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C. Gopinath

WORK dominates our lives. When we first meet someone, after introducing our names, the next question asked is `where do you work?' Our identity is so closely determined by where we work and what work we do that it causes serious problems psychologically when we lose our job.

Given the importance of our work situation, you would think we would be experts at making it a happy place. Far from it!

When two employees get together for a chat, the topic invariably gravitates towards a complaining session about their work, and the villain of the piece is the boss.

Civil servants, especially in the administrative services, suffer from a curse of having a new boss almost every two or three years.

A friend who used to be in the service told me that if in an entire career, you have a `good' boss about one-third of the time, you should consider yourself lucky!

How the word `boss' usually evokes the worst in us! While the boss is an employer or a supervisor, being `bossy' also means domineering.

Based on what I have heard from people I have met over the years, there appear to be three kinds of bosses, classified according to the manner in which they treat their subordinate in a work related situation. For convenience, I shall treat them all as men.

The stand-off boss. This person takes himself seriously and feels the need to maintain himself at a distance. He believes that he is the big-picture person and does not want to be bothered by the little details of your job. Therefore, if you run into trouble or need help on some issue, his response will be, "I expect you to deal with it. That is what you are paid for."

Alternatively, if he got up on the wrong side of the bed that day, he will say, "That is your problem. I do not care how it is solved, but I want it done before 5 pm today."

Now, have some pity on this person. It is not that he is too busy to deal with you or your problem, but he does not know how! He is embarrassed to say that he has no solution, for he is the boss.

Therefore, he decides to hide behind that façade and stand aloof. He is sincerely hoping that you would not ask him too many questions about how to deal with the problem for his ignorance would be revealed. So, he has to be brusque. The advantage you have with this boss is that he cannot find fault with what ever you do in that situation since he does not know any better. He may whine if he is not happy with the result, but the fact that you asked him first serves as your insurance.

You would probably go to someone else for help, but also take the advantage of situations like this to ask your boss for his help first just in order to subtly point out to him that he does not know the answer either!

The hangover boss. I shall call him this not because of what he drank the previous night but because he still seems to have a hangover from his previous job, when he did what you are doing now.

He has all the answers, and not only tells you what to do but also how to do it.

And after you have done it, he will tell you how you could have done it differently and better.

The problem with this kind of a boss is that he is not doing the work he is supposed to do because he is still doing the work he used to do before he got promoted.

There is nothing wrong with this if you can stay at home and draw your full salary but current organisational practices do not seem to allow it.

So, you will have to learn to live with a person who is constantly breathing down your neck looking at what and how you are doing it.

Try positive strokes with this boss. Tell him, even before he does, that you wish you were as good as he was when he did the job. Divert his attention to war stories that begin with, "When I was..."

Treat these times as meditation sessions, switch your mind off and take some rest.

The helpful boss. This is a rare species but there are a few around who unfortunately are not given national awards, although they deserve to be. These individuals are happy and secure in their jobs and family.

They get a good night's sleep and come to work believing that things are not all that bad in this world. They assign you work and never ask about it again since they are confident you can do it. They will drop by your office and ask you if all is well with you and if you need any help.

They may not always be able to solve your problems but they will try, and at the very least, empathise with your needs. They make it worth your while to get to work.

You could, I am sure, add to this list with your own categories. After all, when it comes to bosses, are we not all experts! A lot of management literature deals with motivation. The underlying theme is that bosses and supervisors need to find ways to be creative in how they motivate their employees.

Remember the old McGregor's `Theory X' and `Theory Y?' McGregor's point was that managers make some assumptions about their workers' attitudes. The Theory X type of manager assumes that the worker is lazy and does not want to work.

Such a worker needs to be kept in line with a system of rewards and punishments. The Theory Y manager assumes that workers are not inherently lazy and given the right environment, will maximize their efforts.

Unfortunately, much of the motivational literature seems more focussed on the X variety and not the Y variety.

Thus, while organisations conduct training programs on how to deal with employees, they also need to train employees on how to deal with their bosses.

Employees need to be given the psychological support to deal with different types of individuals they report to. They must be provided with the requisite tools to manage their work and obstructive bosses. It is a one-sided view to assume that bosses need to be helped to deal with their subordinates and not the other way around.

The latest fad in performance evaluation is the `360 degree feedback.' Under this system, employees are rated not just by their bosses but also by peers, subordinates and sometimes even by customers. There are flaws in the procedure. For one, being an anonymous procedure, many individuals think this is an opportunity to give vent to all their frustrations and biases and this clouds the data.

Another problem is that while it works well as a feedback mechanism, it causes a lot of problems if used as an evaluative tool.

But an organisation that treats its people seriously as human assets can make use of the information collected to help bosses be better bosses.

(The author is a professor of international business and strategic management at Suffolk University, Boston, US. His Internet address is cgopinat@suffolk.edu)

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