It’s a sinking feeling. One I’m all too familiar with. It starts out with your boss telling you she, or he, wants to talk to you. If he’s a real heel, he’ll get a hold of you on your cell phone (company provided or personal) late in the evening or even on the weekend. When your boss calls you at night or on the weekend, it’s never to give you a raise. The worst part about it is when you’ve got to wait until Monday morning to get the news.

This recently happened to a friend of mine.  A bunch of us were hanging out on Sunday evening, when she gets a voicemail from her boss telling her to give him a call back, “if she feels like it.” WTH? Who does that? On a Sunday? With no hint at all about why he’s calling? I’ll tell you who does that. A jerk. And unfortunately the business world is full of them. When I was laid off from my last position, my own jerk called me on the first day of my vacation, to lay me off. Why, you might ask, didn’t she just tell me the Friday before I left for vacation? Did I mention she was a jerk?

What I do know is that bad bosses – really bad bosses – whether by design or sheer incompetence, choose the worst times to do the worst things.  Layoffs, “come to Jesus meetings” and run of the mill, work-related bad news are all par for the course wherever you work. My issue is with the way these bad bosses choose to handle delivering it. Once after a particularly disastrous quarter, one boss called to blame me for the entire million dollar company’s poor  performance. Even though I was the marketing manager, he held me responsible for sales, production and inventory failures. Why? I was the only one stupid enough to take his call on a Friday evening.

I’ve spent over ten years working for bad bosses who made holding the proverbial ‘other shoe’ over their employees head into an art form. Some seemed to actually derive pleasure from passing on bad news at inopportune times. Others just seemed oblivious. Whatever their motivation, it was just one of the many really bad habits of really bad bosses. The light at the end of the tunnel? The worse these bosses were, the harder I worked to get away from them. I’ve also found that eventually  there’ll be a shoe looming over their heads as well. And I have to admit, when the other shoe finally did drop squarely on the shoulders of one of my most notorious bad bosses, I got a big kick over it – pun intended. Is that wrong?

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.

We probably already knew it, but didn’t have an official study to back it up. Now we do. November’s issue of the journal Psychological Science includes the results of a study conducted by researchers Nathanael Fast of the University of Southern California and Serena Chen of the University of California, Berkeley. 

The study’s lead author, Nathanael Fast says, “It’s not just power that corrupts people and it’s not just incompetence either.” He continues, “It’s the pairing of the two that leads to aggression.”  Belittling, humiliation, sabotage – if you’ve had a really bad boss, none of these things are foreign to you. Our guest blogger, Buck Hamilton, refers to it frequently in his Managing the Meanies series. When you take people ill qualified and ill prepared to take on leadership roles and promote them into positions of power, it quickly goes to their heads and the rest of us suffer for it.  And unfortunately, I’m afraid this dynamic duo is here to stay.

You can read more about the study here. Share your really bad boss stories of power and incompetence in the comment section. We’ll feature the best story in a future post!

Occasionally we find bad bosses outside of corporate America. Whether it’s politicians or entertainers, people who’ve been given a lot of responsibility and absolutely made a mess of it will find themselves mentioned on the site. Today it’s teachers. And it’s a doozy.

Try to keep up with me on this one. A couple of middle school teachers came to blows in a Clayton County, Georgia school after a love letter hit Facebook. A fight broke out on Monday between Teachers Chaka Cobb and Ebony Smith after the women learned they were both involved with the same male teacher, who also teaches at the school. Cobb, who happens to be pregnant by Professor Feel-Good said she found a love letter from Smith on the man’s Facebook page. The line that probably set it off? "I am in love with you. I am tired of being your every blue moon [expletive]." Cobb of course responded with a hot Facebook message of her own. When she arrived at school on Monday, Smith confronted her and told her to “never do that again.”  I imagine that’s when things escalated beyond the verbal realm.

Cobb had the assistant principal brought in, but the fight didn’t stop there, it spilled into a classroom full of kids even as several other teachers tried to break it up. Students said they heard Smith yell "[Expletive], you don’t want none of this" and "get the [expletive] off me" while teachers tried to restrain her. On Monday, police charged Smith with simple assault and disorderly conduct. Cobb was charged with disorderly conduct. Read the full, sordid tale here.

Half of me is laughing and half is so disgusted. How can we expect our kids to handle their lives better when the adults around them are doing such a horrible job? When teachers start acting like out of control teenaged celebrities and I’m writing about them here, things are getting way out of control.

Really bad bosses aren’t limited to the boardroom. Send your really bad boss stories from academia, politics or the entertainment industry to denised@reallybadboss.com, and if they’re really good, we’ll post them here!

Photo: Source FoxNews and obviously NOT teachers Chaka and Ebony

Yahoo finance listed 5 of the most overpaid CEO’s of 2008.  Some of these companies performed well while others didn’t. But still, it chaps my hide to read these figures.  At what point is compensation just too much? 

• Michael Jeffries, Abercrombie & Fitch – total compensation of $71.8 million with a base salary of $1.5 million.
• James W. Stewart, BJ Services Company  – James Stewart’s $34.6 million windfall came from value realized on stock options, which resulted in a $30 million jackpot.
• Brian Roberts, Comcast Corp. – total compensation of $40.8 million (and I can’t get Comcast to come when they say they will.)
• John Faraci, International Paper – total compensation of $38.2 million.
• Eugene Isenberg, Nabors Industries – total compensation of $79.3 million.

How many employees did these guys lay off last year? How many of their remaining employees have affordable health insurance?  When I hear that universal health care is going to cost this country “too much” and then I read stuff like this, I want to spit.

Daniell Eckert victim of bad management decisions. (Kenosha News photo by Kevin Poirier)

Really bad management decisions and the inevitable breakdown that follows - Case in point, CCRT Properties of Brookfield Wisconsin is going after Debbie Eckert for rent and early termination fees that her son, Colin Byars, could not pay…because he was dead.  Debbie’s son died on February 21^st and now the management company wants March and April rent and early termination fees.  Debbie contacted the management company to advise them of the circumstances behind the early termination and non-payment of rent.  They said they were already aware, but had been advised by their legal representative that they should go after the rent and fees.  This is where a breakdown in management usually begins. 

Manager A talks to Upper Manager B.  Upper Manager B gives Manager A a directive that might cause the rest of us to say “you know what, that might not be a great idea and here’s why…” Instead, Manager A, without thinking twice, is off and running doing exactly what B told him or her to do.  I’m pretty sure that that scenario playing out throughout history has been the demise of countless careers and companies.  We saw it with the hospital manager who called a nurse out of surgery to lay her off because management said that the layoffs were “immediate.”  And, I’m still convinced that at least one smart little worker bee at one of the big three automakers said “it’s probably not a wise idea, Mr. Auto Industry exec, for you to fly to DC.  On a private jet. To make the case that you’re broke and need taxpayer money.”   Read the rest of this entry »