Good Boss, Bad Boss

"Developing and sustaining self-awareness ought to be at the top of every boss's list."

— Robert I. Sutton

Sutton is professor emeritus of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford and cofounder of the d.school, the university's design institute. This book is the follow-up to The No Asshole Rule (2007): if that one explained how to shut the door on toxic people, this one studies what the best bosses do differently, based on research in psychology and management and on real cases.

Sutton starts from an uncomfortable observation: most people rate themselves better than they are, and the worst-performing bosses are the ones who most overestimate their abilities. That's why good bosses seek data and candid feedback on how their mood, their words and their decisions land, and invite the hard questions even when they don't look good.

On mindset, the book describes five beliefs the best bosses share:

• Don't squeeze the bird: Sutton borrows the image from Tommy Lasorda, the legendary Dodgers manager; squeeze too hard and you kill it, hold too loose and it flies away. Managing is finding that point of control.
• Grit gets you there: good bosses pace themselves for a long career and keep going despite setbacks.
• The road to success is paved with small wins: big goals give direction, but progress comes in modest, manageable steps.
• Beware the toxic tandem: power makes the boss more self-centered just when their people are watching every word and every gesture.
• Have your people's backs: good bosses protect their team.

On what they do day to day, the lessons are practical:

• Take control: act with confidence even without all the answers, and don't waver; say yes or say no.
• Strive to be wise, not just smart: the smart boss projects certainty and almost never asks for help; the wise one admits what they don't know, listens and changes the plan when needed. One of his rules is to fight as if you're right and listen as if you're wrong.
• Call stars only those who make others better, and remove those who drain the team. Sutton holds that getting rid of bad people is even more important than bringing in excellent ones, because the bad outweighs the good.
• Link what you say to what you do: influence should follow knowledge and not whoever talks loudest, and a simple strategy gets executed better than a brilliant one nobody understands.
• Serve as a human shield: absorb pressure from customers and other areas, and protect your team's time from useless meetings and paperwork, even if that sometimes means being "creatively incompetent" with instructions that don't help.
• Don't shirk the dirty work: address poor performance early and follow through on what you warned, instead of hoping the problem solves itself.

The lessons about you as a boss are the most personal:

• We all carry an inner jerk that pressure and power bring out even in good bosses; Sutton devotes a chapter to containing it.
• Inform early: when people don't have information, they fill the void by inventing and spreading false explanations.

The concept to master is being in tune: closely tracking how your team, your peers and your customers react to you. Sutton questions the advice that "it's not about you." For a boss it is about them, in the sense of carefully watching their own effect on others. One example from the book shows it well: a vice president became so visibly uncomfortable when delivering bad news that his team already knew when the cuts were coming, and joked about it: "the boss is wearing very interesting shoes today."

How to start this process? Ask three people on your team to tell you, in one sentence each, what you do that makes their work easier and what you do that makes it harder. Listen without defending yourself. Then pick one behavior you're going to stop and one useless meeting or task you're going to shield your team from this month.

As a founder it will help you be the boss your people want to work with as the company grows, and to catch in time when pressure is turning you into the boss you wouldn't have wanted to have.