss hole but what was it that was really lacking? And I remember early in my career I had a manager named Gary. Gary was actually he was my- after college, one of my very first managers super nice guy and what I learned from Gary is that you need to have the difficult conversations. Gary was apprehensive in having those difficult conversations and when he did, they tended to be a little bit awkward and not necessarily very constructive.
Now, at the same time, he realized that he had this sales team and the sales team needed to grow and I was given the opportunity to attend a professional selling skills course, and this was something that Xerox and this is a name, a blast from the past, a name that some of you will remember, Xerox was sort of the quintessential name in printing and copying machines. But they were much bigger than that too. The organization I mean the company, the global corporation did so much more, but that's kind of conventionally how we knew them. But they had a consultative selling course called Professional Selling Skills. It, at the time, was a very comprehensive and strong methodology in consultative selling practices. Not too long ago actually it was this year, 2024, I ran into somebody who not only was trained in PSS but he was a facilitator in PSS. I think it has changed names, I think the methodology is still out there. It may be offered under a different name, but it was a great program, suffice it to say.
The organization where I was working was looking externally for developing best-in-class sales practices for their salespeople, but none of the managers in that organization that I ever met really embodied a coaching approach. They were saying look, go learn this. We're going to give you these tools Now go out and use them. And so, while the content was very helpful and it helped to shape my skills, if you will, as a sales professional, as a business development professional, there was no manager in that organization that I experienced that was a coach and was able to reinforce that. Now let me just be really clear. I met some really great people there and I know that the managers and supervisors cared about performance. They just were very much the old command and control, more stereotypical manager versus what is required, to what I believe the workforce really needs today, a manager who is truly more of a developer of people.
So then I moved into a different industry, had an opportunity to move into the chemical industry, great experience there. But one of my managers and I'm going to call that manager Fred. Fred was the subject of our very first episode, "Don't Bring Him Back, or at least one of the first few episodes that we published, and I don't even remember what name I used for him there. It might've been Fred. Anyway, I have always said since having worked with him that he would have been a great neighbor. He would have been the neighbor living next door who, if you were working on a patio or putting a deck on your house, he would have come over with his tools and probably a cooler a beer and said, hey, how can I help? And then you sit down and enjoy some time together.
When it came to being a manager, same thing. He was not a developer of people, he was more of an overseer. He truly was a manager, you know. There there was, there was a hierarchy, and his responsibility was to make sure that all of the people on his team were doing the tasks, doing the various, you know the things that they thought resulted in higher sales, and one of those, as a matter of fact, one of those was you need to make a certain number of sales calls per day. There was a quota, and I never believed in quotas because I learned early on in my career that when you create a quota and it's like the law of averages, it's like, well, if you make a whole lot of sales calls, the law of averages will work in your favor, that you're going to get a win, and to me that seemed like a colossal waste of time. Now I get it. There are some call centers out there and their job is just to get on calls and make phone calls to people until they get somebody who agrees to listen to their pitch and buys what they're selling. I was never in that kind of a market.
What I realized is that when you do your research on the front end so those leading indicators of doing the research on the front end and looking at who are the organizations, who are the clients that have the greatest need, highest probability of buying, and you narrow that down and you start to target them very surgically. I always had the highest sales in the organization but I had the lowest sales calls per day or the lowest average of sales calls. So my ratio of sales to sales calls was actually really strong and he didn't like that and this was something Fred would constantly catch me on. He would say, yeah, your numbers need to be higher on your sales calls and I said, okay, I get that, but you see that my sales are higher. I'm making fewer calls, but those calls are actually higher probability calls because of the work that I'm doing on the front end. That never really resonated with Fred and unfortunately we just got to a place where we were just tolerating each other. He sort of let things slide because he was never going to convince me that just making calls for the sake of making calls was a better strategy than making better calls.
But what did I take from Fred? What did I learn from Fred? I learned from Fred that it is possible to look beyond what have been, say, traditional metrics of business development or any kind of a role. Can I learn from the people on my team? Is there a better way of doing something? Is there a more efficient way of doing something? And I was never really able to convince him of that. What I really learned from Fred is that even in a management position, I need to be open to the people on my team about what they bring to the process. What are some unique things techniques, strategies, perspectives that they bring that could improve the way everybody else works, and I always wanted to be really mindful of that, and so Fred really taught me that.
Later on, as I moved on through my career, I had another manager and his name was Larry. I'm going to call him Larry. This was one example of where Larry demonstrated a real I would say there was a arrogant element to the way Larry worked, in that I really felt that he lorded over everybody his role, his position, his position of authority in the organization, and this is an example that I shared in a previous episode of where we would have our weekly meetings and Larry I think he got a little bit of pleasure from embarrassing people in the room when they underperformed, and so there were a number of occasions where we would have meetings. Some performance metric wouldn't be hit. One of our team members fell short. Larry took that opportunity to call that out, rather than acknowledge it and say, okay, well, let's talk offline about why this happened or where we are right now and we can improve upon that. He actually used that moment to embarrass the person, and I took a very important lesson away from that.
I've always known that you want to praise in public, but if you need to punish or critique or provide some constructive direction, you do that in private, and that was really reinforced in my work when I was on Larry's team. When the opportunity presents itself, when I have my own team as a manager, if somebody is struggling, if somebody fails, I want my team members to know that failure and failing safely is okay on my team, and when that happens, you and I will talk about it privately. You and I will take it offline. We'll sit down as part of our regular check-in and say, okay, tell me what's going on here, tell me why this metric wasn't hit and why you are struggling in this particular area, and let's remedy it, let's fix it. So that was really very powerful because I saw how that public humiliation that Larry would offer up really diminished not only the individual but also just stifled what was going on in that team. So there was a fear that you know I don't want to screw up because I don't want to be humiliated in front of my teammates and fear is never a great motivator. Can you get people to be motivated and do things out of fear and pressure and manipulation? Absolutely, and a lot of managers AKA boss holes have embraced that strategy in their careers. So I thank Larry, I thank Larry for demonstrating that and I use those examples from Gary and Fred and Larry of how to avoid the boss hole zone when I had been with my direct reports.
And I think there's another important takeaway there that is related to psychological safety. In other words, de-stigmatizing failure, allowing people and permitting people to fail safely and to make mistakes and to be able to talk about it openly that's what creates psychological safety and that's what creates a healthier team and, ultimately, better team performance. Now, as you all know, you've been listening to this podcast. That is one of the things we can measure on a team. We can measure the degree of psychological safety. So if your team is struggling, if you have a team that is struggling, you should find out what is the level of psychological safety on that team and then those results. That objective data allows you to work more specifically with the manager and with the team itself and again, to destigmatize failure and allow people to fail safely and fail in such a way that it actually moves things forward safely and fail in such a way that it actually moves things forward. And so we can call out and talk about our mistakes and our errors and then start to have a better view forward so that we are avoiding those circumstances that actually inhibit performance. And so over the years, over the last four years of the Boss Hole Chronicles I can't even believe it's been four years, but again, thanks to all of you that keep this going, that give us ideas, that have contributed to this podcast.
Clearly I've had my share of bad managers or boss holes, and I know none of them did it on purpose. They didn't know any better, and that's why we do this work not only through the Boss Hole Chronicles but at Real Good Ventures, helping organizations elevate their managers to be really good developers of people. So, while I have more stories of boss holes in my career, I actually have some other stories of really amazing managers that I've had. Yes, have I had more boss holes in my career than I have non-boss holes? Absolutely. I think that's probably the case for a lot of us. However, I offer my thanks to those bossholes for what they taught me to make me a better manager, leader, colleague and member of an organization. But I really do want to call out a couple of people, and I will use their real names because they're amazing.
I had a manager by the name of Christie, and Christie I found to be an exceptional individual and manager, and this would have been, I would say, later in my career. Uh, and the reason I felt that she was such an effective manager. I trusted her judgment and that trust was earned. I mean, she never gave me a reason not to understood. When you're in a leadership role, an executive role, you can't communicate everything to your direct reports. You have to be very discreet and you have to be careful about what you communicate, but the one thing that I knew is that Christy would communicate what she could and, at the same time, provide guidance and direction about how things should move forward, and so there was a level of autonomy and trust that she extended to me, but I also knew that she would be very clear on guardrails of this is where we can go, and I would avoid going in this direction, and it was incredibly helpful to me. I always knew that she had my back and I always knew that she would provide cover when necessary, and that doesn't mean to artificially augment and manipulate a situation so that I'm protected. She provided that level of insulation or a barrier and absorbed things that could have hit my area, my group, my team, and protected me from that and not just me, but her team and, at the same time, when direction, constructive feedback, criticism was warranted, she provided it in a way that was not only helpful but also truthful and honest. That's where I believe I felt a level of psychological safety to be able to do my work, but also understood the parameters within which to do that work.
Now, that is one example that just stands out, but I want to share a few others that these were not my managers, but they were what I would consider mentors. These were individuals to whom I did not report but expressed a vested interest in my development and growth. One gentleman's name was Bill. Bill has since passed away, but Bill was a colleague of mine, a more experienced business development individual, and he was always wonderfully helpful. I mean, he just cared about my growth and development as a colleague, as a newer member in the organization.
In that same time frame there was a gentleman by the name of George. I lost touch with George, but George was a technical expert associated with our organization and he was such an on this. You need to be wary of this. You need to think about these things as you grow in your career. Nothing expected in return. This was just somebody who offered up this wisdom and mentorship in a way that was extraordinarily helpful to me.
The last gentleman I'll mention his name is Robal. That is his name R-O-B-A-L. Robal passed away about nine years ago and I met him when I was actually a course leader and course developer with the American Management Association. I did that about 10 years but actually I got into that work because of Robal. Robal was a great mentor as I started my first consulting practice when I went out on my own, and again, just amazingly generous with insight and wisdom and direction based on the things that he had learned. Once again, he wasn't a manager of mine, but he was a mentor.
And when I think about how thankful I am of these people all of them, by the way, the mentors, the good managers I've had, and again, the boss holes for whom I worked and there were more of them I think about to get better at what I do. It's an ongoing process. You never sort of reach that finish line, but I am so thankful for all of them, for all that they contributed to my growth and my development as an individual and a business person, and so I would encourage you, as we wrap things up before the Thanksgiving holiday, do the same thing. Take inventory, look back on those people that have had such a significant and marked influence on who you are as a professional, and give thanks to those boss holes out there. And if you haven't really thought about what you learned from the boss holes, take this time to do that. Look back and ask yourself well, what did I actually take away? Because you did, you did take away something.
I think back to an episode I did with our good friend, Karen Shulman, and it was called Boss Hole or Tormentor, and her admonition was remember in the word tormentor is the word mentor, and so we can learn from anybody. I would also say that, as you reflect and give thanks about all the wonderful things in your life, as I said, faith, family, dear friends, the work that we get to do, this amazing country in which we live, and this time of reflection For those of you that have a great manager who is invested in you and helping you grow, make sure you thank them this season, reach out to them and let them know and say hey, I just want to let you know how much I appreciate what you do and what you offer in terms of my growth and my development. It is making a huge difference. I can absolutely assure you they will appreciate that, because they probably don't hear that enough. Being a manager, being a supervisor, it's a tough job. They are one group within the business climate that are experiencing the highest degrees of stress and anxiety and burnout, and that helpful and positive feedback from you will absolutely do their hearts good. I can assure you of that.
So everybody out there in The Bosshole Transformation Nation. Thank you for letting me take a few minutes to reflect and share some of the things for which I am thankful, and that includes all of you out there that are listening to us week in and week out. Enjoy your Thanksgiving holiday and we will see you next time on the Bosshole Chronicles. Thanksgiving holiday and we will see you next time on the Bosshole Chronicles Chronicles. Thanks very much for checking out this episode of the Bosshole Chronicles. It was so good to have you here, and if you have your own Bosshole story that you want to share with the Bosshole Transformation Nation, just reach out. You can email us at mystory@thebossholechronicles.com. Again, mystory@thebossholechronicles.com. We'll see you next time.