what my best bosses had in common
A colleague recently asked me to share what I appreciated most about my best bosses. I’ve been pretty lucky in this regard. I’ve also made several career moves based on bosses I wanted to have, almost to the exclusion of everything else. I took pay cuts, moved far away, did low-status stuff - all to work for a leader I thought I could learn from on a mission that really mattered to me.
When I looked at the four people I’d name as the absolute best of the best, they had these things in common:
Very high standards that they refused to compromise
A joyful embrace of the hardest parts of the job
A big, patient, wise sense of where we fit into the grand scheme of things
A narrow, impatient, sorta crazy obsession with the little, early indications of how things were going right then, in the little scheme of things
Each of the four had very different personalities and styles from one another. All of them inspired people to achieve improbable, ambitious things (often without deliberately doing anything that was supposed to be “inspiring”).
-Eric
