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Your Boss
Edited by Anna Muoio

What do you do about your boss? We approached various writers, academics, thinkers, and consultants -- men and women who make it their business to answer this boss question.

Leonard Schlesinger
Senior Vice President for Development
Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island

I've got three words for you: Suck it up. Intense psychotherapy and pharmaceuticals might have a significant impact on your boss's behavior -- but you won't. It's not up to you to change your boss, but you can change your situation. You can do this in one of three ways: impose or relax constraints on the situation, work your way around the situation, or get out of the situation.

Yes, it's a grim and unjust reality: Most of us work in hierarchical organizations -- and we have bosses. Therefore, the consequences are grave when you establish a mindset that says, "You are not the boss of me. I am the boss of me." Sometimes I marvel at people who expect their boss to move heaven and earth to accommodate whatever idiosyncratic interest or point of view they have -- without considering peers, efficiency, or hierarchy.

My first job, at age 19, taught me an invaluable lesson about working for dumb bosses. Back then, I worked for the state government of Rhode Island. My boss was as dumb as a rock. But he required only three things from me: He needed to get credit for everything; he wanted to be fully briefed weekly; and he wanted me to get him into the newspaper as much as I could. If I did these things, I had the latitude to do whatever I wanted with my work. Although my friends thought I was working for a complete dope, I was thinking that this situation was a gift from heaven. At age 19, I had opportunities that I could never have had anywhere else -- experiences that, down the line, made me substantially more valuable in the job market. If you work for a dumb boss, don't be dumb to the opportunities that exist. Find them, and then exploit them for your own benefit.

Unfortunately, there are bosses who simultaneously are dumb and don't let you do anything. If you're working for one of those, my message changes to just two words: Move on.

Leonard Schlesinger (len_schlesinger@brown.edu) was the George Baker Jr. Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He now heads Brown's fund-raising enterprise. He has written several books, including The Service Profit Chain, which he coauthored with J.L. Heskett and W.E. Sasser (Free Press, 1997), and The Real Heroes of Business: . . . and Not a CEO Among Them, with W. Fromm (Doubleday, 1994).

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