Boss V. Leader

A new boss arrived. He did NOT speak at all-hands, did not send flowery emails to his staff, and did not produce a new mission statement, like every boss did before him.
We were surprised.

Then, our engineer made a huge mistake and unplugged a wrong server. A major outage resulted. The boss called him into his office.

The engineer expected the worst, he started saying "It is my fault..." but the boss stopped him. "As your manager, I should have made sure that cables were clearly labelled so such a mistake would be difficult to make." Together two of them labelled every cable in the data centre.

We never heard a reprimand nor a patronizing comment from him.

He allowed flexible working. Clients loved him because he was there for them too, always. We launched new business lines.

When he finally spoke at all-hands, he never mentioned any of what he did, he only spoke of successes of his employees, calling us out by names. He made each one of us feel very special.

What he got back was our utmost loyalty and dedication. He never asked for it, he did not need to.