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The Boss

  • Writer: Lisa
    Lisa
  • 1 day ago
  • 7 min read

by Joe Mahoney

Canadian author Joe Mahoney 2025.
Author and Publisher Joe Mahoney

Hierarchy (2026) - 02

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"Things About Hierarchy" is a thematic series of articles, sponsored by Reality Skimming Press. Pieces in the series run from Jul-Dec 2026. coordinator Lisa Van Gool at  info@realityskimming.com. Query us about contributing for $25 CAD a post at https://facebook.com/relskim  or by email at info@realityskimming.com

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The Boss

 Once upon a time, at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, I was a boss. I wasn’t the top boss, by any stretch of the imagination. But enough of a boss that some people called me “Boss.”

 

Boss comes from the Dutch word baas meaning “master.” It first came into use around the 17th century as a way to avoid referring to people directly as master because of that word’s connotations to slavery.

 I would not have wanted to be called master, but I didn’t mind being called boss. It didn’t strike me as hierarchical per se. It wasn’t suggesting I was better or superior in any way; it simply acknowledged in a friendly sort of way that at this time, in this place, I had the right to suggest certain courses of action with an expectation that people would do as I suggested. Most of the time I was simply organizing what my own bosses wanted done.


 Still, it did acknowledge that I occupied a certain place in an undeniable hierarchy. I had mixed feelings about occupying that place. At first, it felt weird to me. For the first month I wasn’t sure I was up to the task. It was overwhelming, everybody coming to me with questions and problems for which I didn’t have answers or solutions. Also, I had spent quite a while at the CBC not being a boss (almost twenty years), long enough to have developed certain jaded opinions about bosses. I was well aware that being a boss did not mean that a person was wiser or more knowledgeable or in any other way superior. They might be, but it wasn’t necessarily so.


 I got over that feeling of being overwhelmed. My own boss at the time, John McCarthy, told me, “Don’t be spooked, Joe,” effectively snapping me out of it. After that I found myself amused at having morphed into a boss. I took my job seriously, but I regarded my new place in the CBC hierarchy with a good dose of ironic detachment. It was a role to play, a job to do. Being a “boss” wasn’t a critical part of my identity. It wasn’t important to my sense of self. Or so I thought. One day the CBC placed me on a course where all the students took a test designed to group them into personality types. I considered this sort of thing akin to astrology. In other words, I didn’t really buy into it. But I played along. Afterward, the instructor sorted us into four groups according to our results. I found myself in a group for whom, allegedly, status was important.


What the heck? Status was decidedly not important to me. I had always considered myself the ultimate democrat. I was no better than anyone else and nobody else was any better than me. To me, hierarchies were completely made up, existing only in people's minds. I disliked any form of social stratification. And now this test was telling me that status was important to me? Good thing it was no more accurate than astrology.


 Rather than reject the premise outright, though, I considered it. There was no doubt that I appreciated certain aspects of occupying that position in the hierarchy. I did not mind being told what to do by people who meant well and who knew what they were doing, but I did not like being managed by, shall we say, nincompoops. The fewer people in positions of power over me, the better, as that would theoretically result in fewer potential nincompoops lording it over me. Also, there was no question that being higher up in the food chain resulted in a certain deference, at least to my face. I got used to this.

 

Once, on a day off, I had to pop into the CBC for a minor task. A friend accompanied me, one I’d gone to school with and had known forever. I wasn’t a boss to him. I was just Joe, a guy he’d lived and partied with. At the CBC, I summoned one of my direct reports and, as my friend looked on, told the fellow what I needed done.


"Holy cow,” my friend said afterward. “That was a whole different side of you!” I was completely baffled. I had just been myself. “What do you mean?”


My friend had observed an aspect to my interaction with my subordinate that I had not been aware of. That, over the years, I had just come to expect. It was a brisk efficiency to the conversation, a mutual understanding of our respective positions in the chain of command. I had hired this fellow and been his boss for years. We had a good relationship (I believed). I told him what needed to be done, he accepted my authority on the matter, and went off to do it. Accompanied by distinct deference. It was my friend’s first (and only) time seeing me in a position of authority.


This deference that accompanied direct authority was something that I appreciated. It reduced resistance. It helped get things done. Later, I moved into a different position and found myself trying to make things happen without direct authority, without the same level of deference. Not surprisingly, it was much harder. So yeah, I was forced to admit that there was something to this whole status business. It made life easier. And truth be told I liked my position in the hierarchy. I liked being Manager of Audio Systems. And then Senior Manager of Technological Maintenance and Support. And then Director of This, That and The Other Thing. I could tell how much I liked being Director by the dismay I felt when I got demoted back down to manager.

 

Ouch. Be careful how you treat people on the way up because you’ll likely see them again on the way down. (Fortunately I was pretty nice to everyone on the way up.) This sort of thing happened at the CBC from time to time. Departments were always being reshuffled. One day my department was unceremoniously eliminated. I was lucky in that I wasn’t let go entirely (which also happened to people often). Instead, I was snapped up by another department but with the title Manager as opposed to Director. On a practical level, this meant little. My pay remained the same and my job actually got much more interesting, with more responsibility and more travel, which I enjoyed. But my position in the hierarchy was diminished. I felt it, and initially cared more than I wanted to admit. People who had been managers when I’d been a director were now directors and I was back to being a manager. It was embarrassing. But I was only embarrassed because I’d allowed myself to buy into (in fact, was only too happy to buy into) the hierarchical system… when it benefited me. Clearly, status mattered to me after all.

 

But this wasn’t the first time the CBC had thrown me a career curveball. Years earlier I had been forced to leave my position as a recording engineer in the radio drama department to become the tech for a brand new show called Q. At the time, it had felt like a serious career setback. A demotion. Now, in hindsight, I see it as one of the highlights of my career. The same would prove true for this latest apparent demotion. And because I’d lived through the previous experience, I suspected this might be the case. I was able to psychologically process this latest turn of events much more quickly, much more positively. Sometimes, you see, it looks like you’re losing when in fact you’re winning. But you’ve got to be able to recognize it when it happens. This is hard to do, but as I’ve suggested a little life experience helps. In my new position, I might have been lower on the hierarchy, but I got to travel all over Canada, visit every single major CBC station and many smaller bureaus, make a lot of new friends, and more importantly, ironically, I found myself in a much better position to identify issues and improve infrastructure in all those sites. I had a much larger, more positive impact on the CBC as a whole than I had had in any of my previous (supposedly superior) positions. It was a terrific three years. After which I retired, content, with zero regrets.


Now, retired from the CBC, I am no longer the boss of anything other than myself. Well, I run a boutique publishing company but there is only one full-time employee: me. I suppose I continue to exist within a hierarchical structure but honestly out of a hierarchy of four (me, my wife, our Sheltie and our Siberian cat) I have no idea where I sit in that hierarchy. Drawing upon my experience at the CBC, now I spend my time writing about hierarchies on spaceships and distant galaxies. My next book, Captain’s Away! Beausoleil (coming Nov 1st 2026), explores the adventures of a 17-year-old girl whose consciousness is transferred into the body of a battle-scarred, 40-year-old starship captain. Desperate to get her own body back and terrified of being exposed as a fraud, Marie-Josée Doucette has no choice but to step up and figure out how to operate at the top of the food chain. Spoiler alert: she develops a taste for it. Just as I did.


I’m no longer chagrined by that fact. The truth is there’s no getting away from hierarchies in human society. And it’s okay to be a part of one if you’re there for the right reasons. I may no longer be in a position to boss anyone around. But with what little influence I retain (via essays such as this one), I suggest we pay close attention to the hierarchies around us. Poorly implemented, with nincompoops in charge for the wrong reasons, bad things happen. But implemented properly, they’re simply a way of organizing ourselves efficiently to make good things happen.


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Prior to launching Donovan Street Press Inc., Joe Mahoney spent 35 years as, primarily, a producer of programming at the CBC, retiring in 2023 from a management position. He launched Donovan Street Press in the same year, as publisher. He is the author of Adventures in the Radio Trade: a Memoir, and SF title A Time and A Place.


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Copyright © 2023-2026 Lynda Williams

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