My wife and I attended the opening of our town’s newest library,
which is magnificent, and on the way home I said I was glad to live in a
fairly small place that manages to have six libraries. “You forgot
one,” she said, and she mentioned another that I’m not going to name
here.
“That doesn’t count,” I said, noting that it is part of a different borough.
“They
are all crabby there anyway,” she said, “Those ladies are all sour and
rude to everyone. Except there’s one lady, she’s nice.”
It’s
true: they are a very sour pack of library ladies. “That’s the sign of a
bad boss,” I said. “For whatever reason, the boss sets the tone. And
then the workers pick up on it and dial it up a notch, and they get used
to it, and it keeps going. That one nice lady probably just wants to
have a nice day and doesn’t buy into the negativity. But the boss is
letting the other ones get away with it.” It was an easy diagnosis for
me, because I run into this same thing myself.
I
sit in a very small office with my administrative assistant, my two
sales engineers and my design engineer. All five of us hear each other’s
conversations and are privy to most of what we all do each day. And
inevitably there are moments when we get off a phone call or finish
reading an e-mail in which we have encountered some bad news or
something irritating, and we vent.
I do it; the others do it. It’s
just human nature. But I’ve learned to make sure that I take a deep
breath and try to get my mind back to a better place. And I make a point
of listening with sympathy but then reminding everyone that most of our
clients and vendors are good people who are easy to deal with. And I
repeat that to myself. Again and again. I really need to keep thinking
about that as often as I can.
After 26 years of long days, bad pay
and dealing with a million fires, it would be easy to let the fog of
cynicism and negativity engulf me. But if I do that, the bad attitude
will spread quickly to everyone around me. I find it’s one of the
hardest things about being a boss — keeping that smile on my face,
answering the phone with the perfect jaunty greeting no matter how
crummy I feel, and staying calm even when the situation calls for
running in circles and screaming. Understanding that the staff will
mirror the attitude of the boss, I know I have to set the tone. If I let
my guard down, I can do great harm.
And most of the time, I do
O.K. But I’m bad about one thing: at work, I have a very foul mouth. I’m
not sure where I picked this up. I could say that it’s a result of
working on construction sites, but I haven’t spent a huge amount of time
on construction sites. I think it’s just a way I have of letting off
steam. Clearly, I can communicate without swearing when I want to. But
if it’s just me and my workers, I am one swearing — oops, almost did it
again!
Maybe I could stop doing this, but I haven’t made the
effort. It’s not something I’m proud of, but no one has ever complained
to me about it. I should probably cut it out. But I have limits to what
I’m willing, or maybe able, to do to be the perfect boss. I have enough
trouble with the basics of running a profitable factory. Perfect
behavior seems to be too much of an effort.
Do you have a bad habit that you know you should stop?
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