"People join companies, but they quit their boss" --Marcus Buckingham, "First Break All The Rules"
"First-line managers touch more employees than any other single role, influencing the productivity and success of individuals and teams where the work gets done." --Mark Harbeke, Winning Workplaces
"First-level leaders are the ones who are most responsible for a firm's day-to-day relationships with customers and the bulk of employees." -- Andreas Priestland and Robert Hanig, Developing First Level Leaders, HBR June 2005
"Managers on the front line are critical to sustaining quality, service, innovation, and financial performance." --Linda Hill, Becoming a Manager
"We unleash creativity and innovation by recognizing that individuals are the ultimate source of value, and creating an environment where they can make a difference." --Declaration of Interdependence
Every few weeks, some Silicon Valley start-up tries to lure Mary Morse, a software engineer, away from Autodesk, a computer-aided design company in San Rafael, Calif. But Ms. Morse invariably says thanks, but no thanks. The reason she is staying put, she says, is simple: she likes her bosses.
- All the kindness she has received the last two years, Ms. Morse says, is literally worth a million dollars to her. Before she joined Autodesk, and again nine months after her arrival, she was wooed by a telecommunications company that specializes in high-speed data transfer.
Both times, she says, the company had not yet gone public and offered her 7,000 stock options at an exercise price of less than $1 a share.
Had she accepted, she would be sitting on options worth $1 million at the current stock price. But she has no regrets. People at the company that wanted to hire her tell her they are bored and frustrated. The general feeling is that they are putting in their time, waiting for their options to be vested so they can bail out, she said.
And friends at other Silicon Valley firms complain to her that they have trouble getting up in the morning, telling her, she says: This thing worked out great, but I'm miserable.
Workplace specialists say Ms. Morse's experience is not unusual -- nor is the unhappiness of her acquaintances at other companies. The No. 1 reason people quit their jobs, they say, is dissatisfaction with their supervisors, not their paychecks.