The problem with working for Greg Savage

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Clickbait headline, right?

For sure.

But you’re here now, so you may as well keep reading.

The problem with working for Greg Savage is that you think it’s normal to have a boss who wants you to be better, drives you to be better, and will help you be better….if you are prepared to put in the work.

There is no such thing as a perfect boss, and Greg’s two books detail the mistakes he has made and what he has learned from them.

I didn’t like everything Greg did, agree with everything he did, or necessarily always agree with the way that he did what he did, but I respected the hell out of his right to make those decisions and execute them his way.

Greg had earned, and continued to earn, my respect over the nine years we worked at the same company, either as my boss’s boss or as the person I reported to.

Most employees have a default position of respect for their new boss. Then that boss either justifies that respect or loses that respect.

Without knowing it, many bosses lose the respect of their direct reports. The loss of respect is unlikely to be immediate (although I was bad enough to accomplish that in the early days of my leadership).

The four most common ways bosses lose the respect of their team are the following:

Make promises they don’t keep – mostly these promises are ‘small’, such as a response to a request, a promise to meet, a promise to create an introduction etc. If your boss can’t consistently keep ‘small’ promises, how could you trust them to keep big ones?
Failure to recognise, and act on, incompetent, poorly behaved or uncommitted team members – how can any boss expect to build a culture to be proud of if they appear oblivious to those not pulling their weight? Those pulling their weight notice and are resentful of that obliviousness or indifference, whether they say so or not.
Avoidance of hard decisions – being a leader means making timely decisions about scarce resources such as time, money, and people, with (in many cases) incomplete information. It’s natural, and almost always an error, for a leader to defer a difficult decision because “I need more time”. Rarely does more time provide greater clarity or change the decision that needs to be made.
Lack of care – if you don’t care about people and standards, then please don’t think you can lead. The people who report to you notice your lack of care, and they will soon stop caring as well. Why should they care when somebody who is paid more doesn’t seem to?

Greg, overwhelmingly, kept his promises, acted on incompetent, poorly behaved, or uncommitted team members, made hard decisions, and cared about people and standards.

Having a boss who can tick those four boxes creates an employee’s expectation of a future boss that, in my experience, is very hard to find.

A subsequent boss of mine was so far from the standard that I was used to with Greg that I started down a path to self-employment that was fulfilled nearly three years later.

The problem with working for Greg Savage was that I found it impossible to work for a leader who fails to keep their promises, ignores incompetent, poorly behaved or uncommitted team members, avoids hard decisions and doesn’t care about people and standards.

I decided that ‘problem’ was a good reason for becoming self-employed.

I suspect it’s also why many agency recruiters seem to be choosing self-employment over remaining an employee.

Leaders are still mostly terrible at weekly one-to-ones

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Posted in Recruitment