What the blogosphere’s saying about bosses this week…

• I came across a really great article about the relationship between bosses and employees on VandNews.com, Virginia and North Carolina’s community newspaper. In part I of his series, Bad bosses and Bad Employees, Frank Newell, of Newell Farms Wildlife Center, writes about the mutual respect that bosses and employees should have for each other and how that manifests itself in a great culture.

• Firing bad teachers – Teachers are one of our most underpaid and undervalued positions. Charged with instructing the children of this nation they’re faced with daily obstacles that would be difficult for many of us to surmount. That said, a bad teacher is a bad teacher and he or she has got to go. Not so easy in Los Angeles it seems. According to an article on KCET Local, “trying to fire a bad teacher in L.A. can cost the city up to half a million bucks, and almost never happens.”

• Egypt moving closer to passing sexual harassment laws – Although they’re often ignored by bad bosses in the states, at least we’ve got laws on the books that define sexual harassment and make committing it a crime. Egypt, not so much. Reuters reports that that might be changing.

• Over on OpEd News, Roger Shuler reacts to a federal jury awarding $2.7 million in a sexual harassment suit against Georgia based security company, U.S. Security Associates Inc. Referring to his own age-based harassment claims againt the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Shuler asks the question ‘How clueless can management be these days?’ By the number of sexual harassment and discrimination cases in the news each week, we think the answer is “very.”

University researcher hires actors to testify on his behalf

From the ‘so wild it has to be true’ files comes a story out of Buffalo NY where it seems a former researcher at the University at Buffalo paid professional actors to testify on his behalf during an investigation into whether he falsified data for use in federally funded studies.

According to state prosecutors, 48 year old William Fals-Stewart, a researcher at the University at Buffalo from 2000 to 2005, was being investigated for allegedly inflating the number of research recruits in reports he provided to the National Institutes of Health.  To answer the accusations, Fals-Stewart reportedly hired three actors to testify by phone at a university misconduct hearing.  The actors were told they were being hired for a mock trial training exercise, but were actually offering sworn testimony before an inquiry panel.  Using scripts provided by Fals-Steward, the actors testified that they had worked on his projects at the university’s Research Institute on Addiction.

Following the investigation and the testimony provided by the actors, the inquiry panel recommended that the investigation against Fals-Stewart be dropped. Claiming his reputation had been tarnished, Fals-Stewart filed a federal lawsuit against the state, asking for $4 million. It was actually this greedy maneuver that ultimately got him caught however because it was in preparing to fight the suit that state prosecutors uncovered the fraud.

Fals-Stewart, appearing in Buffalo City Court on Tuesday, was charged with among other things, grand larceny, perjury, and offering a false instrument. Don’t feel too bad for him though, after leaving the University at Buffalo, he was hired as a research scientist at the University of Rochester. And if that doesn’t pan out, he can always get a job as a politician.

Source: AP

In this week’s installment of Managing the Meanies, Buck tackles the seeming dual personalities of bosses. A nice guy after work but a real tyrant in the office. Well, Buck’s not buying it…

Certainly you’ve had a boss who when at work was a monster, an abusive tyrant like some of the characters that I have described here, but when outside of the workplace in a social setting, seemed to be a decent, almost tolerable human being. The change between work and social setting was so remarkable that people actually commented that the boss wasn’t so bad after all, or at least when away from the office. Well, I don’t buy that.

Surely you’ve heard the popular behavioral estimate that the way people treat wait staff in a restaurant is a glimpse as to who they really are. Surely the way people are at work, when exposed to all of life’s stresses, challenges and human interactions, is indeed a full life-size portrait as to who they truly are. No concealments here, you’re looking right into them.

A valuable lesson

One of the most valuable lessons I learned years ago from some of my first interactions with demoralizing bully-bosses, whether as an observer or as a recipient, was just how not to treat people. True, years of selling paper and as such selling myself, has fine-tuned my persuasiveness. After all, you can’t successfully sell paper by being abrasive, secretive and abusive. You can’t persuade the customer to buy from you after you have humiliated her, held back critical information and declined to answer her questions.

Similarly, companies cannot realize a truly committed and brilliant performance from their most valuable asset, their people, if their people are languishing, their talent and creativity suppressed, under a bully boss. And despite all that has been written about leadership, the self-help, motivational management stuff (the book store management sections are full of new inspirational works!) we’re still led by poor managers. Like bad parenting, which can mess up your kids for life, bad bossing can similarly create a whole generation of poor leaders – managers who haven’t a clue as to how to motivate their people.

Next Tuesday: The conclusion of Buck Hamilton’s Managing the Meanies series.

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.

Inspired by Liz Ryan’s recent Business Week article “10 Management Practices to Axe”, I’ve come up with my own list of 5 ridiculous bad boss behaviors I’ve personally encountered, that should die a quick and painful death.

1. Not communicating effectively – O.k., so we know we can’t be trusted with the confidential, top secret, magical corporate plans, but if the entire office is abuzz about something that everyone suspects is about to take place, the responsible thing to do is to have a conversation with your employees – one that involves some semblance of the truth. I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve sat in with top management reassuring everyone that their jobs were safe, only to watch the very same management team drop kick key players just days after the declaration. We’re not saying you’ve got to let us in on the secret family recipe, but not talking at all, or talking but lying for that matter, fosters an environment of paranoia and mistrust.

2. Employing ‘Big Brother’ tactics – If you do a good job in the recruitment and hiring process, why watch your employees like a hawk? Excessive time checking, micromanaging and spying on employees actually reduces productivity in the long run. Employees that feel they can’t be trusted to do their jobs turn into employees that can’t be trusted to do their jobs.

3. Different rules for the rest of us – If workers are required to get to work on time and aren’t allowed to spend the day shopping on Ebay, poking people on Facebook and tweeting tweople on Twitter, then management shouldn’t be doing it either. Allowing two sets of rules fosters resentment and places an even greater wedge between bosses and employees. Yes, many managers have earned the right to some perks, but a lack of productivity shouldn’t be one of them.

4. The blame game – From the largest of organizations to small family owned businesses, I’ve seen it all too often. Something goes wrong, sometimes drastically wrong, and management is all too ready to blame the little guy, often reverting to lying in the process. A leader who won’t or can’t take responsibility for his own actions or the actions of his or her team is no leader.

5. Failing to recognize and reward a job well done – I once single handedly completed a project that resulted in our division winning its first award ever. Not even as she pushed me aside to run on stage to receive the award did my boss acknowledge the work I’d put into the project. Instead, she ran on stage, grabbed the trophy and promptly placed it on the shelf in her office upon her return. The quickest way to ensure an employee stops giving 110% is failing to acknowledge that they have.

What other bad boss behaviors should die a quick and painful death? Share your thoughts in the comment section.

This week in Really Bad Boss…

CBS’ new reality series Undercover Boss premiered and of course we had something to say about it.

I steal office supplies because I hate my boss – In this week’s Managing the Meanies, Buck discussed both bad and good bosses and the impact they have on employees.

It must be Wednesday caus’ another bad boss just declared himself a sex addict. We’re not sure if we buy it.

We’re not the only ones to have an opinion about ‘Undercover Boss.’  In this week’s Blog Roundup, we let you know what others are saying.

What the blogoshpere’s saying about bosses this week…

As we suspected they would, a lot of people had a lot to say about CBS’ premier of the reality show ‘Undercover Boss’ this week. Here’s some of what was said…

Popeater asks, is ‘Undercover Boss’ exploitive of employees? To make their point, Popeater points out that the employees featured don’t make a dime from their appearance. This while the networks are making millions from the show. Good point. We still think that anything that has the boss cleaning toilets and collecting garbage can’t be all bad.

Newsweek thinks the dirtiest job in America right now is producing reality TV and exhibit “A” is the “deeply fictional” reality of ‘Undercover Boss.

Over at Three Star Leadership, Wally Bock’s post entitled “Undercover Boss: A Repellant Piece of Trash” left us unclear about how he felt about the show. Not really, obviously he hated it. Check out his post here, to see why.

The HR Capitalist thinks executives wished that’s all it took to change their businesses and questions the real “reality” of the series. Kris Dunn sees the main problem with ‘Undercover Boss’ as that fact that transformation just can’t plausibly happen during the course of a 60 minute reality series.

No surprise here. Former ESPN baseball analyst Steve Phillips said in an interview with the Today Show’s Matt Lauer on Monday that he knew he was/is a sex addict. Speaking publicly for the first time since leaving Pine Grove Behavioral Health and Addiction Services clinic in Miss., Phillips admitted to “making mistakes” and said he wanted to take ownership of his behavior.

Phillips was fired from ESPN after an affair he was having with a 25 year old ESPN production assistant Brooke Hundley was uncovered. In the interview with Lauer, Phillips said he “couldn’t stop [himself] from doing the things [he] was doing.”

I’m in no position to judge Phillips or either validate or refute his diagnosis of sexual addiction. But I do wonder why in cases like this, where public figures are caught with their pants down, the addictive behavior leads them to have affairs with young, attractive women. Drug addicts, alcoholics and the like pursue their addictions indiscriminately. Have you ever seen a crack house? What’s the deal with younger, often blonder, addictions who sport face candy (Tiger Woods anyone)? And, in the cases where the partner involved in the addictive behavior is a subordinate, does it make it less of a sexual harassment issue because the perpetrator claims he’s an addict? It’s rumored that David Letterman had been having affairs with his staff for years. It’s actually surprising in today’s climate that he didn’t claim to have a sex addiction.

What’s to stop future bosses charged with sexual harassment from claiming that their addictions made them do it? Most companies have policies that prevent them from firing employees due to illness. So what happens when harassers start blaming addiction for their behavior? Something tells me we’ll soon find out.

Source: ESPN