Being a boss isn’t for everyone but is there any escape path?

It is fair to assume that one starts off as part of the general crowd in the initial years of a career, but after that phase is over, going up the order means being asked to lead a team.

It is a sign of progress. The faster a team is latched under you, the more meritorious you are. But I can lay a wager that most bosses hate being bosses.

Peel off the status tags and ask them if they enjoy the administrative and often thankless work that they are made to do in the name of ‘management,’ and they will holler a ‘nay’ if there is no one around to judge them.

If you are not a boss yet, then let me assure you that when you trudge past the corner offices dreaming of a manager’s post, there are many seniors who envy your present luxury of nonchalance.

Of course, this does not mean they will give up their higher pay packets and other perks, but they may want to give up boss-hood. There are more leaders than one cares to admit who accepted their managerial roles because that was the only path to career success available to them.

A quick internet search throws up a paragraph on the etymological journey of the word ‘boss.’ It has Dutch roots and comes from the word ‘bass,’ meaning ‘master.’

In the 19th century, the word travelled from the Netherlands across the Atlantic along with the other linguistic baggage of settlers in North America. In the new land, the word was adopted quickly and eventually came to edge out its British equivalent ‘master.’

More than a century later, we now have bosses who were never trained to become mentors or leaders. They were chosen because they were found to be better than others in a team or were elevated because they threatened to quit or simply had more work experience than the rest.

None of this prepares a boss for the demands of a new role, which could involve a painstaking understanding of how to handle the highs and lows of a team, the eccentricities and fears of subordinates, or the pushes and shoves that could come from the top.

A boss often needs to act as a buffer and a pulley at the same time. It is a tall ask because while performing these tasks, a corporate boss also gets measured by the output of an entire team, whether it is about signing up new clients, closing a deal or meeting a stiff sales target.

The result of the pressure is felt most acutely at the middle-management level, which is often stuffed with disgruntled bosses who are trapped in their designations without a way out.

Quitting the role could get one labelled as someone unable to handle ‘responsibility,’ on which companies tend to place a high premium, whereas the individual may be best equipped for specific but valuable tasks that do not involve management.

Before I became a journalist, I was a recruiter for nearly a year. My job was to hire senior call centre and business-process-outsourcing employees for their rival firms.

The outsourcing sector was at its peak around 2005-06 and I was surprised to see people in their early 20s with barely two years of work experience being awarded boss roles.

They suddenly had dozens of other workers under them and the pressure of chasing call-quality targets and working across time zones led to rampant drug abuse, most of which went unreported.

This problem is sector agnostic and is visible in companies that are in a rush to promote young talent and reward recruits with rapid career escalation.

In such businesses, skill-set mapping and leadership coaching starts only in the later stages as people reach the CXO level.

As this is often time-consuming and expensive, a short-cut is to put people prematurely into team management roles, letting them run small fiefdoms on the assumption that they can be hauled up if things go awry and replaced pronto if need be.

This creates a low-cost but high-churn cycle that many firms seem okay with.

Newly appointed bosses take time to learn the art of boss-hood, but much damage can potentially be done in the interim before the company’s higher-ups recognize that some appointees were not meant to be leaders and were probably better off as individual performers.

An acceptance of this is tough for decision-makers, even if the obvious stares them in the face.

Misaligned escalation does not do any favours to those who benefit from it (at least in salary terms). When misfit bosses look back at their careers, they may find very few people whose careers they shaped for the better, while they may have had to bear the blame for staff attrition and many a crisis.

The next time someone argues that ‘people leave managers and not companies,’ call it out. It is people leaving companies that failed to spot the right managers. ‘The Peter Principle,’ meant as a wry observation, has been around since the 1960s.

In a hierarchy, it states, employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence. This has long been one of the most ignored warnings on the way companies are structured. Yet, there still seems no escape from it.

The author writes on workplaces and education at Mint