Warning Signs Your “Great” Boss Isn’t So Great

I’m just going to say it — your boss is not your friend. I don’t care how much fun he is, how many times you go out after work together, how much he ‘has your back’ or your team’s back, even how much he praises you.

You have a job to do. And, unless you work for one of the scarce great leaders, that job is to make your boss look good.

I know. It’s popular for people to talk about how their personal goal every day is to make their boss look good. Mostly that’s an underhanded way of saying you want to do excellent work, and you want recognition for it. There’s nothing wrong with that.

A good boss elevates his team rather than himself. So you trying to make your boss look good is contrary to the goal of a true leader. Your boss should be evaluated based on his ability to motivate, train, and develop his teams to do a level of work beyond what they thought they were capable. That makes both of you look good.

Behaviors that Appear ‘Great’ But Undermine the Team Instead

In theory, the behaviors I’m going to describe sound fantastic. Who wouldn’t want to work for this kind of boss? But looking at the ripple effects and long-term consequences, I hope you’ll understand how your boss is setting you up for failure by engaging in these practices.

Having your back

Let’s talk about how your boss ‘has your back.’ Supporting your employees is good until it slips into covering up and/or justifying your mistakes. No one is perfect. Admitting mistakes shows professional maturity and accountability. One of the most significant time sucks in business is the amount of effort and energy it takes to cover up mistakes. Fess up, fix it, and move on.

News flash: mistakes rarely go unnoticed by others. When your boss fails to acknowledge your mistakes, you start to lose credibility with your team and other teams. You’re not fooling anyone. Trying to cover it up makes you and your boss look stupid and untrustworthy. Not exactly the foundation for healthy working relationships.

Special privileges

Then there are the ‘extra’ privileges your cool boss extends to you and your team. You know what they are — little things that you and your teammates get to do, but other groups can’t. While this is great for you, each time you take advantage of your awesome boss’s generosity, you’re creating resentment from your peers and the other teams around you.

It might not be said to your face, but don’t kid yourself. The sideways glances from the other staff turn into snarky comments in the breakroom that lead to other employees losing respect for you and going out of their way to sabotage your ideas or blatantly undermine your success.

Put simply, it pisses other people off, and they aren’t going to like you for it. You can justify it all day long by waving around your boss’s approval. It doesn’t matter. Your special privileges give you the appearance of having favor while your peers feel they are being treated unfairly. Your boss is setting you up to become wildly unpopular.

Creating a tight-knit team

Teams often become our ‘work families.’ We develop close bonds and friendships with these people. That’s great until it undermines the team’s ability to work well with other groups.

Team loyalty gone wrong can quickly turn into an ‘us vs. them’ environment. If your boss encourages, or demands, team consensus when you’re interacting with others, it can create an atmosphere where people feel ambushed. There’s no point in discussing differences of opinion and collaboration goes out the window. It’s always your team against someone else. That is not a good dynamic.

Not only does unhealthy consensus inhibit the creative process and limit ideation to those of a few, but absolute team consensus also shows others that worthy ideas and valid opinions don’t come from anyone else. Your team will quickly become the know-it-alls, and you know how people love to work with those folks.

Other managers, your boss’s peers, also take offense to this approach, breeding more ‘us against them’ behavior, losing respect for your boss, and ultimately your team. The last person I want to work for is the boss the other managers make fun of or outright dislike.

Don’t get sucked in by these manipulations.

Yes, I said manipulations. The reason your boss engages in these behaviors is wholly self-serving. He wants his teams to adore him. He wants everyone in the company to know how much his teams love working for him. Why? Professional advancement. He is using you to get to the next rung up his career ladder.

Hiding your mistakes and allowing special privileges makes it easy for your boss to create a loyal team dynamic. This also allows him to keep the covers on questionable team operations and subpar outputs. Yup, it hides your team’s weaknesses, limiting your development and professional growth. Well, I should say it protects your shortcomings from the C-Suite that will promote your boss. The other teams working around you are quite aware of what’s going on.

So, your ‘great’ boss is using you for their professional advancement, turning you into a target for your peers on other teams, and generally creating a team that no one else respects or wants to work with. How great is that?

So what do you do?

Many of us aren’t in a position to switch to a different team with a different boss. The best thing you can do if you find yourself with a ‘great’ boss is to be aware of the dynamics being created within your team and with other teams. Go the extra mile to reach out to your peers on other teams. And, when you can, don’t get sucked into the ‘one for all, all for one’ attitude in multi-team settings. Contribute to your team and support them, but be you.

I’ll end where I started: your boss is not your friend. He’s looking out for himself. You should do the same.