Good Boss, Bad Boss - The Asian Perspective

Good Boss, Bad Boss was the title of a book written by Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University.  In his discussion with bosses and employees, he mentioned 12 traits of bad bosses, such as:

1. I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.
2. My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods. 
3. Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable my people to make a little progress every day. 
4. One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to strike the delicate balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough. 
5. My job is to serve as a human shield, to protect my people from external intrusions, distractions, and idiocy of every stripe — and to avoid imposing my own idiocy on them as well. 
6. I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge, but humble enough to realize that I am often going to be wrong.
7. I aim to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong — and to teach my people to do the same thing.
8. One of the best tests of my leadership — and my organization — is “what happens after people make a mistake?”
9. Innovation is crucial to every team and organization. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. But it is also my job to help them kill off all the bad ideas we generate, and most of the good ideas, too. 
10. Bad is stronger than good. It is more important to eliminate the negative than to accentuate the positive. 
11. How I do things is as important as what I do. 
12. Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting  like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it. 

Assuming that the views above were mainly for bosses from the western society, do Asian bosses differ? From my views, education and globalisation has flattened management styles across the world.  Similar frustrations faced by bosses and employees are also faced in Asia. 

However, the fear of facing unemployment is generally higher in Asia mainly due to the lack of the social security net.  This is especially true at mid-level management where roots of the Asian culture of reverence and respect still prevail.  As such, attrition rates for this level in Asia is generally not as high as that in the West.  People only ‘sack’ the boss when they cannot tolerate him or if there are very good openings available elsewhere.  Besides, commitments of folks at this level would have grown. To most, familiarity counts.  They tend to adhere to the Chinese proverb that says, “better to work for the known than an unknown”.

Nonetheless, this scenario is not the same for the younger generation, who do not have any regard for allegiance. They will go where the pay and perks are better.  For these, the quality of the boss is not the factor that retains them.  It is their comfort zone that drives them.