Small Bosses Get Fired – BIG Leaders Are Followed

Hello and welcome to another installment of my Small Boss – BIG Leader Series where I discuss BIG Leadership Principles for your everyday use. I’m Brian Bratti, a Business-Executive-Life Coach dedicated to helping you achieve your highest good through achieving BIG Results.

Small bosses (and we’ve all demonstrated small boss tendencies from time to time) tend to hold many incorrect paradigms about life, business and, more specifically, leadership.  In particular, a small boss attitude tends to view the process of termination or firing like a one-way street where the direction only flows from them to their employees. This sort of paradigm can really limit their effectiveness and is really an outdated view of the current power relationship between the two parties, especially in post-covid Corporate America.  A leader can be lulled into the false belief that they alone hold the power of employment and their employees or direct reports are, in essence, powerless to act in their own best interest.  If anything, phenomena like Covid and silent-quitting have proven this sort of mind-set to be quite incorrect bordering on dangerous for the organization as a whole. In a day and age where people working from home can quite easily give their notice, take their current company’s laptop down to the nearest UPS store, ship it back, pick up their next employer’s laptop and be up and running with their new employer in a matter of hours, there is a genuine risk of flight that a BIG Leader does not casually dismiss. Likewise, any employee can now in less than an hour and for a low cost, establish their own Limited Liability Company (LLC) and begin an online business with relative ease which would allow them to work from the comfort of their own home in a moment’s notice.  In essence, the playing field between employer and employee is definitely leveling, even if the small boss decides to turn a blind eye in that direction.  The geographic handcuffs so many small bosses relied upon in the past have been unlocked to a large extent and, by extension, so are the available opportunities to 21st century employees.  Covid, combined with ever improving technology and now with the advent of affordable Artificial Intelligence in the form of mechanisms like ChatGPT, have proven to be disrupters in the marketplace and no amount of large corporate CEO mandates will bring back those geographic handcuffs to the extent they existed in the past.  While it is unfortunate that many CEOs who could not and did not foresee this trend now find themselves and their organizations tied to unfavorable real estate commitments, the fact remains that people simply have more choices now than ever before when it comes to working in general and for whom they work in particular.

The small boss ignores these realities to their detriment but the BIG Leader does not.  The BIG Leader realizes when people quit their organization there was a risk that they could have been fired.  This uncomfortable yet necessary realization allows the BIG Leader to possess the humility to do a “post-mortem” on what happened and what, if anything, could have been done to avoid this costly decision since it is common knowledge the costs of hiring often far outweigh the costs of retention in most instances. Now granted, there are a number of reasons why people leave organizations that have nothing to do with the specific leader or the organization. However, in my experience as a coach, I have found that many times those terminations could have been avoided and thus were the result of one or more of the small bosses involved being fired by the employee.  In many instances, if the small boss endeavored to take the BIG Leadership Leap by working on improving their BIG Leadership and interpersonal skills, the firing could have been avoided.  This is because, as a rule, people tend to avoid change. In fact, I’ve witnessed people putting up with quite a bit of unreasonable behavior from “small bossness” before they actually pulled the trigger and kicked the small boss to the curb.  As John Maxwell said, “People don’t leave companies.  People leave people.”  When an employee leaves a person who has behaved like a small boss, that’s just another way of saying to that small boss, and by extension the entire organization, “your fired.”

BIG Leaders realize and appreciate the value employees bring to the organization and thus are keenly aware of the danger that they too face concerning being fired.  This tends to have a curbing effect on their ego and puts the value of the relationship in proper perspective.  They don’t take their position or their team for granted and constantly act in a fashion that astutely and carefully balances the interests of the organization, the employees and themselves as they lead their team to success and excellence.   Granted, that’s a hard thing to do day in and day out but that’s why a Leader is in that position and often gets paid more than others on the team.  It just comes with the territory.

Improving your qualities as a leader is a constant work-in-progress that can be difficult and uncomfortable.  Confronting the small boss mentality that dwells within us all is a constant challenge that first starts with awareness and then involves continual improvement and skill practice. I enjoy helping people who want to improve their leadership skills so they can lead their teams confidently and effectively.  Click HERE to learn more about BIG Leadership Coaching to see if I can help you achieve your highest good and BIG results. 

So, for this week, don’t be Small Boss who’s continues to get fired by your employees.  Work on becoming a BIG Leader who is eagerly followed by your team as you collectively execute the mission before you with enthusiasm and excellence.  That’s all for now.  Have a BIG blessed week!