Learning to be a Boss
“Arghh!!”
Karen, ground her teeth as she looked down at her desk. Instead of the draft report she had expected when she тату got back from her meeting, there was a note from Ted. “I’ve still got some issues on the report,” the note said. “I don’t want to show it to you until it’s ready.”
Karen pushed back her chair and stood up. She paced back and forth in her cube, gesturing with her hands even though no one was there.
The final version of the report was due to her boss, “The Field Marshal,” on Monday. She would look terrible if the report was either late or not up to her boss’s high standards. Karen figured she was way too new in her position to risk looking bad.
She looked up, a little surprised to realize that she had walked the length of the corridor while she was thinking. She always did that when she was upset or excited. Walking just seemed to make her feel better.
She was going to need some help and she figured the best shot was one floor up. Karen climbed the stairs and headed toward a cubicle with the light on.
Trying to appear casual, she draped herself over the cubicle wall and addressed the occupant. “Got a sec?”
“Sure, pull up a chair and unload.”
Karen dropped into the only free chair. She exhaled heavily and stared down at her lap.
“Ted again?” asked Jim.
“How did you know?”
“Because nothing else seems to penetrate your armor of enthusiasm as quickly as he does. And because I know the signs. Anyone who’s been a boss for a while has had at least one Ted.”
“OK, then, smart guy,” Karen smiled, “how do I motivate him?”
Jim just stared at her. Karen flushed and reached into her purse. “OK, ok, I said the M word and now I’m going to pay.”
Jim had several rules for the people he mentored. One of them was that they couldn’t ever say that they were going to motivate someone else. Every time they said that, they had to pay a fine.
Jim extended a mason jar filled with coins and bills toward Karen. Theatrically, she withdrew money from her purse and dropped it into the jar. “At least I’m not the only one wracking up fines.”
The amount of the fine wasn’t much and Jim put it into a fund to buy educational supplies for the families of the people who cleaned the office.
“You can’t motivate another person,” he said over and over again. “All you can do is use the behavior you can control to influence the behavior of the people who work for you.”
Karen had sure heard that often enough from Jim, even though she hadn’t been a boss for very long. She had an undergraduate degree in business and an MBA. She’d worked during school and then started with the company in sales.
After her promotion, she was assigned to Ray’s unit. It was a high performance group, but Ray wasn’t always the easiest person to talk to about people problems. That was why Karen was glad she had met Jim.
It had started out as one of the worst days of her life.
She’d only been in her
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