As a kid, my parents moved around a fair bit. I went to a lot of schools during my elementary years.

It was instructive.

From grade 3 to grade 6 1/2 I was at Emily Carr elementary school in Vancouver. The leaders on the male side were two boys: one red haired freckled Irish kid who wanted to be a football player and a tiny, but extremely fast and coordinated Chinese kid. The class had almost no bullying and it was because of them.

They accepted everyone into their group. You were always welcome to play with them. They were friendly, egalitarian in the way boys are (some are better at sports, but everyone gets to play) and they didn’t bully, and they didn’t tolerate it. Mostly they never had to do anything, other kids followed their example, but I remember one case, and only one, where the Irish kid told someone intimidating a weaker boy the age old “if you want to fight someone, fight someone your own size.”

The fight wasn’t necessary, the kid backed down and his behaviour changed. He wanted to fit in, to have the approval of the leaders.

Half way thru grade 6 my parents moved and I went to a new school in Coquitlam (can’t remember the name, don’t care enough to search.) The leader there was a big kid, only half decent at sports, but he led by constant threats and bullying. And so a lot of the other boys copied  him: the pecking order was based on who could shove who around.

Entirely based on who the lead kids were. Entirely. (Teachers were not involved in this stuff back then unless it caused actual injury.)

I hated the boarding school I spent high school in. The kid leadership was… indifferent, not good like the Irish/Chinese pair, or bad like the bully, just self-involved. So there wasn’t much bullying, but there was some, and it could be moderately nasty. I knew one kid who got the “hung up in locker” treatment frequently. Personally I was just ostracized, partially deservingly, but mostly left alone.

But the leadership of the staff was good. The place had fair rules, fairly enforced. The Headmaster, Alan Brown, was on top of the teachers and the boarding house masters. He knew every kid’s name, in a place with about 500 students. And the reason the bullying didn’t get completely out of hand was that he tamped down the worse cases, and he was startlingly effective. Usually the last thing you wanted was teachers involved, but every case I saw him involve in he made better.

His emphasis was on truth. Not lying. Kids do bad shit sometimes, it’s not a big deal usually, but you damn well better not lie about it.

I didn’t like him much, and he didn’t like me: I was sullen, under-performed in most classes and didn’t like team sports. But I respected him and part of that was because he didn’t like me but he treated me fairly. That was the first time I saw an adult with power operate like that.

(That I so rarely saw adults not abuse or misuse their power is one of the reasons I turned into a good analyst. My default assumption is that people with power are scum, and in the current time period in most of the world, that’s the right default.)

As an adult, it was a few bosses who made an impression on me. Once again, if the boss was good, the place was good to work at. If they weren’t, it was always shit. The fish always rotted from the head. Whenever I run into bad service at a corporation regularly (as opposed to one bad apple or someone having a bad day) I know it’s a management issue, and in those cases where I’ve investigated, it always was.

Working at the megacorp was particularly instructive. My first job was to help it go public (yup, bad sign) and my boss (also named Ian) was probably the best boss I ever had. It was a small team, and he trusted us. The strongest memory I have of him is when he gave me an extra task near the end of the job, and I said to him “I’m already working 60 hour weeks. I can do this. But if you give me one more thing, you need to tell me what other task you’ve given me not to do.”

He nodded and agreed. I think I’ve had three bosses total who would have reacted that way.

He also let us take time off when things were slow, which they sometimes were. He was 100% focused on getting the actual job done (given there was a deadline and billions of dollars at stake this made sense, but it still rare). If you were getting it done, what you did in your spare time was up to you.

But what made the megacorp so instructive wasn’t one good boss, it was watching and working on different teams. They might as well have been different companies depending on the boss. Some were wonderful. Some sucked. It all flowed from the boss.

Over time good bosses became rarer, though, because the big boss was now a scumbag standard executive whose primary goal was to make bigger quarterly results so that he could have higher bonuses. The ethics and morality and kindness which had been fairly common slowly went away as the good bosses left, because every slice of heaven had been some boss protecting their workers from upper management, unlike pre-going public when the upper management were basically decent people who expected to get wealthy but not rich.

One visit to the US, to help in a company my employer had taken over, was particularly instructive. I was senior operations, but not management. First day I noticed they were doing something counter-productive: actively harmful, but easy to stop. I went to the manager and told her, she replied (paraphrased and in the condescending tone possible) “that’s a management decision and I don’t want you to ever involve yourself in such decisions again. Just do your job.”

Of course her staff, and indeed the entire company’s staff, were completely demoralized, never accepted ownership of or solved any problem, and always said “I did what you and the rules told me to do. I don’t do anything else.”

Then I got involved in politics, and I can count the number of politicians I’ve met who I’d trust to walk my dog on one hand.

But what all this taught me is that leaders really, really do matter and nothing matters more to how well anything functions than who leads it. Nothing matters more than how we select our leaders.

We, of course, select them badly. But what was interesting to me was watching, over decades, as the number of good leaders declined and as the niches where they could operate were reduced in number. Every year, just a little. Over decades: massive.

Good groups are possible. Better societies are possible. But it all starts with who leads us and figuring how to select the right people.

 

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