If you’re responsible for the performance of a group, you’re a boss, no matter what title you’ve got. And the odds are that you don’t get much love at all. To add to the fun, being a boss is hard work. Here are fourteen reasons why.

The team is your destiny. Your performance is the performance of the team, which means that team members have your future in their hands.

You’ve got two objectives. One of your objectives is to accomplish the mission through the team. The other is to help individual team members succeed.

Sometimes your two objectives conflict.

Your work is dealing with people. Every one of them is different. They’re all emotional. And some of them will create problems. Some of the problem creators will do it on purpose.

Your team is a human system. Everything that you do in one part of the system affects other parts of the system.

The way you’re most likely to succeed is also the scariest thing you can do. You have to let your people have the freedom to make basic decisions about how to do their work and then do their work well.

Being a boss is situational. Every situation is different. Your job is to figure out what to do.

Everyone is watching you all the time. And everything you do sets a precedent.

There are trade-offs with everything you do. Over the long term you’ll do better if you play the odds.

Some of the problems you face don’t have solutions. The best you can do is work on them.

Sometimes you can do everything right and still have things go bad. Of course, sometimes you get lucky, too, you just aren’t as likely to remember those times.

Sometimes the only choice you have is which bad decision to make.

Being a boss means that it’s your job to confront poor performance and bad behavior. Most people don’t like that part of the job.

No matter how much you hope for it, problems rarely solve themselves. Instead they go from bad to worse the longer you wait to address them.

There is no magic and there are no shortcuts.