Monday, June 05, 2023

Good Bosses and Bad

To get situated, imagine you are sitting right here outside in the hills overlooking San Francisco Bay. We’re looking west, the sun is shining, and far below us the traffic is buzzing freely back and forth — north and south — along the I-80.

A passenger train is angling through that same area with its haunting whistle rising on the soft breeze from the flatlands.

Several birds come and go in the yard, visiting their favorite trees and shrubs before ascending to the electric wires strung overhead. One pair is hard at work building a nest in a bush down by the sidewalk when they have to angrily ward off two crows that keep trying to encroach. 

A hazy fog hovers over the coastal range in the distance.

Over here just to our right is the wooden planter box where I’ve seeded tomatoes, peppers, and a pea plant and set the seeds of carrots, onions and cucumbers in the fresh black dirt. Everything is moist as I’ve just criss-crossed the contraption with a small sprinkler can.

Next I need a strategy to ward off the deer who periodically strip everything edible from this yard.

But what we are discussing today is what it means to be “retired” after many decades going to work every day, week after month after year, and on and on until a half-century has passed. To start with, it means no more paychecks, that’s for sure, which is not such a good thing.

But it also means that you don’t have to be in any particular place at any particular time doing some very specific thing and answering to somebody who — let’s just be honest here — is probably acting more or less like a jerk.

That goes with the territory.

Being retired also means you have time to think back over it all. People in general, I would say, don’t really make very good bosses. The way they get into that position is usually some mix of talent, privilege, competition, aggression, ambition and greed. 

All other things being equal, people who enjoy telling others what to do out of an inflated sense of their own rightness do not make very good bosses. On the other hand, exercising some degree of decision-making power over well-deserving employees can be an opportunity to make others’ lives in that moment just a little bit better, happier and more rewarding.

There’s an entire library of mediocre books about management theory with charts and statistics but trust me on this one, it all boils down to whether you are a good boss or a bad one.

Now that we’ve settled that issue, let’s celebrate that none of this is any of our concern any longer. And that, my friend, is a very good thing. We’re retired. We can focus on the nesting birds and hope they’ve chased off the marauding crows at least long enough to usher a few new lives into this world of survival of the slightly more fit.

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