What Makes a Great Boss & Why Does It Suck To Meet one?
This is not a listicle; this is first-hand experience.
If someone had asked me how to recognize a great boss when I started my career 15 years ago, I couldn’t have known how to answer. That’s because one doesn’t know what to look for when they have no reference point and plain nice, doesn’t cover it.
So, by the way, you don’t want a “nice” boss. There’s something else that makes a boss great. And that’s definitely not niceness.
To really appreciate a great one when you see them, it takes a bunch of other bad ones to deal with as part of the learning experience — it’s a process. The good thing, though, is when you work with bad bosses for some time and survive them sanely, you come to appreciate a great boss ten times more if you are lucky enough to meet them.
In my work experience, I had my fair share of bad bosses.
My first boss expected me to run a one-woman-show in his department, from cleaning the toilet to making the coffee, from organizing scientific conferences to fixing the network, from writing and editing scientific articles to ghostwriting more than I ever imagined I would and from preparing contracts and gathering signatures to hosting guests from abroad by showing them the city. Yet, my nice boss was…
