Dear Bob ... I use your book, Leading IT: The Toughest Job in the World, for my university classes. An interesting question come out of our discussion of your chapter on motivation. "We work in a separate building from the big bosses. Nobody in corporate is looking over our shoulders checking on us. Every day, my boss is 1/2 hour to 1 hour late, and he leaves work on time. This is affecti Dear Bob …I use your book, Leading IT: The Toughest Job in the World, for my university classes. An interesting question come out of our discussion of your chapter on motivation. “We work in a separate building from the big bosses. Nobody in corporate is looking over our shoulders checking on us. Every day, my boss is 1/2 hour to 1 hour late, and he leaves work on time. This is affecting morale and the work habits of the rest of our team. What can one you do to motivate your boss to come on time?”I’d enjoy a chance to compare your ideas to what my students came up with.– The Perfessor Dear Perfessor …I only see four alternatives. Every one of them is obvious, and has obvious consequences:* Let the boss know, directly, that it’s a problem. * Let the boss know through an anonymous note dropped on his desk that it’s a problem.* Let the boss’s boss know that it’s a problem – not anonymously, but in confidence.* Ignore the situation – team members instead look to themselves and each other for motivation. I don’t know the boss’s situation. I don’t know if the team knows the boss’s situation either. Perhaps the boss works from home early or late to avoid a bad commute. Perhaps the boss is a single parent and has to drop off kids at school. Perhaps he has a drug or alcohol problem. Maybe he’s just lazy.The toughest question in a situation like this is whether to save the manager or allow him/her to fail. It’s a question worth probing both from the perspective of self-interest and obligation to the employer. Self-interest says make it work anyway, because if the manager fails, everyone reporting to the manager will be viewed as suspect. From the perspective of obligation to the employer, hiding a manager’s ineffectiveness prevents difficulties in the short term, but in the long term simply perpetuates a problem the business ought to deal with.– Bob Technology Industry