Having a decent boss could have lifelong consequences
Bosses needn’t do anything extraordinary, just be decent and fair, to be humanitarian and heroic
I hope it is true that young people have a lot of sex; almost everything else about their lives is so bleak. Especially when they are at work, which is how most of them spend most of their youth. Their happiness is fragile, dependent on people who have power over them. Their lives would be richer if they had good bosses. The entire youths of millions of people would have been better if they had better bosses.
I got lucky there in my first job. My first boss, Ingrid Albuquerque, was a seasoned editor of glossy publications. I was 20 years old. She was generous to me, saved me from trouble, and at the time she was the only person who was materially useful. I sensed she could have an outsized influence on my professional life, a reason why the most thrilling part of my life then was waiting for her couriers, or phone calls. She died last week after a heart attack. In the end, even though she was my boss only for a year, in that brief time she was many times more useful to me than I ever was to her. In fact, I don’t think I had done anything for her.
A piece of nonsense I hear frequently from bosses is that they aim to “hire people who are smarter than me." It is wise, but the opposite of what a boss who says stuff like that does. Rather, bosses primarily tend to hire people who make them feel secure, which often means someone who is not exceptional, or they hire a nerd who has narrow domain genius and will never climb the management rungs, or they hire someone who is too young to be a threat of any kind. So, the calibre of the boss becomes the upper limit of talent, and every rung of the hierarchy below them is guarded the same way by smaller ringleaders. As a result, a smart young person so often has to report to managers who are not natural leaders, or who are in fact very bad at their jobs. This in itself need not be hell, but usually is.
Young men are routinely humiliated by middle-aged bosses who see them as sexual competition or who just resent them for their youth. The Me-Too movement showed one way in which bosses can degrade the lives of young women. The movement is also a hint that bosses can hurt their subordinates in other subtle ways, ways that are neither obvious nor criminal.
The humanitarian potential of a boss, at every rung of an office set-up, is immense. This does not mean he or she needs to go out of the way to do good. There exists that type, too, and they are the amateur bosses. They impart too much articulation of intent and too much do-gooding, which often leads to trouble. I think the best bosses are those who are primarily good at their jobs, and whose decency is in the fact that they do not do anything indecent or petty. That alone is enough to improve the lives of their subordinates.
Despite the fortune of being hired by Albuquerque, my first day as a full-time journalist was a disaster. There was a senior writer I had to report to. In the first two hours, she had taken me under her wings and even called up her contacts to fix appointments for a story I had planned. By tea time, I thought adults in offices were generally good people.
But then disaster struck. In the middle of a chat, the senior writer asked me to guess her age.
She looked old, I thought, but my instinct told me that I should reduce her age a bit. I said “63"; I always used odd numbers that were not divisible by five to sound precise.
It turned out that she was around 45 years old. I didn’t understand how that was very different from 63. The senior writer started yelling at me.
I wondered aloud on her “idiosyncrasy". I used to use words like ‘idiosyncrasy’ in conversations back then.
She froze. She probably thought I was calling her an idiot through a longer word. She yelled some more and called up her contacts in Madras to warn them about me. I had that effect on many people at the time—I would say something and they would start screaming. But this case was particularly bad because she was going to be my bureau chief. But when Albuquerque got to know, she ensured I did not have to report to the slighted writer again. She promised to protect me from people who seemed crazier than me.
When Albuquerque hired me, she did not know I was in a bad way financially. I was in the middle of a charlatan diploma course in journalism, fending for myself. I had tried to liberate myself by looking for a job, but newspapers in Madras, despite their idealism, said they would only hire interns at no salary.
After Albuquerque gave me a paid job, I went to the principal of the college I attended and asked for my fee back, as I would not be staying back for the rest of the academic session. The principal was yelling long after I left his room. It was a period of my life when I realized character was entirely blood pressure.
Often, you cannot look at a person and tell he is on the brink, or even what the brink is. Bosses need not know about the situation of those who report to them; maybe they should not know too much. But merely by being fair, not even generous, just fair, they can transform many lives.
Ingrid Albuquerque did not know much about my life all those years ago. But, once she drafted me in, she made it her mission to get me a fair shot. It helped me grow some muscles at the very start of my writing career and prepared me to leave that job for better places.
Manu Joseph is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’
