A boss is the person whose name appears above yours on the organizational chart and who derives authority from that fact alone. Not from competence. Not from institutional memory. From position.
The interview is where the relationship begins, and where it is most misleading. The boss describes the team as collaborative. They use the word “we” with confidence. By the end of the first month, “we” has clarified into a working arrangement where the work flows in one direction and the credit flows in another. This is called delegation. It is a real management skill. What it produces, in practice, is a boss who is across everything and accountable for nothing.
The early goodwill is not calculated. They probably did mean it. A joke during onboarding, a name remembered by day two. These are genuine gestures. They are also irrelevant to what the job turns out to be. The role has its own logic, and the person in it eventually follows that logic whether they intended to or not.
What remains, once the goodwill has been used up, is the org chart. It was always going to come back to the org chart.
