I was asked an interesting question the other day by someone who is looking for a job. She wondered that with all the idiot bosses out there, how can you tell in an interview whether or not you’re going to have a good one.

I didn’t have a good answer so I thought a while on this one and here’s what I decided:

If you want to be successful in your next job, you”re going to have to be working in an environment that supports success. This is your boss’s job, to ensure that you’ll be as successful as possible.

I hadn’t thought about this as the boss’s job but when you get down to it, this is what a boss has to do. A boss has to manage or lead you in a way that makes you successful. So to figure out whether the boss will be any good, that’s what you’ll have to find out, whether she’ll do the things necessary to make you successful.

I’ve said before that if an employee fails, it’s the boss’s fault. He has failed to hire correctly, train correctly, or supervise correctly. But what about an employee’s perspective? What does an employee need besides native capabilities to be successful.

Well it comes down to four things. Besides the right resources, an employee needs to:

• Know exactly what is expected of them,
• Know how they’re doing,
• Know how to get better at it, and
• Know how they’ve done.

If a boss can do those things then you should succeed. For the rest of the week I’ll propose questions that will attempt to get at answers to these questions.