Everyone Hates the Boss

"That's right, my dear. I'd love to embrace you, but first, I have to satisfy my sense of moral outrage." (Roger Rabbit, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? 1988)

Without a chain of responsibility and accountability, things fall into chaos. If you are the boss, you are accountable to your boss. Everything falls on your shoulders. You can't hold onto all that accountability by yourself, or else you'll go crazy. You'll crack. And mostly, it's not fair. If there are people under you, staff you can delegate responsibility to, then that needs to happen. If they don't do their jobs, they need to be held accountable.


An employee (left) and me.

You can't do everything by yourself; that's what the people below you are for. You can't shoulder every task alone, shouldn't have to. You can't cover everyone else's mistakes all the time. You can't not point out other's mistakes or else they'll never learn from those mistakes.

But where to start? I always feel like I'm playing catch-up. I am constantly back-tracking to make sure that the little things, the easy things -- the "free throws" -- are getting done. This is how I lose sight of the big picture, and the big problems. Once upon a time, I was one of those staff below, and I did what needed to be done. I was responsible for my own actions. I led by example. But in doing so, I did more than my share. I did others' work, too. No one else needed to be held accountable, because no one else did anything. I took care of it all.

Now, I can't take care of everything. I don't have the time. I have too many other responsibilities. And those who took my place, don't have the understanding of how things work the way I did.

Did I fail? Did I not teach them right? Not well enough? Or do they really require the micro-managing that they claim to hate so much? Do they need someone constantly checking up on them in areas that I never did?

You can make as many lists and post as many memos as you want. If there is no follow-up, no one will ever take that list or that memo seriously. You may as well write "do whatever the hell you want," because that's what will happen.

I'm not the only one guilty of doing others' jobs for them. I've passed that trait on to my second-in-command under the mistaken guise of "work ethic." But they're easy to mix up. Sometimes your own to-do list needs to simply read, "make sure everyone else did theirs."