The Boss

Throughout the years of our career employments or in what we call a profession we all meet many people who are our colleagues and who are our bosses and sometimes they become our friends.

I’ve come to the conclusion in my later years that it is not easy to be a boss. It’s not easy to assuage the wants, needs and emotions of people you try to manage and supervise and encourage them to give the best performance out of their innate and experiential abilities.

I’ve had some bosses who I thought were inadequate to the position. They were nice people, but were, in my mind and experience at the time, elevated to the Peter Principal precipice. The Peter principal is one that suggests people are often promoted to their level of incompetence.

We’ve all had that experience if we’ve worked more than one job.

The other day I had the pleasure of connecting and talking again to a man who was my boss nearly forty years ago. He’s older now and so am I, but the strength of his thought and reason has not changed. He was tough then, but he was fair and that to me is the quintessential quality of a great managerial leader.

I’m not going to give you his name because I don’t have his permission, but I am going to tell you what I think made him a great leader.

First of all it was his imagination and vision seeing the potential and the opportunity in something new while maintaining the ethic and dignity of an old and established profession.

Second it was his personal ability to write, observe and to know what was good reporting and a good story. He was and is an example for all who chose to see it. Some did not.

I thank my long time boss. I was successful because he was.