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The 12 Beliefs of Good Bosses

Guest post by: Jeff Ogden

Article Overview: 12 Beliefs of Good Bosses – from the book Enchantment by Guy Kawasaki He quotes Bob Sutton, a professor at Stanford University and author of Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best…and Learn from the Worst. Professor Sutton compiled a great list of twelve beliefs of good bosses, which we share here.

The 12 Beliefs of Good Bosses

While I am currently the President of the B2B lead generation companyFind New Customers, I have the experience of personally working for the very best - and the very worst bosses on Earth. So this resonated with me and it may with you. I really hope you find a way to share this post with your boss.....

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, and not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.
3. Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think of 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 someone makes 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 then to accentuate the positive.
11. How I do things is more important than 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.

What do you think? We love comments and those who share our content.

Jeff Ogden (@fearlesscomp) is President of the B2B lead generation consultancy, Find New Customers and in his long career, has worked for a few of the best and many of the worst - bosses anywhere. This is why he is looking to share key ideas.

To learn about Jeff, please click Who is the Fearless Competitor?

Find New Customers helps companies (with between 150 and 5,000 employees who sell complex products to businesses) to implement world-class lead generation programs. As companies struggle to create quality sales opportunities, they turn to lead generation companies like Find New Customers.

"Find New Customers can certainly help your business dramatically improve the flow of sales-ready leads to salespeople." Paul Dunay, Buzz Marketing for Technology.

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Article Tags: b2b demand generation, b2b lead generation, btob demand generation, btob lead generation, demand gen, demand generation, demand generation companies, demand generation company, find new customers, lead gen, lead generation, lead generation companies, lead generation company, sales lead generation



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