What the blogosphere’s saying about bosses this week…

• Yahoo’s Shine – Marci Alboher reviews the book Working for You Isn’t Working for Me, and has a Q&A session with the authors, Katherine Crowler and Kathi Elster. One of the great points Crowler and Elster make is that while we can’t change our bosses, we can certainly change how we react to them.
• Washington Post – Leadership consultant John Baldoni thinks there’s an upside to having a bad boss. After trembling at the mere thought, I read his article and realized he’d made some good points, the primary one being, “Leaders are those that make good organizations good — whether or not they have a bad boss.”
• Xconomy Boston – Robert Buderi talks to members of Boston’s Innovation Community about their own bad boss experiences. Buderi makes a great observation – many entrepreneurs have had really bad bosses.  Maybe we should be grateful to them. Ok, that may be pushing it.
• NY Mag – A couple of weeks ago I had a field day with David Letterman’s “creepy” office sexploits. This week a former writer speaks out about the hostile work environment she says led her to give up her “dream job.”

Occasionally we find bad bosses outside of corporate America. Whether it’s politicians or entertainers, people who’ve been given a lot of responsibility and absolutely made a mess of it will find themselves mentioned on the site. Today it’s teachers. And it’s a doozy.

Try to keep up with me on this one. A couple of middle school teachers came to blows in a Clayton County, Georgia school after a love letter hit Facebook. A fight broke out on Monday between Teachers Chaka Cobb and Ebony Smith after the women learned they were both involved with the same male teacher, who also teaches at the school. Cobb, who happens to be pregnant by Professor Feel-Good said she found a love letter from Smith on the man’s Facebook page. The line that probably set it off? "I am in love with you. I am tired of being your every blue moon [expletive]." Cobb of course responded with a hot Facebook message of her own. When she arrived at school on Monday, Smith confronted her and told her to “never do that again.”  I imagine that’s when things escalated beyond the verbal realm.

Cobb had the assistant principal brought in, but the fight didn’t stop there, it spilled into a classroom full of kids even as several other teachers tried to break it up. Students said they heard Smith yell "[Expletive], you don’t want none of this" and "get the [expletive] off me" while teachers tried to restrain her. On Monday, police charged Smith with simple assault and disorderly conduct. Cobb was charged with disorderly conduct. Read the full, sordid tale here.

Half of me is laughing and half is so disgusted. How can we expect our kids to handle their lives better when the adults around them are doing such a horrible job? When teachers start acting like out of control teenaged celebrities and I’m writing about them here, things are getting way out of control.

Really bad bosses aren’t limited to the boardroom. Send your really bad boss stories from academia, politics or the entertainment industry to denised@reallybadboss.com, and if they’re really good, we’ll post them here!

Photo: Source FoxNews and obviously NOT teachers Chaka and Ebony

There must be something in the water, or maybe it’s the change of season. But something seems to be ushering in a slew of really bad and really stupid bosses. Earlier this week I shared the story of the asinine UPS manager who sold a package of illegal drugs authorities told her would be delivered to her store. Now the NY Daily News reports that Jose Delgado, a manager at Western Beef in Staten Island, is being sued for sexual harassment after repeatedly making sexual advances and inappropriate comments directed toward Jessica McCarthy, a meat wrapper for Western Beef.

“Bone me, I’m the meat manager” was just one of several x-rated advances Delgado made to Ms. McCarthy in the form of a note posted on a workplace board. Confirming his supreme idiocy, Delgado signed the note. He’s also accused of repeatedly harassing McCarthy, who’s gay, and asking her questions like “Why don’t you like guys?” and “Don’t you need a man?”

According to the lawsuit McCarthy filed on Wednesday in Queens Supreme Court, when McCarthy complained to a supervisor, she was told, “Oh, Jose is like that.” By like that, we’re assuming the supervisor meant “like a complete idiot.”

Photo: Jessica McCarthy - Murray/NY Daily News

Last week I introduced you to Buck Hamilton and his series Managing the Meanies, where Buck, a sales and marketing executive, introduces us to and dissects the behavior of several of his really bad bosses. Last week it was Peter, the quintessential bad boss. This week, Buck delves into the psyche behind a lot of bad bosses…

12 bosses, less than 20% worth their salaries

Over the course of a long career in the paper industry I have worked for twelve bosses and I figure now that less than twenty percent of them were worth the salaries that they were paid. Only two of them could be considered skillful motivators, while a few were mediocre managers and quite a number of them were just outright terrible. Some of these former bosses are now deceased, a few have retired to Florida and sadly several of them are still actively in the paper industry, and as of this writing, continue to mismanage and de-motivate people.

Surely bosses that are afflicted with this often morale-busting behavioral trait are likely to mismanage themselves and their people into disaster. Such self-doubters will put you down — often with an audience — in order to advance themselves; they’ll keep you suppressed so as not to bring favorable attention to you from the higher ups. To keep you from shining they’ll give you few opportunities at which you can excel, or they’ll assign you the wrong ones so that it’s almost certain that you will fail. It has happened to me countless times and unless you’re working for an enlightened motivator it’s probably happening to you right now.

We put people in charge who have no right to be there…

Have you ever had a boss that you would jump off a cliff for if asked? Of course that’s a ridiculous question in its literal context, but you get my point. Conversely, have you ever had a boss that you would not lend a hand to if he or she was mired in quicksand? The fact is that we put people in charge who have no right to be there; they’re morale busters and are as harmful to the company as any competitive threat. But strangely nearly everyone in the organization sees it, yet senior management is blind to the malady and the mismanagement blunders on without change.

I have worked for all types of managers, from control freaks and Napoleons, self-doubters and egoists, to true leaders and motivators. They all had one thing in common however, and that was that I worked for them and as such my performance contributed greatly to the success and advancement of their careers. One thing that they did not have in common is the understanding of that fact. A simple truth is this: your people can elevate you and your company to great heights or they can drag you into the mud with their resentments when their creativity is stifled and their enthusiasm is suppressed.

The most dangerous managers in the workplace suffer from low self-esteem

I’m not a human behaviorist, nor am I academically qualified in the realm of psychology, but I can tell you that years of working with people and thus observing them closely has given me some remarkable insight. Arguably the most dangerous managers in the workplace are those that suffer from low self-esteem or diminished self-confidence, issues that these ill-managers struggle to conceal from the rest of us, vulnerabilities that are minefields that we as subordinates or colleagues can inadvertently stumble into. The bottom line is that the self-doubters are terrified of having you excel at your own job for fear that your superlative performance will threaten their own security.

Buck’s given us a lot of food for thought this week. Are the most dangerous managers in the workplace those who suffer from low self esteem? And maybe even more importantly, why are so many people in charge who shouldn’t be?

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.

You’re the manager of a UPS store, you receive a package containing marijuana, and instead of contacting the authorities or alerting your own manager, you sell it. You might be a really bad boss and a really stupid one if you knew in advance that authorities had been expecting the package, but decided to sell it anyway.

Atlanta based UPS manager turned drug dealer, Anna Wright, was arrested last Friday on charges of making false statements to federal agents. Why that charge? Turns out the 33 year old Wright had previously been alerted by US Postal Inspectors that a certain mail box in her store might receive a package containing contraband. Wright agreed to contact the inspectors if and when the store received the package. But authorities say that instead of alerting inspectors, Wright stole the package containing several pounds of marijuana and sold the drugs for profit.

In addition to selling drugs, Wright is charged with theft and lying to authorities. The charges each carry a maximum sentence of 5 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. I hope she made enough from the sale to pay for a lawyer. She’s going to need one.

Source: WSBTV Atlanta

What the blogosphere’s saying about bosses this week…

Bad Boss? Don’t explode – The recession has thrown an alarming number of under qualified bosses into management positions. How do we survive them? Cindy Krischer Goodman over at Workplace Violence News (yes, there’s a place that features news about workplace violence) has some suggestions. I’m not sure if all of her suggestions would have worked for me, but I’m definitely feeling the “create your own positive environment” idea.

What Great Bosses Know About Staying Calm in a Crisis – Great bosses know their emotions are contagious, they work hard at keeping calm under pressure and they’re the exact opposite of really bad bosses. Forward this link to your favorite really bad boss. They might learn something.

Do you learn more from working for a bad boss than working for a good one? – Bob Sutton weighs in on the matter. I’ve learned a lot from both good and bad bosses.  But there’s something about the bad boss lessons that stick with me, probably because I never, ever want to do what they’ve done or become who they are.

Facing down big, bad bosses – 37% of U.S. workers have been bullied on the job, and bosses make up 72% of the offenders. Workbabble.com has some suggestions for dealing with these bully bosses. Really Bad Boss guest blogger Buck Hamilton’s series, Managing the Meanies, does a great job of analyzing bully boss behavior. Check out a new installment in the series every Tuesday here at reallybadboss.com.

Got a blog entry or website you’d like to include in next week’s Really Bad Boss Blog Roundup? Email me at denised@reallybadboss.com.

I’m no great fan of Al Franken, but after years of offending people with crass jokes, Al’s trying to make up for lost time by proposing an amendment that would prohibit the government from contracting with companies who require their employees to agree to resolve certain claims, including rape and sexual assault, through arbitration. The amendment was proposed after Jamie Leigh Jones claimed that while working for a contractor in Iraq, she was gang raped by employees. When she attempted to sue her employer, she was basically shown the fine print in her contract.

30 senators opposed the amendment (which eventually passed in the senate) on the grounds that “the government should not interfere with how corporations contract with their employees.”  I’m beyond being surprised at what senators oppose or support these days and the ridiculous arguments they use to convince themselves that they’re doing the right thing. No, what I want to focus on is the company in question, KBR Inc., a subsidiary of Haliburton, and their contract.

My first question would be, is sexual assault and rape of colleagues such a common occurrence that you’ve got to stipulate in contracts that employees can’t sue if they become victims of sexual assault? Really? What kind of violent, misogynistic ship is this company running? Can you imagine signing a contract with a stipulation that says just in case you’re raped, don’t come to us. I certainly couldn’t and probably wouldn’t. But regardless of whether Jamie Leigh Jones signed that contract knowing it included the arbitration clause or not, KBR doesn’t get to pull a get out of jail free card because they warned her it might happen. Am I missing something here?

Contract or no contract, should KBR be legally liable for the actions of their employees towards one another? Share your thoughts in the comment section.