Posted by denised in 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.
