By Chetan Dhruve
Do you have a bad boss or have you had a bad boss? If so, you’re not alone. Of all the people who quit their jobs, the vast majority do so because of a terrible boss. Bad bosses are a widespread phenomenon cutting across organizational, cultural and national boundaries. In fact, bad bosses cut across the boundaries of time too – they’ve been around ever since people have had bosses.
What’s our reaction to a bad boss? It is typically, "My boss is bad." The underlying accusation is that it’s the boss’s fault for being bad. In response to bad bosses – and often as a preventive measure too – bosses get sent on all kinds of courses, in the form of ‘leadership’ training. They get taught how to communicate, criticize, praise, motivate, inspire, serve and so on, all to turn them into ‘good’ bosses or leaders. The organization does other things too – it "empowers" you, it "flattens the hierarchy", calls you an "associate" rather than subordinate, and so forth.
Does all this really result in fundamental change? No. How do we know? Because people still fear their bosses and complain about them all the time. Bosses still throw their weight around. So the question is, why aren’t all the initiatives working?
To answer this, we need to ask a deeper question: is it that there are too many bad individuals, or is something else going on?
The strange answer is that our workplaces have been unthinkingly designed to be production lines of bad bosses. It’s as normal to get a bad boss as it is to have a car come out of a car-making factory. If a truck came out of a car factory, that would be abnormal. Similarly, a good boss is actually an abnormality.
How so? The clue lies in the definition of ‘leader’. Typically, we don’t have managers, supervisors or plain old bosses any more. We have ‘leaders’ – team leaders, project leaders, group leaders, division leaders and other forms of the exalted leader. But who exactly is a ‘leader’? Let’s define that first.
Who is a leader?
When it comes to leading people, we actually have a very clear answer that cuts through the clutter of ‘leader’ definitions: A leader is someone who is elected by those he is leading. There are good leaders and bad leaders, but before someone gets called ‘leader’, he has to satisfy one non-negotiable criterion – that of being elected.
Conversely, if someone has power over you and ‘leads’ without your having a vote, we have a different word for that person: dictator.
Your boss has power over you. But you don’t have a vote. That makes your boss a dictator. And because you don’t have power over your dictator, that makes you a subject. Remember, this is by definition, not by opinion.
What happens when boss and subordinate interact – or more accurately, when dictator and subject interact? This is not as simple a question as it sounds. To understand interactions, we need to use a field of study that studies interactions and their effects.
Studying interactions contrasts with our current way of thinking – analysis. Using analysis, we typically break issues down to small parts, and hope that by fixing each part, the overall problem will go away. That’s why, when trying to "fix" boss behaviour, we assume that the behaviour is the boss’s fault. And then we try to "fix" that behaviour through training.
But instead of studying the boss, we need to study the interaction between the boss and the subordinate. To do this, we can use a field of study called Systems Thinking that studies wholes and the interactions between their constituent parts. What does that really mean?
A brief introduction to Systems Thinking
First, let’s define ‘system’. A system is something that results from the interactions among its constituent parts. Without the interactions, the system ceases to exist. Take an example – water. Water is made up of two gases – hydrogen and oxygen. When hydrogen and oxygen interact, we get water. Water cannot exist without this interaction. It’s actually quite strange, when you think about it, that a liquid is made up of two gases. If you didn’t know any better, you could quite reasonably guess that water is a liquid made of two liquids.
If water is made up of gases, where did this property of liquidity come from? In the language of Systems Thinking, liquidity is an "emergent property" – it emerges from the interactions of the individual components of water (the two gases). Hence in Systems Thinking, it’s important to understand that the properties of the system may not be the properties of the individual parts.
Now, what does all this have to do with bosses? Let’s apply the definition of ‘system’ to human relationships. Every relationship’s existence depends on the interactions between two (or more) people. If a person opts out of the relationship, the entity ‘relationship’ ceases to exist. Hence, a relationship is a system.
Now, what system results from the interactions between a dictator and a subject? A dictatorship system. This means every organization that has a boss-subordinate way of working is a dictatorship system, comprising of several mini-dictatorships.
What’s the predominant emergent property for the subject in a dictatorship system? Fear. And for the dictator, it is power-abuse in the form of arrogance, pettiness, "I know it all", and so on.
It’s important to note that these properties of fear and power abuse are emergent properties. They come about automatically, without conscious effort on anyone’s part. Outside the dictatorship system, a subject could be fearless, while the dictator could be timid. Scientific experiments, most famously the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), have shown that more than our personality or character, it’s the situation we’re in that determines our behaviour. As Philip Zimbardo, the lead scientist on the SPE said, "If you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples."
In short, put people in a dictatorship system, and they will behave accordingly. Because everything happens automatically as a result of the system, our workplaces are, in effect, production lines of bad bosses and abject subjects. Of course, these workplace behaviors could be masked quite sophisticatedly – a display of fear does not mean terrified trembling – it could be as simple as a subordinate not speaking up in a meeting. Equally, a boss may not scream or shout – it could just be a look that says, "Do what I say and don’t ask me difficult questions."
That’s not the end of the problem. The more serious issue is that honest and accurate information can be withheld from the boss. When this happens all the way up, top-management is fed information that is severely distorted or just plain wrong. Overall, this results in poor decision-making, potentially resulting in catastrophic consequences for the organization.
The system is all-powerful. That is why no amount of training or tinkering with hierarchies is ever going to really help. The only way to change behavior is to change the system in which people work. This of course, raises another question.
What system do we change to?
Simple. We need to change to a system in which freedom is an emergent property. In what kind of system would we find freedom? You know the answer to this one – a system in which people vote for their leaders.
This may sound idealistic and unrealistic, but consider this. Hundreds of millions of people vote for their leaders in systems such as the US, UK, Australia, Japan, Germany, France and so on. Moreover, these free systems are much more powerful, wealthier, and more competitive than "fear" systems such as Libya, Syria, North Korea or Zimbabwe. Of course, you may argue that China flouts the theory, but it doesn’t. China began gaining competitiveness only after economic liberalization (ie becoming more economically free). And in any case, a better question to ask is, "How much more rich and powerful would China have been, had it given its citizens the right to vote?
For organizations that want to compete and win in the future, the lesson is this: the path to success is paved with freedom – the genuine freedom that results when subordinates have the right to vote for their bosses.
The idea of having subordinates vote for their bosses provokes many questions. The most common ones are addressed in this list of frequently asked questions.
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Chetan Dhruve is the author of "Why Your Boss is Programmed to be a Dictator" (Cyan/Marshall Cavendish). You can visit his website at http://cvdhruve.com and contact him via email at cvdhruve@gmail.com.
