I have been working as a writer for nearly a decade. Through all those years, I have had my own share of good, bad and weird bosses. But if you look at it from a different perspective, there really is no bad experience working under any superior because you still learn a thing or two from them.
In my career and life so far, these are the gems of truths I learned from my former bosses:
1. A Good Writing Skill is Not a Requirement to Manage a Group of Writers
During the infancy of my career, I had this wrong perception that only good writers make good managers. That is, managing a team of writers. I forgot the root word ‘manage’ in manager. A manager handles the work load and flow of the team. He makes sure everybody arrives in time and meets the deadline. I’m fine with that as long as he doesn’t edit my writings.
2. Personal Life and Work are Directly Connected
How often have you heard people telling us to leave our personal problems at home? “Never bring them to the office,” one VP once told me. But a former boss was not a believer in that.
Does your mind operate like a computer’s hard drive? Is your mind capable of creating folders and sub-folders where you can temporarily store all your personal problems while you’re busy at work from 9am to 5pm? Let’s be a little bit more romantic: can you tell your heart to stop beating and feeling while you’re creating that all-important spreadsheet?
No is the answer. If you can, you are an automaton.
3. Writers are Not Assembly Line Workers
Writers are creative people together with graphic artists, designers, and musicians. You should never give a writer a desk, a computer and then tell him to churn out 10 1,000-word articles per day, otherwise all he’ll create are low-quality manuscripts. That’s fine if quantity’s all you want.
Inspire your writer and maybe he can do just that with the bonus of quality.
4. A Writer’s Salary is Not As Easily Justifiable for an Increase as that of a Sales Person
In line with number 3 on this list, because a writer is not to be expected to have a fixed number of quality output because of the creative aspect of the job, it is therefore hard for his manager to ask for an increase in pay. Especially in organizations where writers are treated as just a minor division of marketing, the effect of the writers’ contributions to the overall success of the company is not easy to justify.
Sales people have their sales numbers to back up their demands for an increase. Should writers start to imitate that based on the number of their written output? Again, this would be a case of quantity over quality.
5. Ass Kissing is the Name of the Game
I have experienced this too often that I deem this as a truth. It is not enough that you work hard day in and day out. Every rung in your career’s ladder to success requires some sort of a blackhat technique for you to move to the next step. And it often involves some sort of ass-kissing.
Just tell me if I’m wrong on this one. 
Photo by apesara
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I enjoyed reading this post and I believe number 5 is so true!
Have to tell you that #2 is hell true!
I don’t know with other writers, but I really need some rituals done before I write. I have to feel really comfortable because we are talking about spitting sense out of what we think right?
I guess this is something that our loved ones should read today so they can help us to be always in a good mood for writing. Honestly, that greatly affects how you weave words on your article so they have to do their part and help us be in the fighting (good writing mood) when we need to.