The Irrelevant Boss

I continue to talk about taking charge of your life. Today I have an interesting topic called the ‘irrelevant boss’. I am sure I am an irrelevant boss to a lot of my subordinates in the place I work. This thought really came to me when I was still young and a lot of people talked to me about the importance of a job, the importance of a boss in that job, the importance of promotion because of the boss, the importance of designation, the importance of relative designation and relative growth. In all this, the gentleman who is called the boss or his boss’ boss in that hierarchy, played a very significant role for quite some time in my life till I discovered that maybe it’s an irrelevant boss. The reason I say this is an irrelevant boss is because of no disrespect to the boss, but for something else.

If you saw a couple weeks back, there was a football game in which Rooney scored a couple of goals. Or, Sachin Tendulkar just completed his two hundred, the highest score in a one day international cricket match or a fifty over match. Sachin did not desire to be a captain, he achieved greatness without being a boss, he achieved a milestone which no man in history so far has achieved, and that greatness was achieved because he was looking inward, he was not looking up to a boss, it didn’t matter who the captain was, it didn’t matter who the coach was, what mattered to him was that he looked inside and discovered the strength and found the ‘wow’ in being who he is.

In my mind as we work through our organizations our obsession of looking up to our bosses and taking their words very seriously is preventing us from taking charge of our lives. The day I started looking at the boss for what he is, which is one more element contributing to my success amongst ten other things, and I started looking more inward and finding out what my passion in life is, what is it that I really like to do, what is it that I really achieve, who the boss is became far less significant in my life. And that’s how life changed.

So my learning from life is that the irrelevancy of who the boss is becomes very important. We are obsessed with relative promotion, relative positioning and who do I report to. We jump like ping pong balls from one place to another, just to solve that bit of an issue, which I think is quite irrelevant. We should be in the business of discovering what is it that our passion drives us to do. So If your passion is to play forward in a football game, it doesn’t matter who the goalkeeper is and it doesn’t matter who the captain is, because you want to be the best forward in the world and if we can find that kind of passion within ourselves then I think you will understand why our obsession with irrelevant facts like who the boss is prevent us from taking charge of our life.

So if such events like the irrelevant boss have helped you discover that position and take back control in your life, I can tell you that there are so many entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and also in India who decided to call it a day and started their own business because they thought their boss didn’t get it and they decided that they want to be their own boss - and a huge amount of success was driven by them because of that eventuality. It’s not necessary to start your own company to prove that point, I think that within the environment that you are in, the moment you stop attaching too much relevance to who your boss is and the relative scale that you are in, and start focusing on what drives your passion, I think that will drive you to take charge of your life and to drive transformation and the passion which you really thoroughly enjoy. If you think the same way as I think or if you have stories which are different or similar, we all will be very happy to listen to them and share with others.