by Jack Welch
I’ll never forget a group of boss haters we had at GE headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut—a half-dozen or so guys who ate lunch together in the cafeteria every day. They labeled themselves “The Table of Lost Dreams.” Each of these employees was very talented. One had a real knack for turning just the right phrase. He had a background in journalism and worked in PR. Fortunately, the media found his cynicism appealing. Another was a labor-relations specialist who had a real affinity for the unions. His natural sympathies made him enormously effective in frontline negotiations.
All of the guys at the Table of Lost Dreams were very good at their jobs, and none of them managed anyone, so their defiance of conditions at the company was pretty much left alone. I wrote them off as harmless but effective curmudgeons who would have hated any work situation.
But tolerance is not usually what happens in these cases. Most of the time, leaders get sick of the undercurrent of whining and the energy-sapping effects of boss haters and manage them out—by showing them just what a bad boss really looks like.
Maybe this all sounds very unfamiliar to you—you’re basically comfortable with authority, and the rest of your self-examination has you coming up empty-handed too. Now what?
It’s time to find out what your boss is thinking.
Any kind of confrontation, however, is incredibly risky. Your boss may be waiting for just such a moment to dump you. In fact, he may have been hoping his negative vibes would eventually inch you into his office with the question, “So what am I doing wrong?” so that he can answer, “Too much for this to go on any longer.”
Still, you have to talk. There is no way around it. Just remember, before you go into that meeting, be prepared and have options in the event that you come out of it unemployed.
Then, go do it. Don’t be defensive. Remember, your goal is to uncover something your boss has not been able to explicitly tell you for whatever reason. Maybe he’s conflict averse or he’s just been too busy. Regardless, your objective is to extract from him the problem he has with your attitude or performance.
If you’re lucky, your boss will come clean about your shortcomings, and together, you can work on a plan to correct them and get your performance or attitude back on track. Ideally, as you give it your all to improve, his attitude toward you will as well.
Ironically, you are less lucky if you find out that your bad boss is satisfied with your performance. If that’s the case, he is being awful simply because he doesn’t particularly like you.
Which puts you in the same position as the people who work for bad bosses who act the same way…just because that’s the way they are.
For all of you, the next question is:
What’s the endgame for my boss? Sometimes it’s obvious that a bad boss is on the way out. His own bosses have signaled as much to the organization; or he himself makes it clear he can’t wait to move on. In either case, survival is just a waiting game. Deliver strong results and have a can-do approach until relief arrives.
You are in a different boat if your bad boss is not going anywhere anytime soon.
More than a decade ago, I drew the chart below to categorize types of leaders, and to help me talk about who should stay and who should leave.
The chart split leaders according to their results—good or bad—and how well they lived GE’s values, such as candor, voice, dignity, and boundarylessness.
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TYPE 1:
TYPE 2:
Good values/Good performance
Bad values/Bad performance
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TYPE 3:
TYPE 4:
Good values/Bad performance
Bad values/Good performance
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Type 1 bosses, in the top left corner, are the people you want to reward and promote and hold up as examples to the rest of the company. Type 2 bosses, in the upper right corner, have to go, the sooner the better, and usually do.
Type 3 bosses, in the bottom left corner, really believe in the company’s values and practice them in earnest, but just can’t get the results. Those individuals should be coached and mentored, and given another chance or two in other parts of the company.
Most bad bosses are in the lower right corner—Type 4—and they are the most difficult to deal with. They often get to hang around for a long time, despite their awful behavior, because of their good results.
Most good companies usually know about these people and eventually move them out.
But every company, even the good ones, keeps some managers in this quadrant for longer than they should. It’s such a dilemma for bosses at every level. They hear the grumbling down below, but they see the great numbers right in front of them.
Which leads to a kind of organizational inertia.
Take the case of a man I know of whom I’ll call Lee, who ran a thirty-person division of an international communications company. Formerly a successful writer himself, Lee created a competitive, almost frantic, environment in the office, with the staff churning out more copy than divisions twice the size. At the same time, he held the team to extremely high standards of creativity, a major plus in the eyes of headquarters.
But Lee had a mean streak a mile wide. His humor could be cruel, and he particularly let loose on young, inexperienced employees. He also reveled in his intensely adversarial relationship with the division’s unionized employees, which poisoned the atmosphere for everyone.
Lee held his staff in a kind of terrorized thrall. Many people liked the prestige of working in his high-performing division, but they hated his day-to-day nastiness. Top performers often stayed for only a year or less, but Lee was protected by the industry’s laws of supply and demand. There was always another young, ambitious writer or artist ready to sign up.
And so, despite the constant turnover, the organization’s top management let Lee stay and stay—until he suffered a heart attack. After he was gone, one of his former employees said, “It took an act of God to get rid of him.”
Usually, a bad boss with great numbers doesn’t have to die for senior management to replace him, but it can take a cataclysmic event to provoke action.
Take “Karen,” a senior-level boss at a money management firm. Karen managed fifteen fund managers and their teams—about two hundred people combined. The company was known for its ruthless, hard-driving culture, and Karen epitomized it. She worked eighteen-hour days. She publicly denounced fund managers who underperformed, occasionally reducing people to tears in meetings, and routinely belittled the support staff, snidely referring to them as “the Danielle Steel fan club,” since many were middle-aged women who read popular novels during their lunch breaks. When Karen’s bosses were around, however, her persona became thoughtful and caring, earning her the nickname of Sybil, after a woman with multiple personality disorder who was the subject of a best-selling book.
For more than a decade, Karen’s money managers posted impressive results, significantly outperforming comparable funds. But when the Internet bubble burst, the cost of her management approach began to show. Fund managers were heavily invested in high-growth stocks to make their numbers and avoid Karen’s ire—in fact, their biggest holdings were in Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco.*
When Karen was fired, senior managers made a big show of denouncing her management style. Many of her people shook their heads in amazement—it had been in evidence for years, but it took a disaster to make management confront it.
You may not work at a company that lets a bad boss hang around until a mess erupts. But it’s possible great numbers will keep your bad boss around indefinitely.
If you feel that’s the case, your next question should be:
What will happen to me if I deliver results and endure my bad boss? If you think that your organization, and in particular your boss’s boss or someone in HR, understands your bind and sympathizes, you should feel pretty confident that eventually you will be moved up or sideways as a reward for surviving. While you’re wai
ting, hang in there and give the job your all.
I was fortunate to have many great bosses during my career. They encouraged me, protected me, built my self-confidence, and gave me challenges that stretched my abilities. Reuben Gutoff, my boss for more than a decade when I was starting out, did all these. He kept the mammoth bureaucracy of GE off my back while I learned real-time how to build a business from scratch. I was able to travel the world in my twenties, setting up joint ventures and making small acquisitions.
It took seventeen years for me to bump into a bad boss. It wasn’t that Dave Dance, a vice-chairman, was actually bad, it was just that I was in the running for the CEO job, and he strongly supported another candidate. Every day felt like a week. No matter what I did, I felt that Dave was rooting for me to fail. What an awful feeling when your boss is not on your side. I tried to stay out of his way—I hung out at headquarters as little as possible. I spent my time in the field with people I liked, doing what I liked to do, reviewing businesses.*
My situation was a lot easier than it is for many people. I knew that it couldn’t last more than a couple of years, and I also knew the potential reward if I endured, and it was big. You may not have that luxury.
But be careful. Uncertainty about the final outcome can make you do something foolish—that is, pull an end run. You may feel the impulse to sneak upstairs and talk to your boss’s boss about the situation. That can be suicide. About 90 percent of the time, complaining about a bad boss to his boss circles right around to bite you on the rear. The big boss may have your best interests at heart when he scolds your boss for his behavior, but you can be absolutely sure that your life will only become more unpleasant afterward. There is a reason why kids don’t tattle on bullies. Unfortunately, the same principle applies in the office.
There will always be an element of uncertainty to enduring a bad boss. You may surmise a happy ending or be promised one. But there are very few guarantees. All you know for certain in this kind of situation is that going to work every day isn’t fun.
Which is why you need to ask the following:
Why do I work here anyway? Remember how, in the chapter on finding the right job, we talked about the inevitability of trade-offs? It is rare for a job to be perfect in every way. Sometimes you stay in a job for the money or the friends; sometimes you give up money and friends for the love of the work itself or the job’s location or its lack of travel. Sometimes you stay in a job because the company has so much prestige, you know it will help you get a new job once you have a few more years of experience under your belt.
When you find yourself in a situation with a bad boss that isn’t going to change anytime soon, you need to assess your trade-offs and ask, “Are they worth it?”
If the answer to this question is no, then start constructing an exit plan that gets you out the door with as little damage as possible.
On the other hand, if your boss situation offers some kind of long-term benefit that you understand and accept, you really have no choice. Focus on why you are staying, and put your bad boss in perspective. He isn’t everything in your life—he is the one downside of a career or life deal you have made with yourself.
More than anything else, come to grips with the fact that you are staying with a bad boss by choice. That means you’ve forfeited your right to complain.
You can’t consider yourself a victim anymore.
When you own your choices, you own their consequences.
In a perfect world, all bosses would be perfect.
That happens so infrequently that entire movies and books are written about bad bosses, not to mention lots of country-and-western songs.
When you get a bad boss, first find out if you are the problem. That’s not easy, but in many cases, a bad boss is just a disappointed one.
If you’re convinced you aren’t the problem, ask yourself if your company is likely to keep a bad boss with good results. If the answer is yes, the only thing left to do is look at the trade-offs you are willing to make. Is your job worth the price of enduring a bad boss? If so, put up and shut up, to put a twist on the old saying.
If the trade-off is not worth it, leave gracefully.
And as you start your next job, remember exactly what made the bad boss bad and how it made you feel—so that when the time comes for you to be a boss, you won’t do the same.
Work-Life Balance
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EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT HAVING IT ALL (BUT WERE AFRAID TO HEAR)
IF EVER THERE WAS A CASE of “Do as I say not as I did,” this chapter is it. No one—myself included—would ever call me an authority on work-life balance. For forty-one years, my operating principle was work hard, play hard, and spend some time as a father.
Had the concept been around at the time, I am sure I would have described my life as perfectly balanced. It felt like it had everything in it, all in the right amounts.
I grew up in an era and as part of a culture where you struggled to go to college and get a decent degree. During school, or very shortly thereafter, you got married and started having kids. Getting a job and working your ass off at it was considered the ticket to a good life.
I followed this pattern without a lot of thought. Luckily for me, I found work to be enormously exciting. I saw the weekends as a time to play golf and party with other young couples.
But looking back, it is clear that the balance I chose had consequences for the people around me at home and at the office. For instance, my kids were raised, largely alone, by their mother, Carolyn.
By the same token, from my earliest days in Plastics, I used to show up at the office Saturday mornings. Not coincidentally, my direct reports showed up too. Personally, I thought these weekend hours were a blast. We would mop up the workweek in a more relaxed way and shoot the breeze about sports.
I never once asked anyone, “Is there someplace you would rather be—or need to be—for your family or favorite hobby or whatever?” The idea just didn’t dawn on me that anyone would want to be anywhere but at work.
My defense, if there is one, is that those were the times. In the 1960s and ’70s, all my direct reports were men. Many of those men were fathers, and fathers were different then. They did not, by and large, attend ballet recitals on Thursday afternoons or turn down job transfers because they didn’t want to disrupt their kids’ sports “careers.” Most of their wives did not have jobs with their own competing demands. In general, it was assumed that wives stayed at home to make everything run smoothly.
All that started to change, of course, in the ’80s, when women started moving up in the workforce, and by late in the decade, I started to hear a lot more about work-life balance. It initially bubbled up in many of our management development classes at Crotonville, where managers started to describe the pressures they felt trying to manage travel and transfers in two-career households. Debate about the topic within GE became more intense in the early ’90s, both at Crotonville and during meetings with the GE African American Forum, and it reached a new level of intensity later on during my meetings with members of the company’s Women’s Network.
These conversations forced me to confront something that I had never really confronted for myself—the conflicts involved in managing two full lives—the one at work and the one after hours, be it caring for kids, volunteering at a homeless shelter, or running marathons.
While work-life balance was increasingly front and center during the 1990s, the debate about it has only intensified since my retirement in 2001. Today, no CEO or company can ignore it. In fall 2004, for instance, the New York Times ran a front-page, three-part series on work-life balance and job stress. That same week, Fast Company’s cover story was entitled, “Still Worried About Work-Life Balance? Forget It. But Here’s How to Have a Life Anyway.” There is a whole consulting industry devoted to the subject, and too many books and Web sites about it to even estimate a number.
Not surprisingly, then, as I’ve traveled around the
world for the past three years, I’ve gotten slews of work-life balance questions. The most common is, “How did you find time for all that golf and still become CEO?” but they run the gamut. Once, in Beijing, a man in the audience who looked to be in his thirties asked me, “How did you manage your children while you were managing GE?”
My answers to these questions have been of limited use, I’m sure. I say that I found time for golf because I didn’t spend my leisure time on much else. As for my children, I didn’t “manage” them, except to crack the whip on grades and play social director during my three weeks of vacation each year. Their happy lives today have a lot more to do with their mom than with me.
So, I’m clearly no expert on just how individuals should prioritize the various parts of their lives, and I’ve always felt that choice is personal anyway.
But I have dealt with dozens of work-life balance situations and dilemmas as a manager, and hundreds more as the manager of managers. And over the past three years, I’ve heard from many people—both bosses and employees—about this complex issue.
From all these experiences, I have a sense of how bosses think about work-life balance, whether they tell you or not.
You may not like their perspective, but you have to face it. There’s lip service about work-life balance, and then there’s reality. To make the choices and take the actions that ultimately make sense for you, you need to understand that reality:
1. Your boss’s top priority is competitiveness. Of course he wants you to be happy, but only inasmuch as it helps the company win. In fact, if he is doing his job right, he is making your job so exciting that your personal life becomes a less compelling draw.