Dear Boss,

Congratulations on your promotion! Now that we’re starting this new supervisor/subordinate relationship, I’m pretty sure that you may have some expectations from us as your subordinates and we will look forward to hearing about those. We do have some expectations from you as well which we have jotted down below.

Lead by example

We want you to lead by example. We want to follow you. We expect that if you ask us to do something, you would be comfortable doing that work if you had time. Don’t just throw work at us and give us “I don’t care how you do it. I just want it done!” attitude.

We don’t want to be just “Managed”

We realize that you’re our Manager and officially your job is to “Manage” us but we don’t want you to just “Manage” us. We want you to motivate us. We want you to inspire us. We want to be in a situation where if we feel that we’re stuck somewhere, we can come to you and ask for advice and you will be able to get us out of that situation.

Be there for us

We expect you to be there for us when we need you. Realize that a “deadline” is not just for us, it’s for you too. We don’t mind working long hours or weekends but we should feel that we’re not alone in this thing.

Earn our respect

We should not be afraid of you. We want to respect you and look up to you but you’ll have to earn that respect. Just because you’re our supervisor and we’re your subordinates doesn’t mean we’ll respect you.

Treat us with respect

Only thing we can say is that treat us in the same manner like you would have liked to be treated by your boss when you were in our position.

Be honest

We would expect you to be honest with us. If there’re certain things you could share (about the company, about us), we would really appreciate if you could share them. Don’t hold back on sharing this information thinking we may not comprehend it fully. We’re pretty sure that you would be pleasantly surprised.

With great power comes great responsibility

We fully realize that you have worked extremely hard to be in a position that you’re in today and we commend you for that. Also you must be feeling very powerful but we want you to remind that with great power comes great responsibility (copied shamelessly from Spiderman ). We request you to not get carried away with all the power that you possess. Please do remember that in some sense, you’re responsible for us subordinates. We will look up to you for guidance and we sincerely hope that you will not let us down.

Don’t pass on the buck!

Actually there’re a few things here that we would like to mention.

We remember in first year of our college, we were ragged by our seniors. We decided that when we become senior, we will do the same. Please don’t do that. It may happen that you had a crappy boss who tormented/harassed you but we urge you not to do the same. We request you to break the chain so that when we step into your position we don’t end up doing the same thing.

We fully realize that you’re the buffer between your boss and us. If your boss beats the shit out of you, please don’t do the same to us. Of course, you’re free to chew our head up if we screw things up but just because your boss is angry with you doesn’t mean you will have to be angry with us.

Finally

There’re many more things but these are the top of our list. If I were to summarize this in one line, that would be:

DON’T BE AN ASSHOLE!

We look forward to a long, fruitful and mutually beneficial relationship.

Sincerely

Your Subordinates

Closing Thoughts

I speak to a lot of people in IT industry. This post has been a summary of their views on their bosses and what they would like to see in their bosses. Also this is something I aspire to be. I’m proud to say that I do have some of these traits (at least I think I do) but there’re certain things I need to work upon.

I would be very interested in knowing your thoughts (both sides of the table) – If you’re a subordinate, what more you expect out of a supervisor. If you’re a supervisor, what additional positive traits of yours you want to share.