I have become a boss, a development I had spent a fair portion of my working life trying to prevent.

The position is on an interim basis. Help was needed, and I was in a position to offer some. This is how those who believe they have settled a question about their lives find out the question remains open.

For a brief period in my 20s, I was the managing editor of a small chain of Texas newspapers. The money was good. Nearly 40 years ago, my salary was almost what it is now. I decided it wasn't worth it and lit out for Arkansas and an alternative newspaper. I was young enough to believe that leaving an arrangement I disliked would be sufficient to establish an arrangement I liked. In this instance, it was.

With a couple of exceptions, I have mostly been left alone to write. There have been deadlines and editors and disagreements, and occasions when I needed someone to tell me that what I thought I had accomplished wasn't apparent on the page. Being left alone never means being exempt from judgment. It means being trusted to get on with the work, with an understanding of what is expected and some latitude about how to meet expectations. I have been fortunate in that respect, and perhaps less attentive than I should have been to the people whose efforts made that latitude possible.

Somebody has to worry about the things the rest of us assume are being taken care of. Somebody has to notice the gap in the schedule, listen to the complaint that may be justified even when nothing can be done about it, determine which of several needs can be met with the amount of time and money available. When this work is done well, the people who benefit may barely notice. They go about their business believing they have been left alone.

I think we would be better off if more of us could be our own bosses. People ought to have some authority over the work they spend their lives doing. They ought to be able to exercise judgment, make decisions within their competence, and feel their knowledge counts for something. Most adults resent having to ask permission to behave like adults. And a person who has to obtain approval for every small decision eventually learns that the safest course is to stop making decisions. We ought to consider what gets lost in that education.

But being your own boss requires you to show up when you would rather not, recognize when your work is insufficient, and consider what your decisions cost others. There is always the temptation to become a boss who indulges his favorite employee. When the employee is yourself, the performance review can be a remarkably agreeable occasion. Independence is more appealing when we imagine it as release from interference than when we consider the obligations we must enforce upon ourselves.

Even if all of us managed those obligations, we would still have the problem of doing things together. People can be intelligent, conscientious and fond of one another, yet disagree about what ought to happen next. Two good ideas may require the same space. Two necessary tasks may require the same person. What seems urgent from one desk may look expendable from another. Our separate judgments arise from separate lives, and there is no reason to expect them to arrive at the same conclusion.

That is the strongest argument for having a boss. At some point, separate judgments have to become a common decision, and somebody has to take responsibility for making it.

We can vote, rotate the job, or keep talking until everybody agrees. But a newspaper has to come out, and a deadline eventually makes continued discussion a decision of its own. If we spend the afternoon considering what to put on the page, we have also decided how much of the afternoon will remain to produce it.

Still, the necessity of a decision doesn't confer a superiority on the person authorized to make it. Knowing how to put out a newspaper gives someone a claim to direct its production. It does not demand special insight into how the people producing it should live. Authority belongs to the undertaking; its justification is that it helps us accomplish tasks we agree are worth doing. It ought to extend only as far as that purpose requires.

There is a difference between being left alone because the boss happens to like you and having a right to exercise your judgment. The first is a pleasant arrangement that may last for years. It can also end when somebody new moves into the office. The second requires an understanding that survives a change in personalities. People deserve to know what is expected, to be heard when they disagree, and to have their competence respected even when it inconveniences the person in charge.

A boss, meanwhile, has to notice the work that falls between assignments and the difficulty nobody owns. He has to make choices and explain them, including those that turn out badly. An arrangement in which he receives the credit while the consequences travel downward is hard to defend, however efficiently it operates.

A reluctant boss can be evasive, inattentive, or so eager to be liked that he allows a difficulty to become everybody else's problem. Once you accept responsibility, your reservations must be managed yourself. The people depending on you have work of their own, and are entitled to more than a recurring explanation of why you would prefer to be doing something else.

What I want, in the interim, is to help people do work they can take satisfaction in and spare them whatever unnecessary trouble I can. This will involve decisions they won't all like and mistakes I will have to acknowledge. Everybody's time is a portion of somebody's life, including the hours we sometimes speak of as though they belonged to an institution.

I don't want to be anybody's boss. But my freedom to sit down and write has always depended on people who undertook responsibilities I was glad not to have. For a while, I can take my turn. If I do it well, perhaps somebody else will get on with the work and enjoy the agreeable feeling of being left alone.

pmartin@adgnewsroom.com

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OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: In the interim