Trusting Your Boss

About twenty-five years ago, one of my friends told me he wanted to quit his job because he didn’t trust his boss. He was in the kind of job where he had complete autonomy and didn’t really have too many occasions where he had to interact with his boss.

I kept probing, trying to understand what trust had to do with what he was hired to do. In my estimation, he was at the top of his grade, top salary, no one told him what to do because he had workers under his command, and he had a lot of latitude, except that he was always on call because he was the only one who knew how to fix whatever was wrong.

At that time, I was right. Trusting his boss should not have been an issue since his boss didn’t interfere with what he was doing and he couldn’t be replaced so easily.

A decade later, after he had quit his job and gone into a different field, the economy took a nosedive and everyone in his old company lost the money they had invested in their 401K funds. His old boss was probably part of the reason. As I recall, there was embezzlement and his old boss must have been a large part of it because after the dust settled, his company was sold and his old boss was no longer there.

Up until we started hearing about all the people in management, from the owners on down to their top managers, we seldom heard about large corporations embezzling pension funds of their employees. And then, one after another, that seemed to be all we heard about.

My friend got out of there in plenty of time and went into his own business at a time when employees just reported to work, did the job they were hired to do, and went home at the end of their shift. But now it’s a different story.

Now, when I hear someone say they don’t trust their boss, it means something more significant. We have seen the head honchos who run these large corporations, embezzle huge amounts of money from their employees and, with the exception of just a few of them, I haven’t seen them being convicted and carted off to prison.

Now, it means something entirely different when an employee says that he doesn’t trust his boss. Now it could mean that he may be sitting on worthless stock options of companies that are going to hit the skids because the top guys have stolen their employees’ savings.

So, do you trust your boss?

Connie H. Deutsch is an internationally known business consultant and personal advisor who has a keen understanding of human nature and is a natural problem-solver.

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