A First Timer’s Guide to Being a Good Boss

Taking the plunge, becoming an entrepreneur, and starting up your own business, is likely to be a major milestone in your life. The kind of event that you can look back on fondly, as a defining moment in your own personal journey.

A milestone which gets a lot less attention, but which is frequently just as significant in the lives of entrepreneurs, is the moment when your business grows beyond its former limits, and requires you to hire staff, in order to move forward.

This is often a jarring experience, and involves plenty of hasty research on recruitment process steps, and all the rest.

But what does it actually mean to be a good boss, and how should you go about it if you’ve never been in that situation before?

Here are a few suggestions.

Lead from the front

The phrase “leading from the front” brings to mind the image of an authority figure who is “in the trenches” with their team, who has “skin in the game,” and earns the trust of those around them by setting a positive example.

In business, being the kind of boss who “leads from the front” means that you are working just as hard as everyone else, are just as vulnerable to the consequences of failure as everyone else, and are accountable to your team.

Leading from the front doesn’t mean trying to micromanage everything, but it does mean that you don’t get to sit aloof in your office, and expect your worker drones to do all the heavy lifting.

Interrogate yourself for mishaps first

One of the cardinal traits that we all recognise in a bad leader, is that they will never take responsibility for anything, and will always be looking for someone to point a finger at and blame.

A good leader, by contrast, interrogates himself for mishaps, before pointing the finger at anyone else.

So, your team has been unproductive, and has essentially made a mess of the project they were working on? Is it because they are all lazy idiots, or could part of the issue perhaps be that you communicated the goals of the project poorly?

Look after the well-being of your team as an organism

A good leader looks after the well-being of their team, as if it were an organism unto itself.

In practice, this means that a large part of the job of a good leader is to maximise team cohesion, minimise toxic office culture, and ensure that everyone has the space and support to be productive to the best of their capacity.

If, therefore, a particular member of the team is dragging everyone else down, it’s your responsibility to deal with that – whether that means having a meaningful chat, or firing them outright.

As a boss, you are essentially the “gardener” responsible for keeping things in harmonious order.

This is a contributed post.