According to a recent study, men make better bosses. Considering that the two worst bosses I’ve ever had were males, I beg to differ. In fact, the study itself doesn’t seem very definitive. The study says four out of ten women who have female bosses say that their bosses could be doing a better job. Doesn’t that mean that 60% of the women in the survey felt their bosses were doing a good job?

The truth is, bad bosses come in all shapes, sizes, races and are both male and female. My bad male bosses were arrogant, ignorant, bullying, inefficient and power hungry. My bad female bosses were arrogant, ignorant, bullying, inefficient and power hungry and occasionally wore skirts. To assume that one gender corners the market on badness is a dangerous thing. It predisposes us to expect more or less from certain bosses than from others.

I think what some of this boils down to is that some people are still not accustomed to seeing women in high powered positions, saying, doing and behaving in ways that have been traditionally considered masculine. A direct, to the point male boss is considered succinct, while his female counterpart is labeled a bitch. An emotional outburst from a male boss is often blamed on the situation at hand, while an outburst from a woman is blamed on hormones. I wonder what studies like this hope to accomplish? It’s one thing to analyze boss behavior in the hopes of determining what characteristics and behaviors make the best bosses, but what does analyzing their sex accomplish? I’m curious to read someone else’s take on this.

Check out Marie Claire UK’s take on the study here, and more information about the study here.  What are your thoughts? Do men or women make better bosses? Is it industry specific, or does it matter at all? And, what’s the real purpose of a study like this? Share your thoughts in our comment section.

In this week’s installment of Managing the Meanies, Buck reminds us of a lesson his father taught him, “the one asking the questions is the one in charge.”  Bad bosses who refuse to acknowledge our questions understand that providing us with answers empower and validate us, and that’s the last thing most of them ever want to do…

A very costly mistake

Another manager that I had worked with as a colleague some years ago, Mark the plant engineer,  learned this lesson too, but unlike my experience, with bitter results. Mark was a real hard case, a tough guy and walked around the paper mill like he had a broom handle for a spine. He was in tight with the general manager and Mark was quick to note infractions on the clip board that he carried, always reporting to the higher ups whatever he had discovered. Feared by everybody as being the ferret that he was, Mark was an internal affairs type that snitched and tattled for the sole gain of advancing himself and his career. Sure, he had control over our workers, the fear and intimidation type of control, but he had no positive influence with them and in general everyone was unresponsive to Mark. It wouldn’t be too strong an assertion for me to say that all of the papermakers positively hated him.

Well, the time came when Mark made a dreadful miscalculation, a very costly mistake that had huge exposure. He couldn’t hide the fact that he had messed up royally, everyone knew it and his failure was revealed for all to see. He sought me out in the mill, came to me for sympathy I suppose, and I tried to console him as best that I could. He was so distraught that tears ran down his face, his eyes bloodshot and watery, mucus ran from his nose. Gosh, it was awful and I was in conflict with the compassion that I felt for him and the urge to walk away after saying to him “Well, if you hadn’t been such an SOB you wouldn’t be feeling this humiliation, would you? Have you ever thought about what being such a hard case really every got you?” Mark had been disgraced and shortly after was gone from the company. More than a few of us were relieved to know that the company recognized what a morale-buster this plant engineer was and the negative effects he had on the performance of the business.

Acknowledging your question empowers you

My parents understood the maxim that the one asking the questions is the one in charge and surely bully-bosses know this too. “Listen mister, I’m the one asking the questions around here” would have been my father’s reply when I was a kid and for some mis-managers it’s the central tenant of their management style. As for myself, years of successful selling has taught me well that questions are the key as to how fluidly a customer interview will go; the one asking the questions controls the direction and the outcome of the meeting. If you have ever had a boss who simply wouldn’t give you any answers, a very frustrating situation, then contemplate just exactly what’s going on here. Understand that acknowledging your question with a satisfactory answer empowers you, at least in the minds of the bully-bosses; it validates you, lends you respect and establishes you perhaps in some ways as an equal. It renders them answerable to you.

Some years ago I worked for a guy who was afflicted with the worst case of royalty syndrome, and asking him a question — at least if the inquiring person was one that he perceived to be beneath him in the corporate hierarchy — would elicit the most agonizingly uneventful response. Ask this guy a question and he would look away, rub his face, scratch his head, sigh and grunt, all the time fidgeting…and then, absolutely nothing. You could leave his office and go run around the block a few times only to still find him there when you returned, paralyzed by his reluctance to relinquish even a shred of power. You see, he knew that an answer would then validate the inquirer and it was for me to learn after working for this guy for several months that a commoner like me was not allowed to ask the king a question.

Next Tuesday: A desperate dislike for opinions: The poor communicator

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.

Anne Burrell - Image source nymag.com

Anne Burrell hosts Food Network’s Secrets of a Restaurant Chef. But before that she was a chef at Centro Vinoteca, a neighborhood restaurant and wine bar located in New York’s West Village. A lawsuit filed earlier this year claims that while Burrell was a chef at Centro she repeatedly hurled insults at, and discriminated against, female employees. A bartender says Burrell told her she had “saggy boobs,” and called her a “ho.”  Other female employees say they were called “sluts and whores.” The suit alleges that employees who complained to the restaurant’s owners were terminated, and that male employees were “not treated in the same or similar manner.” The complaint also states that Burrell suspended an employee for allegedly stealing a piece of cheese and claimed an employee faked an ovarian cyst to get out of working.

I don’t know much about the restaurant business, and even less about what goes on in the kitchens of these restaurants, but I always thought that restaurant kitchens were really tough places to work, where insult hurling was par for the course. I’m by no means excusing or justifying Burrell’s behavior, especially if it was only directed at female employees. But it’s got me wondering about the effectiveness of these types of lawsuits and the long term impact it may have on women in this particular industry.

Everyone has the right to work in a non-hostile, non-sexist environment, and I understand that when it comes to changing behavior, particularly corporate sanctioned behavior, money talks. Fear of being sued predated the shift in thinking that brought about an end (at least on paper anyway) to an environment where secretaries were openly and routinely goosed and propositioned in the workplace.

It would be interesting to hear an industry insider’s take on it. Is Burrell’s alleged behavior considered typical or even acceptable for the industry? Will a successful suit see the beginning of changes in behavior in restaurant kitchens, or will it more likely result in a reduction in the number of women being hired? Will it make a difference one way or the other? Share your thoughts in our comment section.

Source: Slashfood.com

What the blogosphere’s saying about bosses this week…

On her blog A Meaningful Existence, Karen shares The top 5 reasons to leave your job – no surprise here, a bad boss is number one. And while this economy might have you staying put for a while, it’s important to note her suggestions, particularly about doing something everyday to move towards finding a better job, and a better boss.

Our friends over at Tame your TOT (Terrible Office Tyrant) share a few of the thousand office tyrant stories collected during research for their book. One unbelievable tantrum throwing VP “threw a fit because a new employee took the last cookie in the break room.”  We cannot make this stuff up.

Jack and Suzy Welch offer insight into surviving a bad boss including, trying to figure out your own end game.

“This is NOT in my job description!” I added the exclamation mark for emphasis because I’ve yelled that (in my head) so many times throughout my career I’ve lost count. On his site Work Awesome, (love the name!) Joseph Lewis breaks it down for idealistic newcomers to the workforce – “Life isn’t fair. Nor is it reasonable, rational, sensible, logical, nice, or fluffy. Life is strange, ridiculous, cruel …and just a little bit dirty.” And in this dirty life, one day your boss is going to ask you to do something you don’t want to do. Lewis offers advice on how to handle it when it happens, because trust me, it will happen.

(Halifax, UK) Imagine waking up in your hotel room and finding your male colleague sitting in a chair in a dark corner of the room. Then imagine him going into the bathroom and emerging moments later completely naked. That’s what HBOS worker Haley Tansey alleges happened to her while employed with HBOS. Now after years of sexual harassment, Tansey has filed claims for sexual harassment, discrimination and constructive dismissal.

Tansey claims that for years she endured an overtly sexist culture at HBOS, one that eventually led to her losing the job she loved. HBOS is a banking and insurance group in the UK, a subsidiary of the Lloyds Banking Group. At a hearing before a tribunal this week, the 39 year old Business Manager described the naked coworker incident that took place in 1998 as her worst experience while working for the company.

It was during an overnight hotel stay on a business trip that she spurned the advances of her male colleague. Undaunted, he repeatedly called her hotel room. In the middle of the night she awakened to find him sitting in a chair in the room. She later learned that a hotel employee let him in when he lied and told him he was her boyfriend. Tansey also alleges that her rapid rise through the company’s ranks garnered criticism from male colleagues and managers, leading to years of harassment. Tansey described another incident where she was booked without her knowledge into a lap dancing club. Tansey said she didn’t complain sooner for fear of not being believed and the impact it would have on her career.

I think it’s easy for those who haven’t been through sexual harassment and unbelievable work conditions to question why people, women mostly, don’t come forward sooner, or at all. The answer is both simple and complicated. In my case I needed my job. Not having a steady income was out of the question, and doing anything to jeopardize that job, including doing the right thing, just wasn’t an option. Ironically, not doing anything to stop the harassment and bullying was both the easiest and hardest thing to do. The problem with sexual harassment on the job is the same as with any other on the job issue, employees fear losing their jobs and their colleagues respect. It’s the classic damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario.

Have you been a victim of harassment or on the job bullying? Did you report it? Why or why not? Share your thoughts in our comment section.

Image and story source: Halifax Courier – Haley Tansey

This week Buck Hamilton’s back with a new post in his Managing the Meanies series. The Formative Years covers, well, his formative years, a period in which he developed his leadership skills, skills that would help him get out of a jam or two…

The formative years

It was during my formative years as a young manager when I surely developed my leadership skills. Most of the eighteen men and women that I supervised were easily twice my age, union employees who were protected by a negotiated contract. I was young, very inexperienced, and they knew it. It was on this job that I learned how to be persuasive. If I walked around acting like a tyrant I’d never get anywhere with them. Sure there were a few die-hard union incorrigibles who wouldn’t allow themselves to be swayed by my persuasiveness, but for the most part my style worked and frankly it was one of the most fun jobs that I ever had.

Beyond supervising, one of the important functions of that early management position was writing up the papermaking recipes. On one formula I had mistakenly noted the color formulation to be six hundred ounces of liquid red dye, enough of the pigment to color an Olympic size swimming pool crimson. We were scheduled to make gray colored paper that evening and the dye content should have read sixty liquid ounces.

The importance of being fair

One of the guys who worked for me, Stanley, a Polish immigrant who had been orphaned and displaced during the Second World War, called me in the middle of the night to alert me of my mistake. After tripping over the night stand and knocking over the lamp I answered the phone and heard Stanley’s broken English over the din of the paper machinery in the background. He’d been at the job for over thirty years and had instantly picked up my error – before committing to making the paper, I might add – and just wanted to let me know. Given that this was a union shop, and considering that he would have been following my instructions, Stanley could have simply added the incorrect six hundred ounces of red and the resultant disaster would have not only ruined thousands of pounds of paper, not to mention lost productivity and costly paper machine downtime, but would have also derailed my career at a very young start. I had always been fair with all of them and Stanley knew it, so rather than taking me down the road of humiliation and disgrace he chose to do the right thing and corrected the problem. What do you suppose Stanley would have done had I been a tyrant, an abusive martinet that no one could tolerate?

Had Buck been a heel of a boss, Stanley would have left him high and dry. I’ve seen it happen a dozen times, and I have to admit I’ve let a bad boss or two suffer the consequences of their own stupidity just because I could. It wasn’t necessarily the most mature thing to do, but they had it coming. Leadership – true leadership – earns respect, and that respect goes a long way with employees.

Next Tuesday: The one asking the questions is the one in charge

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.