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Picking a Good Boss

by Donald Christiansen

Most experienced engineers agree that having a good boss is one of the most important aspects of one's job. Your boss can serve not only as a professional colleague, mentor and leader, but often as a shield from the whims of an oppressive bureaucracy.

But how to find a good boss? The odds seem in your favor at a company known by its employees as a good place to work. The likelihood is enhanced if its culture (policies and practices) appeals to you personally.

Over the past few decades, several lists of "100 Best Companies to Work For" have been published. Compiled by a team of business journalists and researchers in 1983, one version included 17 high-tech companies, among them Intel, IBM, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard and Apple Computer. This year, using similar but not identical criteria, Fortune magazine's list included only one of the aforementioned 17 — Intel. Five not on the 1983 list were Qualcomm, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, National Instruments, and Texas Instruments. Among the pluses cited by Fortune for the best-to-work-for companies were these: generous fringes (Microsoft); never a layoff (National Instruments); stock for new employees (Qualcomm); and a friendly confrontational culture (Intel).

But these lists must be taken with a grain of salt. In fairness, it should be noted that the surveys and interviews undertaken to compile the Fortune lists include a random selection of employees, not just engineers, and that the companies' cooperation is needed to complete the exhaustive rating process (e.g., Apple declined to participate).

The most successful companies are not necessarily those rated the best to work for. In 2005, General Electric, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Verizon, Dell, Bell South, Intel, Cisco Systems, and Microsoft were among Fortune's top 100 in revenues, but of those only Intel, Cisco, and Microsoft made the current Fortune best-to-work-for list. And if best-to-work-for and most-successful lists are insufficient, there is still a third — Fortune's "most admired." For this list, a jury of corporate directors, top executives, and financial analysts invoke a different measure for rating companies. For example, in Fortune's 2006 ratings, against criteria that included investment value and financial soundness, this "jury of peers" put General Electric first. Also among the top 20 were Dell, Microsoft, Apple and IBM.

Big Bosses

When corporate CEOs are more than figureheads, their styles of leadership can permeate the entire organization, and lower-level management and staff may react well or badly to the omnipresent hand of the top dog. Several companies founded by engineers became noted for their collegial work environment and enlightened corporate cultures.

• Founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard set the tone for the Hewlett-Packard (HP) culture that lasted throughout their tenure as active heads of the company. A survey of more than 7,900 HP employees in 1979 showed such high regard for the company that the management survey group placed HP in the top 0.5 percent of 1,000 companies surveyed.

• Founded by engineer Howard Vollum, Tektronix followed the HP style of management closely. From visits to Tek, I recall the low-walled, carpetless spaces of its department heads that made for quick and easy communication with all employees, who were on a first-name basis with their bosses.

On the other hand, a new CEO arriving on the scene can sometimes send shockwaves through the management pattern of an established organization.

• Upon succeeding Reginald Jones as CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch radically changed the conservative nature of the company, disrupting the ingrained management style of many GE veterans. Among Welch's reforms was the requirement that GE business leaders earmark 10 percent of their managers as poor performers during the annual evaluation process. Those so designated got no raise and "generally had to go," according to Welch. They knew who they were, and that they had better shape up or ship out. But executives who had built a management team with which they were completely satisfied rebelled. Some would even list managers about to retire, or, in one case, a manager who had died. Welch made it clear that executives who failed to comply would find themselves on the bottom rung. In his memoir, Jack: Straight from the Gut, Welch boasted that finding or creating GE managers in his own aggressive leadership image vastly improved GE's bottom line.

Hot Projects

At the top of the list of important job characteristics, engineers put the technical sophistication of the project to which they are assigned. But those chosen to take part in a challenging project may not always find the boss to be the most personable leader. Nevertheless, a leader's idiosyncrasies may be outweighed by the excitement and, perhaps, the glory of working on the project. In Organizing Genius, Warren Bennis gives the following examples.

• Famed as the inspirational leader of the Apple Macintosh computer project, Steve Jobs was noted for his arrogant and acerbic "walking around" management style, in which he would often blindside technical staff members with scathing comments about something they were developing, but about which he himself often had no relevant expertise.

• Xerox PARC's Bob Taylor was able to shield PARC staff from the conventional thinking of the Xerox bureaucracy. Yet, according to one of his staff members (as reported by Bennis), Taylor rated most of those he dealt with on a "binary scale" — as either "the greatest thing that walked the earth" or "beneath consideration," to put it kindly.

• Clarence Kelly Johnson, who headed Lockheed's Advanced Development Projects (the famous "Skunk Works"), was an eminent aeronautical engineer noted for his bullying stubbornness and hair-trigger temper. His successor, Ben Rich (selected by Johnson), called him the toughest boss west of the Mississippi. Johnson nevertheless was respected and admired for his aeronautical genius. (Rich did not continue Johnson's practice of calling all the shots, telling the Skunk Works team "I'll be decisive in telling you what I want, then step out of the way and let you do it.")

• Tom West was aloof and uncommunicative with the talented members of his Eagle computer (Soul of a New Machine) development team, but he fought Data General's upper management to get them the resources they needed.

No Silver Bullet

In the end, although you may carefully study a company's culture and the nature of its products and projects, a good deal of luck is involved in selecting a good boss.

My advice is this: If you happen to pick a boss you don't like, don't blame it on him (or her). Move on. Find a new boss.

Unless, of course, you elect to become subversive, instigate a cabal, enjoy sleepless nights, upset your intestinal tract, and aggravate your family—and possibly become president of the company.

Resources

For more on "good" companies, projects, and bosses:

R. Levering, M. Moskowitz, and M. Katz, The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America, Addison-Wesley, 1984.

"The 100 Best Companies to Work For: 2006," Fortune, 23 January 2006.

"The Fortune 500: 2005," Fortune magazine, 18 April 2005.

W. Bennis and P. W. Biederman, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration, Addison-Wesley, 1997.

J. Welch, Jack: Straight from the Gut, Warner Business Books, 2001.

B. Rich and L. Janos, Skunk Works, Little, Brown, 1994.

T. Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine, Atlantic (Little, Brown), 1981.

Inside Out: Microsoft—In Our Own Words, Warner Business Books, 2000 (25th Anniversary interviews with Microsoft managers and executives).

F.A. Maxwell, Bad Boy Ballmer: The Man Who Rules Microsoft, William
Morrow, 2002.

R. Slater, Microsoft Rebooted, Portfolio, 2004.

J. Young, Cisco Unauthorized, Forum, 2001.

G. Dorsey, Silicon Sky, Perseus, 1999 (about Orbital Sciences Corporation).

D. Packard, The H P Way, Harper Collins, 1995.

"America's Most Admired Companies," Fortune magazine, 6 March 2006.

Donald Christiansen is the former editor and publisher of IEEE Spectrum and an independent publishing consultant. He may be reached at donchristiansen@ieee.org.