The best boss I had is many times better than anyone else with whom I worked before or after working for him. He is someone who is well known in the graphics and chip design industry but I prefer not to name him solely to keep my semi-anonymity.
I'll list a few of the things he did that really kept me (and everyone else in his team(s)) driven. I was about to say 'motivated' but it doesn't seem to express the intensity as well as 'driven' does.
Here are some of them:
- Was involved in hiring for his team and trusted whom he hired
- He set up 'connections' in such a way that the new folks were always being mentored by people of varying levels of tenure and seniority. This wasn't a direct "so and so will mentor you". It was more that he set up the dependencies and interactions in ways that there was a gradient on which you could keep going to gain further and further expertise from people.
- Was politically adept. His teams never encountered any rubbish that was irrelevant or would slow them down. He would say "if that doesn't work, I know which buttons to press" and he'd make things happen.
- Where I work now, I have to justify before _and_ after going to a tech conference. When I was working with him, he was like "there is this conference. XYZ is visiting there and I need your_teammate and you to help him with some logistics - just take the hardware from your team. I realised after a long time that this was his way of connecting us to XYZ (who's a veteran and highly respected person in the industry) and it was a golden opportunity. He strongly believed in having people who work in different countries and offices getting to meet now and then and would find excuses to make them happen.
- If we messed up, we'd go to him and say "We messed up! This is what happened..." and he'd just say that it wasn't something to worry about and would instead ask about things that were more 'big picture' and 'long term'. This only made us even more resolved never to sully his teams' reputation.
- I once asked for access to the codebase of a project I was interested in to see if I could port it to another OS. Instead of doing that, he instead connected me to the team who worked on that project and asked them to see if I could help them. Again, he was connecting people and giving me much more than I had asked for.
- He was a visionary and would always speak about his vision in a very matter of fact manner instead of making it a grand thing. So, it made it easier to believe in it and think about it.
- He always maintained that he didn't believe in managers who "just manage" - i.e someone without a sound technical understanding of what we were working on, could never be a manager in one of his teams.
There are many more things and for the moment I'll end the list there.
I realise now that no amount of 'process' can generate this kind of drive in people. I hope that some day I can grow up to be 1% as good as he is.
People follow leaders who free them from chains - they don't thrive in systems which artificially-constrain them.