Before the holiday break Buck introduced us to bosses who only appreciate one opinion, their own.  Allowed to rein free in organizations, these insecure bad bosses are dangerous for both the organization and the people who report to them. This week Buck returns with an analysis of another type of really bad boss – the Intimidating Demoralizer. He also introduces us to the idea that the seeds of this kind of bad boss behavior may be sown as far back as adolescence…

Another memorable bad boss in my past was a moody man with a disturbingly de-motivating style. Self-conscious of his short stature, he exerted absolute control over his realm. This guy was so caustic, so abusive and snotty that the dozen or so sales reps and group managers who reported to him would telephone each other in advance and pass along the storm warnings. Like an alcoholic or a manic depressive, this guy was always miserable and unhappy and as such would make certain that we were too. He insisted that we phone him and report the goings on in our respective markets and he would then take the opportunity to dismantle and crush our enthusiasm with an abusive line of questioning.

Absolutely uncertain

One of the hallmarks of his dreadful management style was that he’d never believe what we told him, he’d question the veracity of the intelligence that we reported and let us know that he had little confidence in our feedback. He’d intimidate and demoralize us. We all recognized of course what was going on here; this guy was asserting his power and control over us. If he allowed us to be enthusiastic, if he put credence and confidence in what we reported to him, then he’d be giving us credibility and hence power. He’d be validating us. His moody abuse, like an insecure tyrant, was his way of keeping us absolutely uncertain, never knowing what to expect and always thinking the worst. Dealing with him was an exhausting struggle that over time would have anyone worn down to an insignificant nub. It was some years later that we learned that there was indeed some truth to the otherwise unfounded rumors that he went through the trash in our offices at night after everyone had left to see what dirt he could find on his people. We positively dreaded having to deal with this loser, and he was the company’s vice president of sales and marketing!

Self-inflicted deficiencies

One thing is clear; I know men and I know how they think. I’m a man and have been one for nearly sixty years. As such I passed through childhood and into adolescence with boys, went to school and played sports with them, matured into adulthood with men and have worked with them for over thirty years. What they were as boys and how they learned to interact with other as kids in many ways is what they are today; how they treat others, how they project themselves and, more importantly, what self-inflicted deficiencies they have burdened themselves with since the experiences of their adolescence.

Next Tuesday: Ganging up as a corporate management style

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.

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.

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

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.

In my ongoing effort to help make Monday mornings a little more bearable, here’s a repost that should help you make it through the work week, one day at a time…

Years ago when jobs were plentiful (ask you parents about it), if you had a really bad boss, you’d do one of two things. You’d hit the streets – literally – in search of a new job, or you’d bite your tongue, bide your time and wait for your pension.  These days when you hit the streets, the streets hit back and pensions have gone the way of the 8-track tape and Betamax (ask your parents about that too.)  So, for many of us, for now at least, we’re stuck with our really bad bosses a lot longer than we’d planned on. So, how do you deal with a really bad boss when leaving just isn’t an option?  The answer is, one day at a time.

My most stressed times dealing with bad bosses came in anticipation of the things I feared they would say and do.  After “disobeying a direct order” (my non-military bosses actual words,) I spent an entire weekend tossing and turning, worried that I would show up to work on Monday, only to be unceremoniously escorted out the door by our version of security (the HR manager off her meds).  But after spending my entire weekend worrying about Monday, on Monday my boss never even mentioned the incident.  In fact, she never brought it up again.

Then there was the time I totaled the company car.  Yes, I totaled the company car…during my second week on the job.  Giving my really bad boss at the time, a man who never required a legitimate reason to scream and curse, the legitimate reason to top all legitimate reasons.  As he screamed and cursed at me at length in his office, I tried to defend myself – citing the helium balloons in the back seat of the car I’d hit, the full moon, and the questionable chicken salad sandwich I’d had for lunch as possible causes of the accident. It was terrible – the sandwich and the meeting with my boss.  So terrible in fact, I thought my job and career were over.  They weren’t. I survived that boss’ verbal beat-down and every one that came after that for the two years I worked for him.

The point is, we typically can’t control the actions of our really bad bosses, but we can control ours.  No matter how bad our bosses are, we work for them, and work we must. We can either do that work in anxiety and fear, or we can choose to take the high road.  By taking the high road – the road less travelled – we live above the noise and the nonsense.  If we work at it, we’ll be able to see a lot more, learn a lot more and experience the phenomenal personal and professional growth not readily found elsewhere. It’s a cliché’ for a reason, but the best way to deal with any life challenge, even one of the really bad boss variety, is one day at a time.

How do you cope with your really bad boss? Tell us in the comment section. We’ll share all your tips in a future post.