For most of our lives we have a constant struggle to try to be the boss of ourselves. Does it ever happen? When you grew up as a child I am sure you have memories similar to mine where at some point in your life you were struggling to gain control of your own life. Could not wait to move out of the house and get out on your own, so that you could be the boss of you. How’s that going for you? Are you the boss of you yet?

It is not long after you move out that you find you have a whole bunch of new people that have stepped in to take over the boss position. You have to pay rent so you have to answer to your landlord as he becomes a certain boss and when you can’t pay the rent, he fires you by way of eviction. Then in order to make some money to pay the rent you have to find a job and that usually leads to a boss and might even have a complete entourage of bosses. You know what I mean, there is your manager, the assistant manager, then there is the shift manager and none of them are shy at giving you orders and commands. Come to think of it, maybe living at home wasn’t so bad after all.

Self Employed

Then one day you wake up with this fantastic idea. If you start your own company you could become your own boss. Then you would truly have reached your goal of being the boss of your self. Then as the company grows you could end up being the boss for lots of other people. Yea, this is what you are going to do to be the boss of you. Well it is never quite like that because if you want to remain in business you will need to listen to your customers. You need to provide them with a service that they will value and will want to pay you for. One of the very reasons why a small company has a good chance of competing against a larger competitor is the ability to deliver better quality customer service. Wait a minute! If I have to listen to my customers and do what they want me to do, then they are my new boss? That’s right and as your business grows and you attract more and more customers and you want to continue to be successful, the number of people you need to listen to increases as well. You could just ignore the requests of your customers and we all know how that is going to affect your newly formed company. Remember the last time you were fed up with a business that was ignoring your needs. Why, you found a new place of business who was more willing to listen to your needs and even provide you with that service you were looking for.

Going Public

Okay, let’s take the self employed business a step farther. Let say that you do make a real honest effort in your new business and listen to your customers and follow through on many of their suggestions to improve the products and services that you provide. You make improvements’ in your goods and services for the benefit of your customers. The company grows and grows, you are the boss of hundreds maybe even thousands of employees, your customers love your products so you decide to take the business to the next level and go public. You know trade shares of your company on the stock market. This was of course in an effort to reach more customers and to expand to other geographical areas, expand your horizons and get your products and services into your new deserving customers. This changes things. All of a sudden you are hearing from a new group of people that want your attention and they keep talking about steady growth, make more profit and drive the share price up. These are your investors and it sounds like a new set of bosses to me. They don’t seem to share the same passion that you had with pleasing your customers, in fact they don’t seem to care about them other then to make them pay more money and anything to show growth and make the stock price go up. This can be a problem, if you grow too fast and the profits are a little slow at coming in you are going to be under pressure to increase profits somewhere and decline expenses in other areas. Both of these decisions could greatly affect your fine customer service that you have been able to provide in the past.

Politics

Let us talk about one more area in this topic of bosses and that is in the area of politics. I think that sometimes politicians forget that there positions are in a role reversal of sorts. Politicians work for the people, I think the correct term is the servant of the people. Yes the highest ranked position in the country, that of the president is really a servant of the people and we expect them to serve the needs of its citizens and make decisions that are for the good of the people not themselves and the many friends that they have made to get to this fine position of servant hood.

Conclusion

I think that having a boss and having to answer to someone is a fact of life. You can even get to be the president of the United States only to answer to the people, who are your bosses. So, in conclusion be the best boss that you can be to the people who look to you for leadership and threat those in a boss position to you with respect. If they do not deserve your respect, then maybe it is time to leave and find a new and better boss. There are a number of them out there, I know, I have worked for a few of them myself.