by Vasco Duarte
Why are there sooooo many terrible bosses? Hmm, tough one. One reason is that in hierarchical organizations, the only way is often up. Which is rather strange. Because the better you become at something, the bigger the chance you will become a manager. And being an excellent developer doesn’t mean you have great management skills. Besides, being a manager, you won’t have any time to develop anymore and I think that’s a waste of talent.
Another reason that there are that many terrible bosses might be that being a manager or boss involves power. For most people being a manager means making all kinds of decisions for or about people. Which, again, is rather strange. Because good managers don’t manage people, they manage environments.
So how can we solve that? In this article on psycologytoday.com I found a great quote:
The bottom line is for organizations to develop evaluation systems to identify and eliminate bad bosses, or keep them from rising in the organization.
The article is mostly about power and bullies (little spoiler here: these two don’t go together very well in making great bosses), but I’d like to take it a step further.