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Are staff any better than bosses?

Many articles are written about bosses. Good ones (too few), terrible ones (all over the place) and the ones you are saddled with (tell me about it). There are even books on how to handle ones at the top and many a writer has made a fortune creating a pathway to the summit for people who will buy into it but will never make it to the peak. That is because many of them (us) do not have it in us to get there by either using talent, connections or corruption.
Fact also is nobody writes about bad staff. At every level. It stands to reason if bosses can be raked over the coals, why not the rest of the hierarchy right down to the office helper?
Just as it also is acceptable to blame the boss for all that is wrong in your professional life, including his sense of favouritism, his inability to understand your deep vein of skill, his myopic vision and his pure luck that he became the boss, let's see it from his point of view for a change.
I have heard enough wails of outrage from the bosses who, like Caesar, have been knifed in the back. Betrayed and let down by ones they trusted, they can be harsh about it. But can you blame them?
This is the most common complaint. "I treated him like a son and taught him everything and he just walked out on me for a fistful of dollars. Without even due warning. When he needed a job and my guidance, he would stay in office 16 hours a day and then, poof, gone."
In essence, he was raw as a carrot when he came, I took him under my wings and made him what he is today and he backstabbed me. without a qualm.
I paid for her special lessons and got her a license and now she wants out and I gave her a raise only two months back. She was not even an assistant to a secretary-level, but I guided her to management and then she quit. From being a sounding board, I had to shut down her computer station because, who knows, you cannot trust them anymore.
My friend, a clinical businessman who has 'let people go' whenever it suited him, now tells me of a just-dismissed senior executive: "He was like my brother, we broke bread together, played together and now he has put a case against me, can you believe it? He is charging me with cheating him. I had given his brother a job in Ontario, now I cannot even trust that guy, it must run in the family, will have to dump him."
Then there is inevitably that junior guy the boss converts into his blue-eyed first choice and grooms him because he reminds the boss of when the boss was young, all vim and vinegar. Which, one day, he does, so far that you can't track him, bags packed and gone.
I recall a whizzkid techno telling me, "The punk was a loser until I gave him the confidence and we let him stay in our home and built him up, now he has joined an IT company and taken our database with him. I trusted him so much and all the time he was moonlighting behind my back and cheating the company."
Then there is the family touch, always one of those. "My wife treated him like a third child, even helped get his pad decorated, never made him feel anything but wanted and he does this, he starts a competitive company in the same business and steals my clients. Behind my back."
Why is it so difficult to let go? Just move on. The same seniors cull, rework manpower resources, retrench, downsize, double up, send people on temp leave and see it as strategy. Then they expect eternal gratitude when they have done something good maybe because it suited them and no other grander reason.
I know someone who hunted and chose a housemaid and then, one day, she left. He was perplexed. "She was with us for 14 years and we gave her so much love and now she has done the dirty, overnight, no love nothing, she wants her ticket to go home and this is after we gave her an advance to finish her house in the village, who does that?"
Her argument: I never asked you for love. I cooked and cleaned and you paid me. Now someone else is paying me more to do the same, I never asked you for love, that was your option."
Trust. Faith. Ingratitude. Rage. Disappointment. Hurt. Injury. Horror. Bosses express exactly the same emotions as staff, ironically.
At what?
The perfidy of mankind and the frail strands we call loyalty. Loyalty is nothing but a lack of options.
Are we angry with ourselves as we pull the knife out of our backs that we chose wrong, that we got conned and now that is what rankles? Why is it a virtue in us and a crime in the other guy? Have we always given total commitment? Haven't we walked heroically when it suited us? Leaving behind an irate mentor, shocked that we dumped him. Same difference.
Let it go. If you did what you did, good on you, repayment is not forever, nor is gratitude. Turn the page, move on.
wknd@khaleejtimes.com