Who among us hasn’t, just once, wished our boss could walk a mile in our shoes. Last night on the premier episode of “Undercover Boss” we watched Larry O’Donnell, President and COO of Waste Management , the largest trash and recycling company in North America, walk a few miles in the shoes of several of his employees.

The show’s premise is simple – bosses from major companies across the country go “undercover” in various entry level positions in their respective companies. CBS’s tag line for the show is “They will discover the truth.” And to some extent they do.

O’Donnell sorted trash at one of his waste management facilities, collected trash from the side of the highway and cleaned toilets at a carnival. Along the way he meets with several dedicated and hardworking employees (no doubt handpicked by management for their great attitudes) and learns as much about their personal struggles as he does about the shortcomings of his own company policies. For instance, workers are expected to clean 15 port-o-potties in an hour. On an assembly line, employees have to remove cardboard from a conveyer belt going at extremely high speeds or risk jamming expensive machinery. And female garbage collectors are forced to use a can as a toilet during their routes.

O’Donnell comes across as a conscientious boss who genuinely seems concerned about the well being of his employees. By show’s end, he vows to review some of the corporate policies he and his management team have instituted and he promises to become a better manager. Only time will tell if O’Donnell and Waste Management really make changes.  The cynic in me thinks that when management is really concerned about how their policies impact employees and productivity, they don’t need a television show and cameras to learn the truth, they just  need to listen to their employees.  But, if “Undercover Boss” causes even a few companies to take a closer look at the way they do business, then it’s a start.

To catch clips from last night’s premier, click here.

This week in Really Bad Boss…

The truth about sexual harassment – $51.5 million in monetary benefits last year? Someone’s not getting the message.

Managing the Meanies – Some people just don’t get it. And by some people, Buck Henry means bad bosses and the companies and head honchos that keep letting them in.

Parting words for a really bad boss – The cost of your typical job search – a couple hundred dollars. Finding out you’re not the crazy one – priceless.

Our weekly blog roundup – bad nanny bosses, when Fridays were Fridays and not all bosses are bad. Really. No really.

What the blogosphere’s saying about bosses this week…

Contrary to popular opinion, and our personal experiences, not all bosses are bad. This week Ebosswatch highlights bosses that are actually great. Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

Remember when Fridays were Fridays? Colette Martin does, and in her blog, aptly titled When Fridays Were Fridays, Martin reflects “on life in Corporate America when Fridays were Fridays, loyalty mattered, and bosses still cared.” This week she shares an all too familiar bad boss story submitted by one of her readers.

Bosses aren’t the only bizarre creatures in the workplace. The Work Buzz has a post this week spotlighting the strangeness of coworkers. Our favorite bizarre coworker tale – the colleague who chewed tobacco and spat it into empty soda bottles. Read the entire list here.

Are you a nanny boss? If so, The New York Times says chances are, you’re bad at employer-employee communications. The often passive-aggressive nature of mom-nanny communication can lead to misunderstandings and hurt feelings. Never fear, the folks at the Times have a few suggestions, and, there’s always the Nanny Training School. Seriously.

It happened one day during one of our meetings.  We’ll call this really bad boss, Napoleon.  Napoleon said something during a meeting that was so ridiculous, so utterly stupid, that we all sat dazed, pretending pretending we hadn’t heard it. He’d said ridiculous things before, but it had always been one-on-one and I’d rationalized them by telling myself,  “He is the one in charge, he must know what he’s talking about.” “Everyone else thinks he’s great. It must be me, something must be wrong with me.”

So for a moment, when Napoleon, in a pitiful attempt at building company loyalty, encouraged …no, demanded that we “drink the Kool-Aid”, I thought maybe I’d  misunderstood him.  Maybe he wasn’t referring to the infamous Jonestown cult and its completely insane leader, Jim Jones, who led 918 members of his 1970’s cult, including children, to commit mass suicide by drinking the cyanide laced drink.  Maybe he was referring to the other cult incident where the mass consumption of Kool-Aid ended with everyone living long, happy, prosperous lives.

So now here we were, a room full of people, all thinking the same thing… “something about this man, this situation and this moment is very wrong.  And it was a relief.  A relief  to finally get confirmation of what I’d been thinking for so long.  It was a relief to realize that I wasn’t the only one who saw that we were in fact, dealing with someone who was more than a few fries short of a happy meal.  Today, if I had the chance to say something to Napoleon, it would be that the day I realized he was officially off his rocker, was the day that I confidently and securely climbed back on mine.

If you could say one thing to your really bad boss, what would that one thing be?  Here’s your chance to tell him or her, after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

For all that’s been written over the years about bad bosses, they still exist and may even be more prevalent than ever. The problem is, people just don’t get it. Not the higher ups who hire and retain bad bosses and not the HR Managers who allow them to get away with murder. Today, Buck Hamilton discusses this concept and what he sees as a lack of professional training that cultivates motivational leadership skills.

Several months ago my wife and I were having dinner with some friends when the subject of my writing came up. One of our companions asked me about the subject matter of what I was currently writing and I started to tell her about this article, about poor leadership being wide-spread and about how such bad-bossing is so instrumental in business failures. It’s a pernicious underground problem that cannot be quantified, I explained. This friend of ours, an investment broker who spent many years with one of the top New York firms, looked at me with an impatient and incredulous expression and commented with a bit of a dismissing wave that such a subject’s been written about already. My quick reply to her was a rather trendy but poignant, “Yeah, but people just don’t get it”. She agreed.

A lack of proper training

As for me, the various companies that I have worked for over the years have spent small fortunes on my professional development and have sent me to seminars and training classes covering the whole spectrum of disciplines including process control, quality management, statistical product control, successful selling techniques, management boot camp and plant safety, to name but a few. Beyond these seminars I’ve been through a number of internal corporate cultural programs where the company’s mission statement is methodically dissected and analyzed, bold management statements made about customers, service, quality, how our customers will be driven to prefer us and on one else, really a whole bunch of vacuous rhetoric that pretty much looks good when printed on paper but nothing else. I have never had a single shred, not one hour, of professional training that even hinted at cultivating motivational leadership skills.

Let’s blame climate change

So the key point is this: if your company has been performing poorly no doubt someone at the top is blaming the market, pointing at your competitors or perhaps accusing the sluggish economy, the Internet or off-shore competition. I don’t know, maybe they’re blaming climate change, but surely the finger is being pointed at some influence other than toward themselves, senior management. The failure rests with them and they alone and the question needs to be asked as to what extent the failure is connected to bad-bossing and the outright cancerous attitude that pervades a company that’s afflicted with bully-bosses. The corporate environment is a shelter for the mediocre. In fact, the very nature of most corporate cultures encourages mediocrity, a haven for those that are incompetent. The great achievers, the entrepreneurial types and the ones who really contribute to the success of a business, are branded as not being team players and are either forced out or elect to leave on their own accord. Typically these capable malcontents either go to a more appreciative competitor or stride out into the market on their own where they set up an unbelievably successful competing business and drive the host company into the ground.

Next Tuesday: I steal office supplies because I hate my boss

Editor’s note: Buck Hamilton is a sales and marketing executive who’s spent over thirty years working in the paper distribution business. He’s a prolific writer who’s presently working on a book which narrates the stories of sixteen Vietnam War veterans. You can read his weekly series  “Managing the Meanies: A Survival Guide” every Tuesday here on Really Bad Boss.

David Letterman’s murky, muddled apologies aside, sexual harassment is no laughing matter. It seems that a day doesn’t go by that we’re not reading one story or another about a sexual harassment case being brought against an employer. From pastors, to politicians, judges to nurseries, inappropriate sexual conduct is everywhere. Usually the stories that make it to the news involve women filing claims against male bosses. But lately we’ve seen an increase in the number of male on male harassment cases and even female on male. The EEOC reports that in 2009, 12,696 sexual harassment charges were filed  and $51.5 million in monetary benefits were paid out.

So what constitutes Sexual Harassment? The EEOC defines sexual harassment as:

“Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitutes sexual harassment when submission to or rejection of this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual’s employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual’s work performance or creates an intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment.”

Sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination that violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And with sexual harassment:

• The victim as well as the harasser may be a woman or a man. The victim does not have to be of the opposite sex.
• The harasser can be the victim’s supervisor, an agent of the employer, a supervisor in another area, a co-worker, or a non-employee.
• The victim does not have to be the person harassed but could be anyone affected by the offensive conduct.
• Unlawful sexual harassment may occur without economic injury to or discharge of the victim.
• The harasser’s conduct must be unwelcome.

If you’re a victim of sexual harassment, you may file a charge of employment discrimination at any one of the EEOC’s 53 field offices.  For more information on how to file a sexual harassment charge, visit the EEOC’s How to file page. Of course, your first course of action should be to bring the harassment to the attention of your HR manger or your immediate supevisor – if of course, they aren’t the ones engaged in the harassment. And, until you can file a claim, document every incidence of perceived harassment. Record the date, time, individuals involved and incident details and always keep a copy away from the office.

For more information on Sexual Harassment, visit the EEOC’s sexual harassment page here.

A look at what the blogosphere’s saying about bosses this week…

According to Yahoo Finance, “the day of reckoning has arrived” for bad bosses - If only. Truth is, really bad bosses never read articles on bad bosses. They either don’t know or don’t care. Nevertheless, Yahoo asks, what kind of bad boss are you? Choices include poor preparation, lacking influence and not knowing your job. They forgot to include ‘jackass.’  Check out the complete list here.

Surprise, surprise…or not, pastors can be bad bosses too – In the post Bad Boss Pastors Who Drive You Nuts, the site Church Forward, lists several ways pastors drive their staff nuts including pretending they know better than everyone else and constantly checking their phone at meetings.

Ten Ways to Be a Better Boss – Over on the Rodg3R blogspot they propose 10 pretty effective ways to be a better boss. One of our personal favorites? Public praise, private punishment. Great advice, we wish more bosses would listen.

Management needs training too! – So why won’t anyone give them any?! The Training Time Blogspot is trying to change that. A resource for HR Managers, the article makes the excellent and sadly overlooked point that for bad bosses, “the right training at the right time could transform those rule-huggers and glory hogs into leaders.” Finally someone in HR is acknowledging this fact. We’re wondering though, what do you do if it’s the HR Manager who needs training?

Got a blog or post you’d like us to feature in the roundup? Email it to denised@reallybadboss.com.