How to Run a Department That People Mostly Don’t Hate.

Matt Schellhas
6 min readMay 2, 2021

Today we’re going to talk about one of the most important lessons I know about how to position teams for success within an organization. But first, we need to have a chat about Bruce.

Very early on in my career, I was The IT Guy at a Silicon Valley startup. And I was the total caricature: the scruffy know-it-all kid in t-shirts and Docs who oozed disdain while asking folks if they “turned it off and back on again”. Folks tolerated me because I was buddies with the CTO and because nobody else was foolish enough to do an entire department’s work for as little as I did.

About a year in, we hired Bruce. The son of an Admiral, he was brought in to instill some discipline and professionalism. He was a different sort of caricature: crisp dress shirts, immaculately immobile blond hair, and the expensive, ever-present smile all too common at car dealerships and realtor offices. I met him one early Monday morning when he showed up at my desk, demanding the root password to our email server. No “Hi, I’m Bruce” or “I’m having a problem”; just some stranger looming over me making demands. I (politely) refused and watched Bruce turn various shades of red. Eventually I coaxed out of him that the VP of Sales was having a problem with his email. Apparently Bruce wanted to be the hero on his first day.

Later that day I learned that Bruce was my new boss.

I bring up Bruce because despite how much we despised one another, he did give me one snippet of great…

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