Are you a good boss?  How do you know?

These are questions we often confront in coaching sessions and everyone has a different answer.  Some say “I just know”.  Others rely on the feedback from those around them, “from my last 360 feedback survey”.

But what are the fundamental beliefs that underpin your management style?  How do they impact your decisions and your behaviour at work everyday?

Bob Sutton, renowned author and Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University has developed a list of some of the key beliefs that are held by the best bosses.  How do you measure up?

Bob Sutton’s List

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 the obvious, mundane things – not on magical, obscure or breakthrough ideas
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 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 am to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong – and teach my people to do the same thing
8. One of the best tests of my leadership – and my organisation – is “what happens after people make a mistake”
9. Innovation is critical to every team and organisation. My job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas.  But it is my job to help them kill off all the bad ideas 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

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