How important is the boss to the success of an enterprise? The anecdotal evidence is everywhere, pointing to masterful and inept bosses held responsible, respectively, for grand success or miserable failure.
But the more academic research is often inconclusive, in large part because of so many variables that determine organizational success. These range from the state of the economy to the skill of the underlings (and whether the managers are great because Human Resources got lucky, or, of course, because the second tier is inspired by a God-like boss) and the competition itself – among so many other things.
In some organizations, it’s safe to say that the boss is largely irrelevant. As is often said of newspaper editors, “how hard can it be?”
But even after decades of debate, and thousands of MBA research papers, both the success and the requisite skills of the perfect boss remain mysterious. Put aside the tiresome “class warfare” debate as to the matter of how much the CEO is allowed to grab from the investors and underlings in a public company, and we are still left with the unanswered: What is the marginal value of that next ounce of sweat from the boss’ furrowed brow? Is the next zillion dollars we give him producing even more success, or is it merely keeping him on board, so he does not wander away to work his magic somewhere else? Or, is it none of those things?
The mystery extends far beyond (or below) the Fortune 500. The butcher, baker and candlestick maker also must toil under bosses of varying skills – or be their own bosses, with a company picnic consisting of themselves and a blanket in the park. And what of the successful high-tech entrepreneurs, who aren’t so great at managing what has sprung up around them? The venture-capital boys are more than happy to march in and show them how to be a boss.
At a more nuts-and-bolts level, every jurisdiction must at some time ponder the mystery and majesty of school principals – bosses of a sort who are vaguely in charge of the educational enterprise that is housed within the building.
Laser Focused
In this age of constipated teacher-union work rules and job protection; in this age of bossy school boards and “core curriculum” and government mandates; some would suggest that school principals are left to be little more than robots, with less discretion than the school janitor.
Still, stories abound of principals who are inspiring or mean or impassioned or something that seems to work, better than at that other school down the street, managed by an apparent drone.
A Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education report last month suggested that magical principals can have a positive effect on schools, while the strategy of firing or transferring teachers at bad schools and replacing them has little evidence to support it as an improvement strategy.
Principals at lower-performing schools, the report suggested, “did not exhibit the same level or urgency or laser-like focus on improving instruction and student achievement,” as did the God-like principals at better-performing schools.
On the surface, this research sounds a bit squishy; which is to say that “laser-like focus” isn’t an easy thing to quantify. But, of course, this is educational research we’re talking about, where everything from “new math” to “open classrooms” to “bilingual education” to “tracking” to the long-term benefits of Head Start all had their murky “research” to support them – until everyone sort of shrugged at the inconclusiveness of it all and went back to doing whatever they wanted.
Look at the great “robber barons” of yesteryear. While we assume that they were great bosses, it was the discipline and competition of the marketplace that inspired them to greatness. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, Vanderbilt and Edison all were geniuses of invention and marketing and creativity, in response to market competition – whether or not they were very good at inspiring the file clerk to put everything in alphabetical order.
School principals? It is a constrained, somewhat monopolistic world in which they operate. There must be great, mediocre and terrible principals – but that assessment isn’t easy to make.
