About three months ago, I became a boss for the first time (as one of the managers at a vocational site for adults with developmental disabilities). There are six people who report to me, and it's got me thinking a lot lately about what makes a great boss vs just a decent one vs a bad one. What I've been reflecting on is that what I've been given is a really big responsibility; I affect these people's lives in both big and small ways every day, so I'm trying to serve them well and find ways to make their days better.

What are some of your best (and worst) experiences with bosses/managers? Those of you who have more experience with leadership, what advice would you give someone who's new at it?

Thanks all!

I'm just at my first job right now, so I don't know if I'll be of much help, but I might as well offer some anyway. My boss right now is pretty good. She's very nice and supportive. For example, when I was having trouble cutting bread (as I work at a sandwich shop) she said "we need to work on you bread cutting" and demonstrated the right way to do it and how she did it. And then she added "it's still difficult for some people who have been doing it for a long time" which made me feel better. I appreciated the constructive criticism and that she wasn't rude about it or anything. The only problem I'd say is that sometimes she can have some oversights...like yesterday we served mildewy lettuce all day long--for 8+ hours--and I ate it myself! Or while she's there the bread will still be baked incorrectly or the dishes won't get done. So I suppose all I can say is that constructive criticism is good but being competent is also good, lol.

Well I just got kicked out of my internship without any reason given. That's a boss!

Lots of experience in both places. Worst bosses: tell you to do something, with no or (worse) WRONG directions, then when a co-worker complains about what you're doing, they blame YOU. Or , when you're one of the best workers and really know your stuff, they try to micro-manage, checking your work, literally standing over your shoulder, telling you to do something you KNOW is not the best way to do the job. Giving you more to do than is humanly possible, then finding something you didn't do and punishing you. The winner of BAD: not knowing YOUR job (when YOU do!) but refushing to "lower" themselves by learning from YOU. Supervisors like to say they only need to know how to supervisor, not how to DO the job... not always true.
Especially if you are new to the company, supervising older/more experienced workers, I advise: don't try to be "one of the guys", their is a fine line between being too aloof and trying to be everyones BFF. In any group of people, there will be some that don't like each other. THAT'S OK! But do not tolerate them acting out at work; have a meeting with them. It IS possible to work and be polite with people you don't like. NEVER criticize someone you supervise in front of others; in private, without attacking them AS A PERSON, tell them exactly what they are doing that is unacceptable, be clear what you expect, and always end on an up-note ("I really appreciate the way you..."), and follow up (see that they actually do what you asked, then either re-correct, or praise). Praise more than you criticize! And do it publicly! And if possible, do "team building", it really does work to build the relationships needed; from having a group lunch, to actually going someplace together. I really used to love our weekly lunch meetings. Team meeting in ANY job are a necessity.
Read "Idiot's guide to office politics", and "Dealing with people you can't stand"

Well, I'm 21 and I only had summer jobs so I only had two bad experiences with bosses.
When I was 16 (my very first job) I worked in a bakery. Basically it was me, the boss/owner and another guy working backstage making cake and stuff, while a bunch of girls and the owner's daughter worked in the shop/café. The good about this experience is that I really got to know what I could call "bakery secrets". Cooking always interested me, but no recipe book or tv show is like having to make cakes and pastries every day! I really learned a lot. The downside is that those two people working with me backstage were...
Two. Absolute. Dickheads.
The owner was a grumpy man, who barely had any hearing left (he would whisper something while I was in the other room and then get mad because I didn't do what he asked me, even though I didn't even know he said anything), and the other guy was this self-loathing dick, always ready to shout at everyone and complaining about everything. I worked there three months and NEVER, EVER got a "please" or "thank you" from them: I don't look for compliments or credit while I work, but I don't think it's hard to create a nice environment. His daughter was lovely though, and so were the girls in the shop/café.

My second experience was three years ago, I worked in an hotel in my hometown as a waiter. The pay was sooo bad because I kind of asked for that job last minute, I had to settle for what I found, but I had a great time because my co-workers were awesome. The owner wasn't.
She was this grumpy (sorry again, I just can't stand grumpy people! They ruin everyone's day) old lady, shady and just plain mean. She used to publicly shame the waitress who worked with me because she was pretty. Really just a lovely, pretty, funny, hardworking girl, she took so much s**t from that woman. My boss used to say she was a "witch who makes men do what they want" or a "whore", soooo unreal! Same with the other waiter, who was from Eastern Europe, calling him "that foreign" or calling him unpleasant names.
But it gets worse. Ooooh boy.
She was the G-R-E-E-D-I-E-S-T person ON. THE. PLANET. Literally when I would scoop up ice-cream to serve the guests, she would tell me "Scoop up smaller balls! They don't deserve so much! You want to dilapidate my money! You want me go bankrupt!" and same with everything. She thought we wanted to drive her into bankruptcy, and she was bitchy with customers too. I don't know how that hotel is still open with that b**ch running it, to be honest. I wouldn't sleep a night in there if I was paid for it.

But I also had good experiences. I worked in a luxury hotel when we were treated very well, and when it was time for me to leave the owner popped a magnum bottle of champagne and wished me farewell with the rest of the staff

All of what other people have said is true (lead by example, make sure everyone knows what they need to do without being a taskmaster, be accountable). I really only have horror stories/cautionary tales about my last boss, but they're pretty entertaining, so here goes.

• He used to show up hungover and he'd spend all day locked in his office, leaving me without a second cashier during busy shifts.
• Threw a knife at me once.
• Told a lot of personal stories. Asked a lot of personal questions.
• Half-hour smoke breaks.

@efolger997 -- Thanks for the input. I agree that competence is important. I can't respect a boss that doesn't know what he/she is doing.

@Johnny_Bravo -- Dude, that sucks about your internship. Sorry.

@grammapat -- Thanks so much for the advice and the book suggestions; both sound good to me. I'm the kind of nerd that reads a lot of books and articles about whatever I'm doing, so I've already ransacked the local library for a lot of titles like that. Team building and the balance between aloof and BFF is particularly hard for me, but I'm working on it. I try to be friendly and chat with them during downtimes and at the end of the day, but also give them space to just hang out with each other. No one wants a boss that pushes into their social scene too much.

@Gabrymato -- OMG, those people both sound horrible! In order to be that bad as a boss, I think I'd have to experience a stroke that killed the part of my brain that registers human emotion. Still, I admit that I love to read people's horror stories and was secretly hoping for something like that out of this thread.

@Mammal -- You too, Mammal. What kind of a psycho would...? A knife? Really? I feel like I want the full story on that.

The worst part about the knife thing is that there isn't even a good story. I was breaking down boxes and asked if there was a box cutter, so he throws it to/at me. I dodged (because no, I am not trying to catch a knife no thank you) and then he made fun of me for a week for not even trying to catch it. He was a bastard, but he was mostly just stupid.

No, all my good stories are about the customers.

I've usually been lucky with my bosses - not that I've had a lot of them, though.

But I did, as a student in work practice, have a 'boss' (head of the unit, more like) who happened to be the mother of the worst of the bullies that made my life sour in Elementary school. I didn't see her a lot, but she wasn't all that bad, even if she struck me as a little weird and very scatterbrained at times.

There were times where I very much wanted to remind her how much I despise her son, but I decided to keep my head down for my own good.

My best boss was my first boss as a student "executive assistant," aka student secretary. This guy cared mostly about having me do two things: 1. Be there to take calls 2. Type out thank you cards and thank you letters to everyone. There were other tasks, but I don't think they really mattered because he never complained if I was late in doing them, just as long as 1 and 2 were done, pronto.

The pay may not have been much but I never had so much money for myself in my life every two weeks. It would be fair to say that he let me work casually, but not just me. One of the other secretaries told me that they used purchase requisition forms to order computers and printers for themselves because they knew the purchase order codes. This was back when powerful computers were 2.0GHz. Another guy would just straight download porn all the time and let his pets ( RATS! ) roam around the room, and this other girl was looking up song lyrics and guitar tabs and printing them to make a book for herself.

I mention other students because there was this list of work to be done, shared by everyone. The lesson here is, if you let people work that way then everyone is going to shove all the hard work aside and let someone else do it. Oh, and these things that were "hard" were Microsoft Office spreadsheets, making merge field spam letters, filing ( as in "D" for "December" and "things that start with 'J' get filed under 'J'" ), and typing messages from a private recorder.

There will NEVER be a job for me as great as that one was that that time in my life. Lesson: Dream jobs do exist.

My worst boss was my next job working on the student newsletter, run completely by students with no senior advisor. The Editor let her boyfriend call the shots. She herself wasn't much of a hardass and it was clear every time we were stuck on ads while waiting and waiting for the writers to turn in their work just so that we could start getting to work... when it's already gone 11 at night. That's when we are struggling with layout and stories that aren't long enough but not having a good pictures so we just put pullquotes everywhere and use stock crap... while THEY have their love story over in the corner. Working with macs should be a breeze, right? Well then we were the damn retards completely at the mercy of a room full of networked macs at 3 in the morning because we had NO MAC EXPERT. This was the routine every night before the newsletter was due, leading up to going to bed at 5 in the morning with thursday classes ahead.

So the lesson to learn is to ask the previous editor what is involved in the job before taking it. If it involves sleep deprivation, think twice.

I try to keep in mind that it's not easy being a boss - they usually answer to someone higher up the ladder, have to implement unpopular policies and have their own problems to deal with.

I had a boss who was an alcoholic, a pretty far gone one - he was hard to work with at times. I remember once he didn't come back from lunch and people were like 'Where's Mr. X?', but I didn't know. The next day he came in and his face was all beat to shit. He said he fell down the stairs to the subway - so maybe he took a tumble after a liquid lunch or ran afoul of some rough trade, but in any event, drunk lunch was just normal for him. He'd come back everyday reeking of Aramis, the horrid concoction that he doused himself in to cover up the smell of alcohol. Other than his drinking, he wasn't a bad guy though and I wasn't a perfect employee.

My worst boss was a woman I'll call AH; she is on my Ultimate Enemies list. I can't think of a way to express how much I hate her and I'll never stop hating her. Outwardly and at first AH seemed like your everyday normal, nice person, but I guess that's the way with psychopaths. After they've fucked you over and you're sitting in a daze wondering what just happened, it will still be hard to wrap your mind around how evil this person is. A coworker called her 'the cockroach' because after layoffs or other work upheavals, she would always crawl out from the rubble while better, smarter people were gone. She accomplished this by smiling in people's faces and 5 seconds later behind their backs tearing them and their work down. She would always need help with her work because she was an idiot, but helping her out didn't earn you any reprieve if the next day she needed someone to throw under the bus. And the buses were always running in AH World.
Wherever she is now, I hope she's miserable.

Some high executive at the company where I work signed a deal about our insurance, and from then everybody has to wear safety shoes. Because that way they could get the insurance cheaper. (That's what I heard anyway.)
So they bought in a lot of safety shoes. For building workers, even though we work indoors. We might need safety shoes but only in certain areas where they drive around with trucks, but for my part I never work in those areas.
A lot of people refused to wear safety shoes without reason, the safety shoes were too hot also and were not comfortable. Then as a compromise we were allowed to wear safety vests instead. Of course this did not make a lot of sense because safety vests will not protect anybody's toes but somehow it was important. I got a safety vest which was size XXL or something. There were not any left in my size, so I went to Clas Ohlson and bought a smaller vest. It was a little bit tight but better than the one which was always falling off my shoulder.
My supervisor noticed the new safety vest and brought me a new XXL one instead and said that I could not wear the one from Clas Ohlson, he did not even explain why. The big vest fell off my shoulder all the time and made me feel stupid.
Also it could have been dangerous, the loose fabric could have been caught in the machinery when I was feeding the machine. We are actually not allowed to wear loose fabric such as shawls. And another time he forgot to take care of my application for a day off. I thought it was ok so did not come to work, when I should have been, but he had not told me, and it was embarrassing for me. It was his responsibility, not mine, and he gets paid a lot better than I do. Because he is supposed to take care of such things. Another time when I was working at the flat sorting machine, he was standing at the feeding station for half an hour, and just chatting with the guy who was feeding the machine. Actually something I really have a problem with is when someone is not working, but just supervising, because it's really not necessary to supervise anything, makes me feel like I'm in some kind of prison camp in the 1930's. Well maybe I am exaggerating, a little bit, but I have had lots of other jobs and I have not seen this kind of system anywhere else. Where some people are just watching the others. Maybe in preschool when the teachers have to watch the little kids.

I have a really good boss at my job right now. We don't work with each other, actually. That's probably one reason why. He gives us under him a lot of autonomy, but is there to answer questions if we have any problems. One time, my work performance dipped, and he called me in saying he's noticed it, and talked it out with me, instead of just yelling or criticizing me like past bosses have, and while I was still sort of reprimanded, that did more for me than just criticizing. He is also a laid-back, joking type of guy and easy to joke around with and get along with.

I haven't worked too many jobs, so it's hard to say what the worst boss was (I'm pretty lucky thus far), but one of the worst bosses was not my boss, but my boss's boss. I, even though having worked with them for a year, had to go to this hiring session. "But I'm already hired..." "You're fired if you don't go - it's mandatory." Might I add, not for everyone else, just me. That was one of the most pathetic moments in my work-life, that hiring - I don't know what to call it - "party," "sad sack 'o potatoes," "waste of time," "I'd rather be fired and in hind-sight should've walked out - thing." I swear, it was like some (very tame) perverted thing he decided to do to "judge who would be best for this position when hiring" (I worked in an arcade). I did NOT respect being made to moo like a cow and oink like a pig in front of others my age. We also had to put on a play on something and talk about cereal (it was really stupid). Mainly it was the making the farm animal noises that got to me - but everything else bothered me as well. It was like some weird power-trip - and I was already working there, I didn't need to be hired! It lasted late into the night (can't remember if I was paid or not, probably not as it was a hiring 'party') and I had a test in school the next day and was pretty tired. I was 16 or 17 at the time and was not really confident in myself enough to say no to things I thought were ridiculous (none of it had anything to do with the job, except to gauge your extroversion, I guess). I continued working there for about 3 months after this - not one person was hired in that time period.

@Noa_4ever - ...that's... what the... ? Seriously, that story about the 'hiring party' is surreal. I've never heard of something like that. Ever.

Frankly, it's kind of creepy.

Yeah, it was. At the time I thought it was stupid, and of course I was mad I had to attend as I already worked there (I don't think I mentioned this, but I wasn't the only one, one of the guys had to attend as well, but no one else).

Yeah, it being stupid was my main thought when it went on honestly. It wasn't until later, much later, actually, did it just strike me as creepy and wrong (mainly with the animal sounds thing). Ugh.

Worst experience: I got a new job, and everything was great. Then everyone in my department accepted an early retirement package a month into my job, and I was left with 2 others. One became my boss. He made me and the only other coworker pick up the slack of everyone that left, because he saw getting new hires as a "waste of money." He wouldn't give us more hours or more pay, or even training, because again: "waste of money." He constantly asked why x or y wasn't done, and when we told him we didn't have enough time or we hadn't yet been trained to do what he wanted, he got angry. Most of the time he sat in his office and chatted on Facebook. After a month of that, we both quit. He said, "Well, it's not like you two were actually making me any money!" Sad part is he seemed like an okay guy before his promotion. Power makes some people crazy.

Best experience: My most recent boss was awesome. He knew what I could do and believed in my ability to get things done and solve problems. He pretty much just gave me tasks and I did them, and he was available if I ever needed an extra hand. That's the kind of boss I like: involved, but not overbearing. And definitely someone that believes in their employee's skillset!

My best boss, was a man named Mr. Reeder who worked in the Publications Dept. of the Mukilteo School District.

The only complaints were trying to justify instilling better work ethics in my other interns (whom I rarely, if at all, saw) since I had to do their work they left unfinished and the random fire alarm activations from whoever ran amok in the office.

It was a 4.92 out of 5.