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The Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training.

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The New York Times ran a great piece on Sunday titled: "The Tables Turn for Dilbert’s Creator." Here's a substantive excerpt.

"This is yet another story about a clueless but obtrusive boss — the kind of meddlesome manager you might laugh at in the panels of “Dilbert,” the daily comic strip. The boss in question operates an upscale restaurant serving California cuisine about an hour’s drive east of San Francisco. The restaurant, Stacey’s at Waterford, is in trouble — two decades of rapid population growth in the region has prompted an influx of national competitors like P. F. Chang’s China Bistro and the Cheesecake Factory. While the chains have 30-minute waits for tables on weeknights, Stacey’s at Waterford has more jewel-tone microfiber chairs than diners, and is slowly but steadily losing money. To make matters worse, this befuddled manager has never run a restaurant before or even supervised another person’s work in more than 20 years. His greatest qualification for the job, one might say, is 17 years spent satirizing cubicle culture. In other words, Scott Adams, the “Dilbert” creator and the progenitor of the multimillion-dollar Dilbert empire, is now a pointy-haired boss himself."

The article is worth reading in its entirety, but there was a quote from Adams that jumped out at me. He said: "I did a really good job not being a boss for a long time, and I was happy with that."

No one should become a boss who doesn't want to. But it happens all too often, and not just to great cartoonists. Consider the case of a young woman I know.

I'm sure her company thought she was a "high potential," with her MBA, work ethic, ambition and sparkling personality. With that in mind, they offered her a team leader position. She jumped at it.

The next time I heard from her after the promotion she was not her usual upbeat self. "I didn't know that all those people would come into my office whining" she complained.

Happily for her and her company, a job opened up soon after that conversation that let her move back into the individual contributor ranks where she's now both productive and happy. No one should become a boss if they don't want to.

So why does it happen so often? Sometimes senior management just can't imagine that everyone doesn't want to be like them. They like leadership roles and they think you should, too.

They're like those professors in college who tell you that you should become a sociology professor because you write great sociology papers for their class. After all, they know that the life of a sociology professor is about as wonderful as life gets.

Sometimes people go into management because it's the only way to get promoted and make more money. That's sadly true in many companies filled with bosses who got into the game for another grand a month. They don't especially like the work and they're not very good at it, but it was go into management or give up hopes of any career at all.

And, like my friend, sometimes people go into management because no one takes the time to tell them what it will be like. They don't understand that when you're a boss the team (including the whiners) is your destiny.

If you want to know why we've got a leadership crisis in so many companies, this is part of the reason. We've got thousands of people doing management work they're lousy at and don't like. At the same time, they're not doing work that they love and excel at.

We can surely do better. No one should become a boss who doesn't want to.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.

Request your free copy of "Meeting the Challenges of the Boomer Brain Drain: An integrated approach."

Wally Bock has helped people learn to be great bosses for more than a quarter century. His latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership, makes learning key leadership principles almost effortless by teaching through a story and providing lists of resources for further growth.

Click here to find out more about Wally's coaching services.

For weekly tips and resources pointers, check our Wally Bock's Three Star Leadership Letter.

Click here to find out more about having Wally speak to your company or convention.