You’re a bosshole if the bar is high and you kick people when they fall short.
High expectation apart from kindness is cruel.
Bossholes kick people when they’re down.
5 steps to becoming a bosshole:
- Belief. You believe in someone’s potential. When you commit to developing people, you see things in them that they don’t see in themselves.
- Excellence. You work with someone in the pursuit of excellence. They’re motivated. They make progress.
- Skills. They acquire new skills and begin to deliver great results.
- Enthusiasm. Everyone’s excited about progress and potential.
- Disappointment.
- Performance drops. The person you believed in runs aground.
- “Your” high-potential does well and quits after all you’ve done for them.
Disappointment is a tipping point between kindness and bossholery.
You either push through disappointment and become kind or you pull back and become a bosshole.
Untended disappointment kicks kindness to the curb.
Grit:
Kindness requires grit. Bossholery feeds on disappointment.
It’s easy to pull back when disappointment hits. You assume a self-protective posture and think, “It’s not worth it.”
A closed heart never builds the team you aspire to create.
Kindness:
#1. Kindness is acting with the best interest of others while serving the best interest of your organization.
If you have to fire someone, do it in such a way that they will thank you in a year.
#2. Kindness is aligning personal aspirations with organizational interests.
#3. Kindness is bringing up difficult issues before they escalate to a crisis.
It’s unkind to tolerate patterns of poor performance. Kindness intervenes. Patterns of failure call for active intervention that serve the best interest of individuals and teams.
Long-term:
Disappointment chokes kindness but long-term success with people requires kindness.
Kindness is the flip side of high expectations.
If you can get there being a bosshole, you need a new destination.
What turns good leaders into bossholes?
What is the cure for bossholery?
