The business of bossing

"The Boss's Survival Guide: Everthing You Need To Know About Getting Through (and Getting the Most Out of) Every Day"
By Bob Rosner, Allan Halcrow and Alan S. Levins
McGraw-Hill, 336 pages, June

By Stephanie Morris
CNN

(CNN) -- Bosses. Most workers have them, and some folks have horror stories to tell about them.

Maybe you are one, or will one day become one. Wherever you are on the corporate ladder, it's probably apparent to you that bosses don't always enjoy the highest regard.

Syndicated columnist Bob Rosner has teamed with Alan Halcrow, former editor-in-chief of Workforce magazine, and Alan Levins, senior partner with Littler Mendelson, to address the problem -- with a more sympathetic approach than some may take -- in "The Boss's Survival Guide." The book went onto shelves June 1 and is published by McGraw-Hill with the subtitle "Everything You Need To Know About Getting Through (and Getting the Most Out of) Every Day."

"What we wanted to do," says Rosner -- whose "Working Wounded" column is read in many newspapers, magazines and Web sites -- "is create a guide to help orient the well-meaning bosses with the most important stuff to know to solve the biggest problems they face.

"The three of us decided we wanted this to pertain to someone running a microbrewery out of their garage in the Midwest to the biggest Fortune 500 company and everything in between."

Rosner, Halcrow and Levins cover more than 60 of the issues most likely to keep a boss up at night, including how to navigate legal issues and how to be a good leader.

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Featured in the book are two Top 10 lists that a boss might consider for the office wall: The Top 10 Things To Do To Stay out of Jail and The Top 10 Things To Do To Keep Your Best People.

Rosner says he encountered a kind of turning point on the subject when he received an e-mail from a former supervisor at a Fortune 500 company. It read, "In my opinion, I would not want to work for me."

"He's a very effective worker," Rosner says of his e-mail correspondent, "but he's chosen to stay out of management because he just doesn't have the temperament."

While he says he remains optimistic, Rosner says there's a lot of work to be done in the management of industry. "I believe America's contribution to the world," he says, "is we take an excellent journalist, engineer, etc., and we turn them into a mediocre manager.

"We're looking at a whole lot of people being bumped into management with no real management skills or experience, and no time to focus on it. Most importantly, most people still have their own job that they do, and then in addition manage a bunch of people."

One attribute of a successful manager is leadership, although everyone has his or her interpretation of what that means.

"The bottom-line definition for me is that a leader is someone with followers," Rosner says, "and given how tight talent is today, if you don't work to keep your followers, you will not continue to be a leader."

A leadership style that works for one boss may not be appropriate for another. Rosner refers to a study in the book of six leadership styles.

"I think too many of us as leaders," he says, "find one or two styles of leadership that we find most effective, and we continue to use them. And what the study clearly documented is that the truly effective leaders apply their leadership approach based on the circumstances."

Once example Rosner cites is the democratic leadership style, in which a boss forges a consensus through participation. Rosner says that while this "let's do it together" strategy is effective, it might not be the best thing a boss should do if the company is facing a crisis.

"If your company is facing a bankruptcy, the last thing employees want to hear is, 'Let's work on this together,'" Rosner says. "They want leaders who say, 'This is what we need to do.'"

By some criteria, we live in a customer-driven world and Rosner likens bossing to that model. He says he believes the employee is the customer of an executive's bossing -- staffers are the clients of their boss.

Rosner says he works as a consultant with many companies that in focus groups discover their employees believe, "My boss couldn't pick me out of a police lineup."

"It's ironic to me," Rosner says, "that as a boss, all of our leverage comes from our people, yet we very seldom focus on where those people are at, what their needs are and what it would take for them to excel in their performance."

Rosner's interest makes him something of a retention evangelist bent on increasing focus on the role of the boss in our society.

"I have a naïve belief," he says, "that bosses are the cure, that bosses can make organizations work better, that bosses can retain the best employees -- but only when bossing is made a priority."