Posted by denised in We’re picking up where we left off yesterday with our fellow bad boss sufferer sharing her story about dealing with her particular brand of bad boss. In addition to the new lunch hour rules being implemented, this bad boss also instituted new rules regarding emails…
Beyond poor managing was her micro-managing. Emailing and responding to clients was a large part of our day. She decided that she needed to read each of the emails that we sent before we sent them. Yes, you can imagine how much wasted time occurred by emailing her a copy of every email we sent for her to review and then sending back an “okay” before we could send it. We are not talking about an office of high school drop-outs. All of my former team had at least an Associates degree, our manager included. I myself have 2 BAs and am working on my Master’s so I do acknowledge that I was a bit more frustrated with that new rule.
In addition, she had our tech team put effort into a weekly “dump” of our emails – to see if we were sending any personal emails (no one in the co sent personal emails via company email!) And to double check that none of us were sending any client emails without going through her. Talk about paranoid!! In addition, all of our phone calls were recorded. Not for the company’s protection – but so she could check our phone calls as well. We went to upper management regarding her behavior. Nothing was done.
While in the office one day, she publicly humiliated (we also had two clients visiting our office at that time) a co-worker by telling her that she used the wrong word choice and that she noticed it in an email as well and that she was also misspelling the word. Her behavior was an embarrassment to the entire office – not just for the obvious, but because her vocabulary didn’t include the word my co-worker had used. The co-worker in question ended up bringing the email to me and after our guests left, I insisted on a meeting with my department manager. She denied her behavior (with a roomful that witnessed it) and insisted that we were not as educated as we thought we were. Yes, she went there – all because she was not familiar with the word! I insisted on a meeting with her, upper management and HR because of her poor attitude. She was chastised and had to go through a two-week workshop about tolerance and employee treatment.
It wasn’t long after that a similar situation arose and she was chastised again. In the meantime, I had had my resume out and quit as soon as I found another job. Four employees followed shortly after my exit. I keep in occasional contact with my old co-workers and have since learned that she (my former department manager) was severely reprimanded again by upper management – she violated HIPAA privacy laws by demanding to see the blood test results of one of her employees who had been off work and ill. What boggles my mind is that the company still has her as an employee, let alone a manager!!
It’s stories like this that make it easier understand things like the banking meltdown and foreclosure crisis. Incompetent people in management making bad decisions with ramifications that go well beyond whether an employee’s feelings are hurt or not. And like our commenter, I’m left to wonder why these mis-managers are allowed to remain in their positions of power for as long as they do. The one bright side of this story is that our reader was able to find another job and get out.
Can you relate to this bad boss story? Share your own story in the comment section, or email me at denised@reallybadboss.com.
