The following are approximately the first 1000 words from Chapter 21 of Jonar Nader’s book,
How to Lose Friends and Infuriate Your Boss.

Heroes from heaven

Managers who enrich your life

Products such as diamonds are sold on the basis of their scarcity. Their pricing structure is delicately balanced between supply and demand. If anyone were to find large diamond deposits that dramatically tipped that balance, they could push the price of diamonds down to that of glass.

Within our social structure, many things are precious because they are rare. If scarcity is the key to our economic system, should we make anything available in plentiful supply? For example, would we want everyone to be in good health? Even if we were able to eradicate the common cold, think of the millions of people who would become jobless, and the hundreds of factories that would have to close down. The health industry wants to make us better, but it cannot afford to rid the world of all its ailments because an oversupply of healthy people would send it broke.

What about management? Would industries thrive on an abundance of skilled managers? Or is it important to maintain a level of scarcity on that front as well? Surely it does not make sense to wish upon ourselves bad bosses and oppressive leaders.

There are two issues to consider. The first is that good managers are not scarce. There are plenty of them. The problem is that they quickly become ‘bad managers’ amid corrupt environments that drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator. One good boss can rarely survive a diseased environment because evil always wins over good, and therefore it is easy to thwart wholesome efforts with corporate cancer. The second issue relates to the difficulty of recognising intangibles. A broken chair is a tangible object that is easily identified, whereas a good boss is hard to spot because the intangible qualities are not readily evident.

As a result of this dilemma, good bosses are often revered in hindsight, not at the time of their reign. Some people fantasise about how exciting it would have been if they were able to work with Albert Einstein, George Patton, Napoleon Bonaparte, Oliver Cromwell, Sun Tzu, Frederick the Great, Julius Caesar, or Henry Ford. The same could be said about poets and artists. It seems that the dearly departed command more respect than the current crop.

If you can identify ‘the boss from heaven’, it would mean that you are able to identify modern-day heroes who will be saluted by future generations. Do not pass up an opportunity to become a student of skilled managers. Your challenge would be to identify who they are, and then to look, listen, and learn.

Heavenly qualities

When asked what they would consider to be the hallmarks of an ideal boss, employees ask for someone who is friendly, caring, fair, intelligent, supportive, happy, approachable, helpful, and knowledgeable. Although these qualities are desirable, they ought to be normal attributes for all managers.

The boss from heaven should possess exceptional characteristics that are above and beyond the call of duty. The following are some of the special qualities that define the ideal boss who can turbo-charge your career.

1.  The ideal boss is able to coach

How would you know what a coach looks like? What is the role of a coach, and what would be your role as a student? Coaches are those who urge you to take paths whose outcomes are of benefit to you, whereas taskmasters are those who urge you to undertake assignments purely for their own benefit.

A good coach will allow you to make mistakes, because the function of the coach is not to tell you what to do, but to alert you to the potential consequences, and to guide you through decision-making processes.

The most important challenge for a coach is to teach you the sense of timing. Much like a conductor who keeps the orchestra playing to time, a coach will assist you to develop your career by helping you to learn when to deviate from the path, and when to apply certain disciplines.

In modern corporate environments, managers are not obliged to act as coaches. Their role is to run departments with the help of skilled employees. If you are fortunate enough to have a boss who is willing to coach you, and if you want to seize the golden opportunity, it is incumbent upon you to learn how to listen and how to ask the right questions. Above all, you must reciprocate with discipline. Talk to young people about discipline, and they will presume that you are asking them to lead a boring, uninteresting life. They see discipline as the thief of fun. The application of discipline is not aimed at suppressing desire, but at eliminating self-destructive habits to the point where the triggers are eradicated.

A good coach will never expect anything in return, but will insist on discipline from every student, because coaching is a resource-intensive affair. For that reason, take care that you do not drain your coach to the point where you will lose the opportunity to stride into a successful future.

2.  The ideal boss is confident

When managers act with confidence, it is not unusual for bystanders and critics to accuse them of lacking humility. For some reason, people feel uneasy around confident operators.

Confidence does not translate into perfection, but into excellence. Yet, excellence does not guarantee success. The function of excellence is to align elements in the best possible manner, given the conditions at hand. This means that a confident person is not someone who knows that success is imminent, but who is certain that everything possible has been done to ward off failure.

If you can learn to observe the ways in which confident operators work, you will see that their attention-to-detail does not come from a desire to live in an orderly world. Instead, it comes from an understanding that they live amid chaos.

Apathy leads to complacency, whereas confidence leads to self-satisfaction. Observers who do not understand this, tend to accuse confident people of being smug.

To appreciate the art of confidence you need to learn the art of planning. Remember that confidence is the end-result of careful planning. It is a veneer, behind which is intricate detail. If you can learn to discern between detail and clutter, you will be able to operate confidently. Failure in the face of confidence is called experience. In the face of confusion, it is called carelessness.