Arizona State University professor David Van Fleet and his wife Dr. Ella Van Fleet discuss workplace violence and management’s role in it, in their new book “The Violence Volcano: Reducing the Threat of Workplace Violence.” David Van Fleet says contrary to popular belief, workplace violence isn’t a result of people just losing it. Instead he says, “It’s really building over time, and workplace violence incidents are just the last step in a series of behavioral and emotional developments.” The problems could be avoided by the presence of good, capable managers, but instead are often exacerbated by the presence of bad bosses and bad management.

The Fleet’s book focuses on understanding the types of organizations and environments that result in incidences of workplace violence. As they reviewed literature preparing for the book, David Van Fleet says “It became clear that bad management of tough workplace problems has frequently led to fewer and fewer options for handling the problems, resulting in these eruptions.” The bottom line? Good bosses can be the key to stopping workplace violence.

Read more about the Van Fleet’s book and learn how to spot the signs to look for in employees who might become violent, here on Arizona State University’s website.

Image: David Van Fleet, ASU

1. You’re ignoring the facts – In the case of my former HR Manager, a 50% turnover rate in an office with less than 20 employees would have probably been a clear indicator to anyone paying attention that things were awry. When you’re not working in the hospitality industry, which is notorious for high turnover, but you’ve consistently got double digit turnover, you’ve got a real problem. Something is being lost in the message. Either new hires are unclear about what to expect or what’s expected of them, or they’re being dishonest in their interviews about their inabilities. Either way, that’s the responsibility of a good HR manager to catch. But in our case, our HR manager was too busy making excuses about the turnover rate to have a honest conversation with herself. It also didn’t help that upper management didn’t step in until things were basically in the toilet. Bad bosses are notorious for being able to pull the wool over people’s eyes, especially their own.
2. Your staff isn’t making deadlines or meeting goals – As a leader, your staff takes on your qualities – good and bad. If you’re unclear about goals, deadlines and the way you want things done, then so are your employees. I once worked with a great guy whose direct reports were always hustling at the last minute to complete even the simplest projects. The problem was he was a nice guy, but a bad boss. His own lack of organizational skills and focus impacted his team negatively, and as a consequence their days were largely spent in panic mode.
3. You outwardly defy the very rules you insist your staff abide by – You hammer home the importance of punctuality to your employees, but are late to every meeting, function and event. You site the importance of customer service, yet can be heard bad mouthing customers and employees alike. Your employees will never say anything to your face, but believe me, they’re talking about you behind your back, and it diminishes your authority in their eyes.
4. Waffle House has nothing on you – If your mission, goals, and plan of attack change with the wind, then you’re probably a bad boss. Prolonged uncertainty breeds doubt, hesitation and ultimately failure, particularly when it comes from a boss. If you’re unsure about what to do, your entire staff will be too. Changing strategy on a monthly basis shouts “I have no clue what I’m doing!” Nothing lowers confidence in management faster than waffling.
5. Openly showing favoritism – Probably every boss has his or her favorites, and there’s nothing wrong with rewarding top performers. Bosses get into trouble and wander into bad boss territory when they begin showing favoritism towards employees who don’t measure up in any category other than kissing up.  Nothing demeans the hard work and efforts of a team than when the boss starts playing favorites with the one person, or people, who aren’t pulling their load.

There are dozens of signs you’re a bad boss, including the deadly trinity of bullying, harassment and lying. What get’s some bosses in trouble is believing that because they’re not involved in the deadly trinity that they’re doing just fine. If your boss is engaging in any of the above behavior, or you’re involved in any of it yourself, then be forewarned, you’re probably in the midst of an unsuspecting  bad boss.

If you’ve experienced any of the above bad boss behaviors, we’d love to hear your story. Share your thoughts in the comment section or email them to denised@reallybadboss.com.

At first glance, Mary was friendly, helpful and knowledgeable about all things HR – until I was actually working with her on a daily basis. It took only a few months to realize that Mary was woefully unprepared for the rigors of real HR Management. Yes she knew the laws and had the required posters displayed in the break room, but when it came to real HR Management – managing people, issues and the day to day operation of human resources, Mary was in way over her head.

A succession of blatantly bad hires and mental breakdowns in front of staff and employees and her carefully constructed cover was blown – at least to those of us who had to work with her on a daily basis. The VPs were clueless about her lack of management skills because they were off-site and because she told them exactly what they wanted to hear. It was only after a couple of years of record high turnover that management took a careful look at Mary and finally got rid of her. The most surprising thing about Mary though wasn’t her ineptitude, it was her complete inability to face up to it. I could never figure out if her bravado was a cover, or if she really thought she was good at her job.  Whatever the reason, her continued insistence that she was excellent at the job was what made Mary completely unbearable.

Then there’s the bad boss who’s friendly, sociable and who you wouldn’t mind working for – if only they knew what they were doing. What makes these bad bosses so difficult to deal with is that they’re genuinely good people, just really bad bosses. You can usually identify them by their tendency to be unorganized, show up late to just about everything and their general inability to give subordinates good direction. They might be very talented in their area of expertise, but when it comes to managing people, they’re just no good at it. As a consequence, they’re great to be around, but really bad to work for. It might seem nitpicky to fuss about a good guy who happens to be a bad boss, but when you’ve got deadlines to meet and professional goals to attain, working for anyone who isn’t able to help you gain the skills and experience you need to move forward can be detrimental to your career.

What’s been your experiences with these particular types of bad bosses? Did you find them harder or easier to work with than other types of bad bosses? Share your thoughts in our comment section.

• A leader is a champion for his or her employees. The boss tends to see his or her employees as a means to an end.
• A leader shows congeniality and respect to everyone regardless of his or her rank. The boss may seek to be pleasant and charming to executives but is indifferent or even demeaning toward direct reports. The saying “smiles up the organization and frowns down the organization” captures the point well.
• A leader will prohibit his managers from being demeaning, disrespectful or verbally abusive to others. A boss often turns his back on such behavior and may exhibit it himself.

Eich rightly argues that any person in a decision-making capacity, formal or informal, who advances the strategic goals of the business, who contributes mightily to institutional performance and who treats people fairly, honestly and compassionately is a leader. Everyone else, by definition, is just a boss. And therein lies the problem. At a time when leadership is needed the most, our companies, schools and politics are rife with bosses and too few leaders. The long term effects of that will be reflected in our ability to do business and affect true change on a global scale.

To read Eich’s complete list of what differentiates a leader from a boss, click here.

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?

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.

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!

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

• 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.”   I’m just as convinced that that same worker was handed her a** for her initial warning and then just as she was about to retrieve it, had it handed to her again,  this time for not insisting they listen to her in the first place.  The question isn’t about what management is allowed to do – in the case of  CCRT Properties, they are legally allowed to pursue the estate of the deceased 24 year old – the question is should they?

For us, the answer is no.  Bad management decisions are far too frequent and often painfully shortsighted.  In the long run, blindly following directives, particularly the ridiculous ones, have negative consequences.  The negative consequences of this property management company going after the grieving mother of a young man could end up being much more costly than the couple of thousand dollars they would have lost in rent and fees. They’ve already made Ken Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World” countdown, and in a housing environment where thousands of rental properties remain unoccupied because renters have so many places to choose from, many potential renters might choose to stay away. 

What were they thinking? Of course the answer is, they weren’t thinking, and that’s the major beef we have with bosses today.  A lot of them just aren’t thinking.  We’d like to offer up some advice to these bosses.  The first is to try thinking for a change.  Try thinking beyond a couple of thousand dollars, beyond an eight hour day and beyond your personal comfort and satisfaction.  Think about the future of your company, the customers it serves and the employees who might be able to teach you a thing or two. The second is for all bosses, but especially those at CCRT Properties; just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.

Source: Kenosha News