Some roles, by their nature, give people authority over other people. Professors, for example, have teaching authority over their students. When I was young, I had a place as a student and that place was not in front of the classroom. My teacher also had a place, and it was not among us students. I understood these roles although, immature as I was, I didn’t necessarily like them and I rebelled.
While I grew out of my school-age insolence, I didn’t necessarily grow out of my pride, and so early in my career I resisted the authority of my bosses. I thought I was smarter than all of them, even though I had no experience and knew next to nothing. What a mistake! With maturity, I got over that and came to respect my employers.
Rebellion is common among youth so young people rarely gain very important positions in the world of commerce. Even as companies are generally flattening or reducing management layers, hierarchal structure remains important and we need to respect it. Someone has to be the boss.
As an entry-level employee or the person with the least seniority, it can be difficult to muster the respect due your manager. It is human nature to begrudge your boss; many people believe their bosses are marginally competent, or worse. Researchers at Florida State University surveyed more than seven hundred people in business: thirty-nine percent of them said their boss doesn’t keep promises; twenty-four percent said the boss invades their privacy and twenty-three percent said their bosses blame others to cover up their own mistakes. Conclusion: there are a lot of bad bosses out there! Nonetheless, you need to respect yours. If you find it impossible to respect your boss, a job change might be in order.
Think of Mathew 23:2-3 where Jesus instructs His apostles to do what the scribes and Pharisees say because of the authoritative position they hold, but not to act according to their example. The scribes and Pharisees were like bad bosses. Jesus didn’t tell His apostles to ignore them. He asked them to honor the authority due them given their role. But He also did not ignore the fact that these scribes and Pharisees were foolhardy and that’s why He warned people against imitating them. If your boss asks you to do something legitimate, you need to do it. But if he is a fool, you don’t need to act like one yourself.
Perhaps the biggest challenge arises when the boss and employee have different ideas about how to accomplish the company’s goals. In the newspaper world, that might be like an editor assigning a sports writer to cover a high school basketball game when the sports writer thinks he should be covering a professional hockey game. Or more seriously, maybe the boss instructs the employee to build a new plant in San Francisco when the employee believes all they really need is a little office in Poughkeepsie.
Communication is important; employees who have serious reservations about their boss’s judgment should talk about those concerns directly with the boss. Ultimately, however, the decision belongs to the boss. This can be difficult for some employees but over time this is a self-correcting system. If the boss makes too many bad decisions, at some point his own boss will deal with him. Granted, this can take a long time. Sometimes it takes a merger or some other dramatic event to shake things right.
Employees, however, are in charge of their own destiny. If the opportunities that lay in front of an employee look skewed because of the incompetence or ill-personalities of the people above him, then the employee needs to change jobs. The employee typically has the advantage over the employer; an employee usually has more opportunity to change jobs than most managers have to fire someone.
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