First management lesson: Trust your boss

Quite early in my professional life I have learned you need to trust your boss. People say that you don't get to choose your boss. I would like to argue differently. You do get to choose who you work for. And if things do not work out the way you expected, you can always walk away. This is the beauty of being an employee - you can walk away. People don't always get it.

You get to choose your boss and luckily, by the start of your job you have already an opinion about the person. In my experience, it takes less than a month to say if your initial assessment was right on the money.

In my first job, the boss didn't turn out to be what I hoped for and I walked out after a month. It was during my University studies. Truth been told, looking back now, neither of us had enough experience to deal with the other. I was looking for a mentor, he was also still looking.

I took the second job because of the boss, whom I arrived to know during my studies and gained a deep respect for him. He was my boss and my mentor for two years, until he retired. With him I have learned my first lesson in management: trust your boss. I was 22, rebellious and wanting things to move faster. He was in his 70th, wiser and with a different notion of time and of the flow of things. By staying two years in the same position, I have come to trust his judgment, even when I was deeply convinced of the contrary. Because there have been too numerous the times when he proved me that experience and wisdom do prevail in the hands of the right person. I learn to trust him, and not to question so much as I used to his decisions. Because I knew that in a while I will get the whole picture, and there will be one more lesson for me to learn. However, the whole time I stayed true to my believe that commitment to an organization it is not measured in the years you've spend there, but in the things you have done in the brief period you were there. Even though at the time I was convinced that I will someday take my mentor's place and retire with honors from the same organization where I have started my true working career.

My third job was a liaison job. I didn't knew the boss or anything much about the job in itself, except the salary was three times bigger than my current one. With quite a good management experience and a lot of confidence, I proceeded to discover my new workplace. It turned out that my new boss was not to the height of my previous one (who retired) and I kept looking for a mentor during my 2,5 years while in the job. However, here I would say I learned Management lesson no. 2: Learn from your co-workers. We were so diverse, so with high hopes and high education and we had so much fun together that it is, to the day, the best crew I've worked with. And they became my friends.

Then I took a year off work to do an internship. Change of country, change of scenary, change of workplace. Looking back now, was quite a good year - I spend most of my time traveling, meeting with friends, keeping in touch. And I did find a mentor in my voyages. Management lesson no. 3: Take a break!

Job no. 4: When coming back, I was prepared to be my own boss - or at least that's what I thought. For a year, was really great. In the second year, things started to crack: I had no direction, both personally and professionally, and it started to show. However, I didn't see the signs in time.
Management lesson no. 4: Have a back-up plan!

By the end of the year, I was pregnant and changed country again. Being all the time tired and emotional took out any possibility of having a real job during that time. I was going to conferences, reading a lot, and mostly sleeping.

Job no. 5: Being a mother. New year, new job: Full-time mom. Too bad I didn't do an internship or a shadowing to prepare me for this one. As with all my education, all the books and experiences I've had, nothing prepared me for it. And it was awful. Management lesson no. 5: There are things you are not prepared for!

So by the end of year I was starting job no. 6. A new team, which I instantly liked at the interview, a new boss, which impressed me with her perfect way of chairing a meeting in my first day of work. It seems that both personally and professionally I do have a direction now. I have someone to learn from and someone who's learning from me. And this is how I came to write this post: I was just thinking the other day that is such a great thing I've learned early in life that if you determine your boss is trustworthy, then you can trust him or her all the way. This saves you both lots of time and strengthen the relation. You don't have to challenge everything being told, you don't have to fight to prove anything. You can just learn - and as it is being said over and over again, knowledge is power.