What Makes a Good Boss or a Bad Boss — Experiences from over twenty-five career positions (Part Two)
In 1987 I took a job as a security alarm monitor at a place called Alaska General Alarm. I was trained during the graveyard shift by a smoker who was also addicted to nasal spray. I displayed an affinity for the work which could get quite hectic at times. It involved all kinds of phone calls and receiving & listening equipment, some of which required a very practiced ability to discern which hashmarks on a live wire system connected to multiple accounts came from which account if two (or more) happened to transmit a signal at the same time.
My supervisor was a woman whose daughter I had dated one summer. She was a fair manager who expected attention to detail and only lost her temper once (that I saw) when another employee who had been there for over a decade had given a contrite answer about a procedure she didn’t want to do because she felt like it would be a waste of time for everyone involved. Our supervisor snapped at the employee, “JUST DO IT!” But no such incident occurred with me.
The facility overall, however, wasn’t as pleasant as the graveyard shift seemed to be. When I was moved to the swing shift to balance my skills with the team’s oldest resident, an onery but sweet woman named Eunice who hadn’t been able to pick up the intracacies of some of the computer terminal based work, I learned there was a whole lot of consternation between what we called the “upstairs” (management) and the service, installation, and monitoring teams. All the techs and alarm monitors were part of Laborer’s Local 341 and the manager of the company did NOT like that at all. Our actual owner was a financier based in Hawaii and we rarely saw him. I never did learn if it was he who was against the union or if it was just upstairs management. At any rate, every interaction with management was a chore. They wanted to cut this, or eradicate that, or minimize staffing. During one shift change the team on the day shift told me and Eunice that they had heard my supervisor actually get into a shouting match with the lead manager about something or other related to the worker bees. When our supervisor checked in with us before leaving for the day, I asked her if everything had gone okay for her that day. She sighed and said, “We’ll see!”
The building manager was an utter jerk. My supervisor was a good boss. She didn’t try to complain or turn us against management. She just went to bat for us, expected us to do a good job, and that was that.
In 1988 I took a cross-country road trip to Maine and stayed there for nearly two years. I held three work positions there. I worked as an alarm monitor doing similar work as I had the year prior only this time I was also dressed up as a Security Guard. We would respond to alarms along with authorities, assess the situation, disarm alarms with appropriate codes, and so on. My supervisors were all fair and direct with me. I had little to no interaction with management. My supervisors were good bosses.
Have you noticed a pattern yet? Every good boss I’d had up to this point were fair and direct. Being even-tempered certainly helped as well.
I worked as a retail clerk at a Spencer Gifts while in Maine and once again, my boss was fair, direct, and even-tempered. She was a good boss.
I took up work as an inventory clerk with a company that would travel all around the upper east coast doing cost-based inventory of Brooks Pharmacies (similar to CVS) and some grocery stores. For 99% of the time my supervisor was a fair and direct boss. However, one incident dented my trust in him.
A lady joined the team part-time one weekend after I had been working with the company for about a year and I learned from my supervisor that she had worked with the company before. I was counting product behind a store counter and she was working her way toward me on shelves with similar product. We used brightly colored tags to define which areas had been counted and we stored the amounts under categories in the specially-designed calculators strapped to our thighs. I’d barely had any interaction with this lady so I was taken aback when she saw my tag and said, “I was going to count that!”
I had already completed counting five or six shelves in the counter area top to bottom. Sometimes you were lucky and it was all cosmetic or sundries. Sometimes it was a mix and you had to save the count to the proper categories, if I remember correctly there were at least twenty at most stores. The issue is that everyone was paid salary, so any “wasted” seconds took away from free time when a store was completed. I simply said, “I’m sorry, I’ve already counted it. You have all those shelves anyway!”
The next day my supervisor wanted to speak with me. I’ll call the lady “L.”
“Why did you tell L what to do yesterday? You’re not a manager,” he said.
I asked what he was talking about. He explained that L had told him that I was directing her to count specific shelves. I explained that was not the case at all, that I had merely finished a section from top to bottom that her shelves were close to and that she had barely started on her section’s bottom shelves.
“Well, I don’t want you telling other employees what to do.”
“I didn’t!” I told him the story exactly as described above.
His face turned a bit red and he seemed to be getting angry. “Look, this isn’t a discussion. You don’t need to be telling other employees what to do.”
“I never have!”
“Good,” he said. “Keep it that way.”
Did this interaction make him a bad boss? No. But what I’m about to reveal next did…
I was friends with my supervisor’s wife. She heard about the interaction with L and told me that years ago, when L was working for the inventory company full-time, she had suspected her husband had been CHEATING ON HER with L. She indicated she wasn’t surprised to learn L had distorted the truth about the conversation I had since L had been more than a bit dodgy when she had confronted L about whether or not her husband had been cheating with L.
So was my supervisor a bad boss? Not overall, but in the instance described above he made a bad choice to give credence to one person’s side of a story over another’s without actually considering both positions first. After that, L only showed up for work a few more times and I did my best to stay as far away from her as possible when we were working.
In Part Three I will describe the absolute worst boss I’ve ever had in my working life.
