I was a mediocre boss

It has taken me a long while to get to the point where I can write this post.

I supervised people, usually between 15 and 40 at a time, and I was not a perfect boss.

For instance, when an employee was telling me a lie I was more interested in learning his "tells" and noodling out WHY he felt he had to tell me a lie. My bosses wanted me to jump on him with both boots but many times the lie was about an inconsequential matter. The last thing I wanted was to train my employees to become proficient liars.

I was also less aggressive about "fixing" things than many of my bosses thought I should be. If there was a speck of dirt in the paint and it was borderline for being in spec, I was inclined to tell my people to let it go. Attacking the clear-coat with abrasive (especially on horizontal surfaces) meant that the UV light would quickly attack the color-coat and give the paint "skin cancer". 

You have undoubtedly seen "skin cancer" caused by overly zealous use of a buffer. It is often seen as two, parallel, fore-aft, 10" wide streaks on the roofs of pick-up trucks where the person using the buffer did not hold up the weight of the tool and the wheel quickly removed a major portion of the clear-coat.

Also, some of the repair people were not inclined to feather-out their repair and they left a crescent-moon when they used the edge of the sanding disc to dig out the speck of dirt.

Another "flaw" I had as a supervisor is that I insisted on learning the jobs. One of those jobs was "fitting" newly hung doors in the body-shop. In one shop, that entailed using a 40 oz hammer and a chisel with a notch ground into the edge and "drifting" the hinges rearward to set the gaps to the panel behind the door. 

My trainer was Don Hendershot (his real name) and I filled him with dismay because his instructions were "Three hits and that is going to have to be good enough". I was not well enough calibrated to do it in three hits and the fourth hit invariable loosened up the joint enough that the entire door slid down to the bottoms of the over-sized holes and it became an off-line (i.e. major) repair.

Another problem was that I struggled to treat each employee in an identical manner. When I started my career you worked in the same area for decades and you had evidence of who told the truth and who "told stories". You adjusted your response based on the reputation of the person you were dealing with.

By the time I was at the end of my career the "job" situation was a game of musical chairs. The Corporation was imploding and jobs did not last long. You either moved to wherever there was a job or you did not have one. 

Upper-management's response was to treat everybody the same. Bill, the guy who missed 4 hours of work in five years (the afternoon his wife died of cancer...no shit) was to get treated the same as "N", the guy who took off six weeks during bow-season because...his wife had been diagnosed with cancer and he needed to be home when the hospital bed was delivered. SIX WEEKS? FOR A BED TO BE DELIVERED?

The game-players were quick to pick up on the new rule set. I had one employee who was a straight shooter to called in and told me he had diarrhea every 15 minutes and he begged me to waive the requirement that he bring a doctor's note. His truck had cloth upholstery.

The next day his co-worker, a notorious game player, called in with a "stomach flu" and didn't think she should have to get a doctor's note. I told her to drive to the doctor with her window rolled down. The repercussions of that went up two levels on both the Management and Union side of things.

Experiences like that shape you. Life comes at you like traffic viewed through your windshield. You give each hazard its allotted three whacks of the hammer and move on. Fixating on any single imperfection is guaranteed to cause a wreck. And for goodness sake, don't try to drive while constantly looking in your rear-view mirror. YOUR hazards are in front of you.