Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems was asked what advice he would give his children if they were graduating from high school.  Schwartz responded with 3 very good pieces of advice.  But there was one that stood above and beyond the other two, and it is what I consider one of the best career advices ever given:

“Pick bosses, not jobs”

But I would like to take Schwartz’s advice and tweak it just a bit:

“Pick bosses, not companies”

The reason I tweaked it a bit is because people may interpret picking a job as picking a profession.  Your profession should be driven by your vocation and your passion, and that decision usually comes before you are ready to choose a boss.  But when it is time to decide who you are going to work for, choosing the right boss is a much more important decision than choosing the right company to work for.

Let me illustrate this point by describing my own personal experience.  When I graduated from college I interviewed with multiple companies.  Many of the companies I interviewed with were good companies, but they were not all that exciting to me, except one.  This one company was considered at the time to be one of the best companies to work for, and is still in many top100 lists.

Not only was this a great company to work for, they gave me the royal treatment.  I was wined, dined and wooed.  They put me through a long day of ten interviews with several top managers, and I walked out of there very excited about the possibility of starting my career with one of the best companies in the world.  But there was one catch.  Of the ten managers I interviewed with, there was one I did not like.

As fate would have it, a few days later they called me and told me they liked me, and one of the managers would like to do a follow-up interview to show me his area of responsibility in more detail and tell me more about the job he had in mind for me.  The problem is that the follow-up interview was with the one manager I did not like.

I went through the follow-up interview, and confirmed my initial instinct.  I did not like the guy, despite of the fact that he offered me a great job, with great salary and benefits, and at one of the best companies in the world.

Around the same time I received a scholarship offer to go to graduate school.  I had to make a very hard decision.  In the end I decided that despite of the fact that I really liked the company and the job offer, I was not ready to go work for a guy I did not feel good about.  So I decided to go to graduate school.

Today, after many years, I often reflect back on that critical decision in my life.  And I still think this was the absolutely right decision.

In the article The 7 Traits of Highly Effective Teams I described how companies come and go, but an effective team remains united, unbreakable.  This unity is made possible in part by the team leader, who is usually the boss.  This boss was likely selected by the team members as the person they wanted to work for after having worked for many other bosses in the past.

If you are still young, you will likely go through many bosses in your career.  Some will be bad, some will be ok.  But if you run into a really good one, make a point to pick him or her as the boss that you will work for, and stick together as a team.

Choosing the right boss is one of the most important decisions you will make in your career, so listen carefully to this advice:

“Pick bosses, not companies”.