In this post, Buck told the story of his first encounter with a classic low self-esteemer…

A Napoleonic Tyrant

A classic case study of such a dangerous low self-esteemer was at my first job at a grocery store in a small town in western Massachusetts. The store manager, Mr. Blowhard, was a Napoleonic tyrant that all of the employees were afraid of, rather a Caine Mutiny captain Queeg kind of guy whose low self-confidence anxiety made him a monster. I dreaded coming to work and he made it difficult for me to do my job. Nothing was right for Mr. Blowhard and every encounter with him brought on a storm of abusive. He would often stand by me while I was packing groceries and once he harangued me so badly that my nervousness caused me to fumble and drop a bag full of goods. It was a real spectacle with grapefruit, oranges and canned goods rolling around the check-out area, while I made the whole situation worse trying to recover the spilled articles.

He and I just didn’t hit it off. I was his whipping boy because I was only seventeen at the time and I needed the job. And he knew too that kids my age respected their elders. Heck, it was my first job and as far as I knew all bosses would be this way. Fed up with having to deal with me he transferred me to one of the other stores in a neighboring town some twelve miles away, somewhat of a hardship for me at the time given that I didn’t have a car and each day had to find my way to and from the store.

“You made me look bad, kid”

The manager there, Ralph, was glad to have me. When I reported to him on the first morning, standing there ready for duty in my grocer’s apron, dress shirt and necktie, he shook my hand, welcomed me to the store and gave me the details of what I needed to do for the day. Well, I reported to this remote store for the entire summer, worked overtime and weekends and it seemed like I never had enough time to finish my job, stocking shelves with goods, working the cash register, packing groceries and rounding up shopping carts in the parking lot. The time flew by each day, I loved the job, the customers, my happy coworkers and I loved Ralph the super-confident manager. His store, by the way, was the most profitable in Berkshire County.

At the end of the summer when my tour with the store at the neighboring town was over I reported back to Mr. Blowhard, ready for work. He berated me and accused me of holding out on him. I was perplexed by his accusations and the confusion showed on my face, which prompted him to tell me that I had received nothing but praise from Ralph for the work I had done all summer. “You made me look bad, kid”, Mr. Blowhard said and this was no doubt because when arranging my temporary transfer he had promised Ralph the worst one of the lot, me. I learned some years later, by the way, that Mr. Blowhard was fired from the company for embezzling, a felony he committed to cover a huge accumulation of gambling debts.

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.

In his third post in the Managing the Meanies series, Buck introduced what I like to call “public displays of incompetence.”

The Morale Buster

This kind of manager is always quick with a caustic remark. One of the managers I reported to would put you down in an instant, usually with a biting sneer, almost a snarl, and often in front of your colleagues. In doing so, this morale buster was diminishing his subordinate and the perceived threat that he or she presented.

I recall well my first morale-diminishing encounter with this man. While I did not report directly to him, he was the head sales and marketing guy for our group and I was the sales manager of one of our paper mills. I had been transferred in to build the business and infuse some life into its anemic sales performance – a challenge that I thoroughly enjoyed. Each month we scheduled day-long reviews of the business, meetings in which I would present the sales numbers demonstrating our progress, new business and accounts, and consistent recovery and growth. We’d begun to really kick our competition in the pants and they were noticing. It was a real success story; month after month of positive reporting. But with this morale-busting boss, while I was making my presentations, I’d find myself wondering why he was squinting at me. Yes, he sat at the conference room table month after month, rarely making remarks or contributions, his laptop as his shield, eyes narrowed to slits like a viper.

It was almost as if he was trying to focus his prismatic predatory eyes, shifting his head in a slow side-to-side rhythm, as if preparing to strike, his tongue darting in and out sensing my fear. I recall being consumed with curiosity as to what the deal was with his strange squinting behavior. What was up with this guy? It was some time later that I learned from a body language expert that narrowing of the eyes, or squinting, is a sign of aggression, an attack signal. This bully-boss was evaluating what I was saying, determining that what he was hearing was a threat and that I was his prey.

Mute in the presence of superiors

This same bad boss, who was a rude and abusive tyrant with his people, was mute in the presence of his boss or someone he regarded as his superior. In the presence of one of the board of directors for example, he was like a stone, terrified to speak for fear of exposing himself as the fraud he surely perceived himself to be. It’s not without irony that this was the same manager who declined to have several of us participate in his performance evaluation because he knew for certain that giving us the opportunity to critique him would have been a damning career move.

If bad-bossing is so obvious why isn’t such poor management exposed to those that count? The fact is this: the particularly manipulative morale-busters portray a different image to those above them; they’re skillful at it. And unless the higher ups peel back the layers and look inside, they’re never exposed. The low self-esteem boss is as skillful at filtering the truth as the illiterate is at concealing the fact that he cannot read. Years of “fooling” people ultimately result in them living a compromised life, full of fear, disappointment and missed opportunities.

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.

In his second post in the series, Buck delved 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.

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.

This is Thanksgiving week, and if I remember correctly, depending on where you work, this is the week where production and productivity begin it’s massive decline, culminating in a complete lack of doing any work at all Christmas week. That said, I thought since many of you will be doing nothing but surfing the web anyway, it might be a good time to catch up on Buck Hamilton’s Managing the Meanies series.  So today and throughout the rest of the week, I’ll be reposting Buck’s serie, starting with his first ever post, Managing the Meanies: A survival guide…

An eager young supervisor

It was while talking on the phone with a friend of mine who just recently left his company for a new job with a competitor that I heard in his voice a level of passion and excitement that he had never shown before. As if having been released from Puritan stocks he was liberated from the former company, the massive oak mantle that he had been locked into had been lifted. My friend was the casualty of a bad boss and the dysfunction cost the former company hugely with the loss of his talents.

His demoralizing bad-boss relationship was reminiscent of my own story when I was coming up in the paper manufacturing business as a young supervisor. At the time I had been challenged with a nearly impossible task, one that had been tackled by several other managers before me without results and one that I was determined to succeed at. This overwhelming assignment involved the disposal of hundreds of tons of waste paper that had been irresponsibly accumulated by the company over the years, paper that had no use whatsoever other than to be gradually reclaimed into the process as raw material, and if successful, the bottom line return to the firm could ultimately reach well beyond half a million dollars.

I worked on the project over time, reading about and researching the technology of recovering the waste, understanding the quality impact of using such raw materials in the process, talking with the old-timers at the paper mill and securing their thoughts and input. Several trials yielded promising results and I was thrilled with the progress that we had made.

Grumpy and unapproachable with a God complex

Well, every morning the company’s general manager, Peter, walked through the plant making his tour, his hands thrust into his pockets and always looking grumpy and unapproachable. On one such morning he stopped and asked me about the status of the project and I told him of the progress we had made and that several chemical company consultants were coming in to advise us on the technology — free input, I might add, with no cost to the company other than the price of the chemical should it work. He lost it right there on the floor and blistered me for bringing in consultants, the only consulting he insisted that the company needed was from him and he walked away berating me over his shoulder. I was left standing there flushed with embarrassment, crushed by the granite weight of his rejection. The encounter left me demoralized and uncertain what to do with the project, paralyzed as to whether or not I should even continue to develop this technology.

The seminal moment

Despite the general manager’s deflating style I succeeded with the challenge and in time recovered hundreds of thousands of dollars in bottom-line savings for the company. My nasty encounter with Peter, however, was the seminal moment in which I realized that it was time to leave the company and move on to a competitor; I had no desire whatsoever to work for a company that promoted such poor management style. But most importantly, Peter had demonstrated to me the lessons of yet another episode in how not to treat subordinates.

Have any of you ever had a seminal moment? A moment where, while working in a bad job, or for a bad boss, you simply realize that you can do better? That you just have to do better? We’d like you to share your seminal moments with us. You never know, maybe your story will give someone the courage they need to realize their own seminal moment.

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.

My first job out of college I worked for a father and son, and son team. If I didn’t believe that every career challenge served to make you stronger, I would say that accepting that position was one of the biggest mistakes of my life.  The boss was the most chauvinistic, incompetent man I’d ever met, and his sons spent their days vying for the title. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I’d signed up to be a character in the middle of one of the worst family dramas I’d ever witnessed.

Family owned business have their benefits. They can be more loyal to employees than large corporations, and they tend to be more family oriented. On the downside, a family owned business is, well, full of family – whether they’re qualified to be there or not. In addition, every dysfunction, every perceived slight or preference is magnified when it’s done within the confines of a family business. The brothers at the company where I worked were constantly at each others throats. Literally. On several occasions, their father had to physically break up hallway fist fights. Did I mention the brothers were men in their 40’s? The only person they hated more than each other was their mother. We knew this because they frequently, and loudly, referred to her as “that b***h!”  In hindsight I realize that the brothers knew they were absolutely unqualified for the positions they held and so did their best to distract the rest of us from that fact.

Later on in my career I worked for a much larger family owned business. This family seemed genuinely passionate about their product and their business. But for all their passion, they couldn’t muster up enough management skill to effectively run the organization.  The kind of hiring and planning errors the owners of the company made were the kind discussed in entry level B School courses. Entry level assistants were seeing the writing on the wall before upper management was. The truth is, passion alone doesn’t make a manager a good one.  Those of us who aren’t born with the instinct to lead and lead well, learn it through a combination of formal education and on the job training. When family members are hired simply because they share a last name with the company, employees, investors and the corporate image are the ones who suffer the most.

My days of working with family owned businesses are over. And although I read stories every day about good ones – Chic-fil-A has developed an excellent business model for folding family into the business – I’m still a little gun shy.  The truth is, when they get it right, nothing beats the combination of management skill and passion that comes with a family owned businesses. The problem is, a lot of them aren’t getting it right.  Do you work for a family owned business? Have they gotten it right, and if not, what are they missing?  Share your responses in the comment section or on twitter @reallybadboss.

A couple of years ago Spike TV posted their Top 10 worst movie bosses of all time.  The list included many of the movie bosses we’d expect, including The Devil Wears Prada’s Amanda Priestly, Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko and of course The Godfather’s Michael Corleone.  One big surprise, The Dark Knight’s Bruce Wayne.  I’m not sure I’d classify Bruce Wayne as a bad boss, but let’s just say if he had been my really bad boss, Really Bad Boss the blog would be a very different kind of site.

The whole bad boss movie list got me wondering why we love really bad movie bosses so much.  I think we can narrow it down to about three reasons:

1. In the movies, really bad bosses are fascinating, edgy, sexy and really cool, adjectives rarely, if ever, used to describe our real life really bad bosses.   Case in point Batman, The Dark Knight’s Bruce Wayne.  We’re not sure we completely agree with Spike TV’s assessment of Bruce Wayne as a bad boss, but they did remind us that Alfred and Lucius (Michael Cane and Morgan Freeman) are always on call, never get vacation and frequently have to retrieve their boss from seedy neighborhoods in the middle of the night.  Bad boss or not, that sounds a lot more exciting than pushing your drunken boss off your lap at the office party.  Add to that, the fact that my boss looks more like a bat, than Christian Bale as Batman, and I’ll take looking for Christian Bale…I mean Bruce Wayne… in the slums of Gotham City any day.           
2. In the movies, bad bosses are really evil and really smart.  Think Gordon Gekko, Wall Street and Miranda Priestly, The Devil Wears Prada.  We might not like their methods and we definitely don’t like them, but behind all the dislike is a certain degree of respect.  They know what they’re doing and they’re really good at it. In real life, most really bad bosses have the evil part down pat.  The smart part…not so much.  Real life bosses forge ahead, logic be damned, making it up as they go along. We never respect them for that.                                                   
3. Finally, the movies remind us that even though our really bad bosses act like the embodiment of evil, things could be worse.  They could actually be the devil. Think John Milton (Al Pacino) in the The Devil’s Advocate.  The movies remind us that our bosses, despite their best attempts to convince us otherwise, are only human – barely human – but human nonetheless.  Just think, no matter how evil our bosses are, if a rocket scientist like Keanu Reeves can defeat the devil himself, we can certainly make it through another day with our own, barely human, very mortal, real life, really bad boss.

Got your own reasons for loving your favorite really bad movie boss?  Share them in the comment section.  For the  full list of Spike TV bad movie bosses click here.

In last Tuesday’s installment of his weekly series, Managing the Meanies, Buck Hamilton introduced us to his first classic low self-esteemer bad boss. This week, Buck defines the Royalty Syndrome, a terrible and unfortunately all too common bad boss affliction…

A common trait with many of the de-motivators that I have worked for is that they suffered from royalty syndrome, a terrible bad-boss affliction and one that always promotes poor morale amongst those unfortunate subjects who have to work under such a regime. One such manager I reported to was the king, at least in his mind, while the rest of us – those either at his level or below – were the little people. The guy embraced the policy that if he showed us any respect, he’d be empowering us, and to him that would have been a chink in his armor, a vulnerability. He was the kind of guy who wouldn’t rise to shake your hand. His management style was to diminish his subordinates by putting them in the proverbial frying pan during presentations, dancing for his amusement until he finally found fault. He’d work them over with interrogative skill to the point of exhaustion. Then the whole abusive process would start all over again. The worst part – during presentations, he’d be busy doing some other unrelated task; scrolling through reports on his computer, writing email or listening to his voice mail messages.

“Okay, who’s the first one that wants to step out and take a beating?”

Do you recognize the message here? “I’m the king and you’re an insignificant minion.” It was exhausting to any of us who experienced it but I can assure you that the higher ups, the guys managing at the top, never saw this side of him and the absolutely destructive management style that he practiced. This guy was an outright cancer on the company, perhaps one of the single reasons why the company failed, but no one of influence recognized this fact. To anyone that he perceived to be above him however, he presented an entirely different picture.

This same abusive tyrant was the company’s vice president of sales, and being in such a high profile capacity, really the single guy most responsible for the health of the business and its progress foreword. He scheduled bi-monthly sales conference calls and all of us were expected to contribute input. The trouble was that when asked to contribute no one would venture to speak for fear of being tongue-lashed and ridiculed. I’m serious when I say that this guy would entice the first victim into contributing some remarks and then would proceed to rip him or her to shreds. As such we would witness agonizingly long silent periods during the call, very awkward episodes where not one of us would speak for fear of having our heads bitten off. It was almost as if he had us all lined up and with a bat in his hand said “Okay, who’s the first one that wants to step out and take a beating?” As with other bad leaders that I have encountered in the past, I often wondered about just where and from whom this horrible manager learned to develop his demolishing, de-motivating style.

Next Tuesday: The Formative Years

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.