• Threw a posh Park Avenue party, invited her employees, then when they arrived put them to work as servers.
• Stole tools and equipment from the company and billed his employees for them.
• Stood underneath a clock as employees arrived for work every morning.  Employees who were one minute late were sent home without pay, even if they were at the end of the line of people waiting to get past him.
• Threw a stapler at an employee’s head for stapling pages together at the top left instead of the top center.

Click here for the complete list.   Tell us your Really Bad Boss behavior stories in the comment section after the jump.

Giant Labor Solutions has been charged with among other things, alleged racketeering, forced labor trafficking, wire fraud and money laundering.  In light of the recent auto industry fiasco and labor unions’ seeming unwillingness to make the compromises necessary to stave off massive layoffs, it’s easy to decry unions in general. But the cold hard fact is many companies won’t do the right thing, unless and until they’re forced to.  Read more at Today’s Workplace.

Retro hose

The other day I promised to provide details regarding the frequent pantyhose inspections that took place at my former job.  Long since paroled  resigned from that position, today, shamefaced and humiliated, I’ll briefly summarize how a master degreed professional was reduced to a work life replete with fearful sick leave taking, snack sneaking, and pantyhose wars. 

In the same office where employees were subject to human voice analysis for sick day legitimacy and where random trashcan inspections were elevated to an art form, monitoring female employees for pantyhose wearage (no, it’s not a real word) was a priority.  I know what you’re thinking.  How is it possible that all that Really Bad Boss talent was concentrated in one office?  Implausible as it may seem, it’s true.  If there’s a management guide on how to demoralize employees, lose their trust and respect, and cause heat stroke, these managers read it, perfected it and then submitted tips on how to improve it.  And on page 378 is an entry that reads something like this “Failure of subordinates to wear pantyhose will cause the total and complete meltdown of the system, resulting in a shifting of the earth on it axis.”  I’ve never had access to the manual, but page 378 must have been dire to elicit the kind of fervent adherence to pantyhose wearage displayed by management.

The irony of the whole thing is that in their eyes, wearing pantyhose epitomized professionalism.  In their minds, clients would overlook the worn carpets and drab office walls.  They’d tolerate long wait times, antiquated office machinery and incomplete and incorrect answers to their questions.  But what they would not tolerate is the sight of stocking-less legs.  We disagreed, but unable to openly defy the establishment, the bravest among us skirted the issue (pun intended) by wearing pants even in the middle of summer.  And thus, the pantyhose wars began.  As with most wars, there were no clear winners.  Management was left with an angry, demoralized staff, and the pants wearers, well, we were just hot.

Regardless of where you work, if you’ve reached the level of General Manager, I’m pretty certain you ’ve rubbed up against at least one sexual harassment policy along the way.  The truth is, men and women who stalk their employees like prey usually know exactly what the company’s sexual harassment policies are.  They simply choose to ignore them.

I was talking to a friend of mine recently, a hard-working, intelligent guy whose skills are in high demand.  When he learned his employer was folding and layoffs were looming, he wasted no time finding another job. Within a couple of weeks, he’d accepted an offer with another company.  Three months into the new job, he realized he’d walked into a company with serious management issues. Frustrated, he tried going through the proper channels to have the problems addressed.  First he went to the offending manager, who basically told him to get back to work.  When he went to that manager’s manager, he was told to hang in there.   A trip to human resources sent him straight into the proverbial brick wall.  The final straw came when in a meeting with both managers he was actually asked “where do you think you’re gonna find anything better in this job market?”

There have been times in my own career when I’ve felt like my bosses must have been thinking that very same thing. “Where are they going to go in this job market?”  And because they felt that way they either took us for granted, or worse, knowingly and willfully continued to mismanage and mistreat us.

When times are bad, bad management seems to get even worse. It’s a disorder that primarily affects companies whose management is already pretty horrible.    Whether you blame it on cockiness, their own fear of job instability or plain old stupidity, bad bosses are notorious for making bad situations even worse.   Managers who can’t function well during good times will most certainly fall to pieces when times get rough, and we, the employees, are the collateral damage. 

For obvious reasons, I look forward to our current economy turning the corner and returning to its former glory.  Another perk of the economic turnaround will be witnessing the mass exodus that occurs when good employees feel it’s safe enough to finally leave their really bad bosses.

I’m no medium, but I could have seen this one coming a mile away.  I think we all can predict a life of crime, imprisonment and possibly death for anyone, if they do the following:

1. Start a rap label and call it anything having to with drugs, crime, arrests, murder…you get the idea.  In this case let’s call it Take Down Records.
2. Make yourself CEO and give yourself an alias that carries the promise of organized crime. In this scenario let’s use the always popular surname Capone. Ace Capone.
3. Star in one of your own label’s music videos as…Ace Capone, the violent drug kingpin -  Be really convincing, because the video will be used as evidence against you in your own trial
4. When the cops raid your home, have on hand; over $500K in cash, 10 guns and 450 grams of cocaine.
5. Finally, do all of this in Philadelphia, the city with the ‘drug kingpin’ statute. 

Ace. Capone no more - Image:Philly.com

35 year old Alton Coles, aka Ace Capone, was sentenced to mandatory life plus 55 years on Thursday for, among other things drug trafficking, wire fraud, money laundering and weapons offenses.  Alton, the CEO of Take Down Records, father of five and owner of a local day care and ice water stand, cried while telling the judge that life in prison was too harsh a sentence for selling drugs. 

I’m not here to argue about whether the sentence was fair or not.  Or, whether Coles’ harsh childhood, including a crackhead father and absentee mother should have been taken into account during sentencing. That’s for another blog and another day.  What I am saying is this.  If, as a CEO, you choose, among all the words available to you in the English language, to name your company using a combination of words associated with crime, you choose to name yourself  after a notorious gangster  and you choose to write about, rap about and star in videos about selling drugs, then when you get busted,  that is what we call a self fulfilling prophesy.  Read more about the case against Coles here.

I don’t even know where to begin with what’s wrong with this scenario.  First of all, the world needs another reality TV show like Donald Trump needs more hair spray.  At this rate, we won’t be done with everyone’s 15 minutes of fame until around the year 2040.  Is America that celebrity obsessed that everyone has to become one?  Even worse than our celebrity obsession is the idea that network execs want to make money so badly that they are willing, even in this economy, to turn lay-offs into entertainment for mass consumption.   Over the past several months, I’ve watched heart wrenching news programs that follow families as they spiral into bankruptcy and foreclosure after a layoff.  Marriages end, children are displaced and people lose the sense of stability they’ve often worked their entire lives to achieve.  This is entertainment?  With unemployment levels poised to hit double digits – is this something we want to make sport of?

No word on whether or not the businesses that participate receive any sort of payment, but even if they do, for the bosses that own the companies involved, we think it’s a bad idea to sell your employees out for a little reality show fame and some cash.  And for the geniuses who came up with this really bad idea, poorly played indeed.  I hope this show gets laid off, and fast.

Learn more about the gem of a show here.

Former really bad boss Elliot Spitzer edging his way back into the public arena

Elliot Spitzer - a sigh of relief?

 This morning, New York’s former governor, Elliot Spitzer, did a segment on one of the morning shows.  He sounded quite remorseful, referring to the behavior that got him ousted from office as “egregious.”  We talked about Spitzer and other renowned really bad bosses in a previous post, The Really bad boss roundup.  At the time, we asked several pointed questions.  We wondered whether these individuals should ever again be trusted in positions of public leadership.  And we asked whether their actions should be seen as character flaws or mere indiscretions that would not necessarily impact their ability to do their jobs. 

Prior to becoming governor, Spitzer was New York’s attorney general.  He was nicknamed the “sheriff of wall street” for his no-nonsense investigations into some of the very banks we’re currently bailing out.  Now he has a lot to say about what should have been happening to properly regulate the banking industry, and some believe he has the skills and know how to help remedy the current situation.  All of this reinforces the fact that when individuals in public positions of power commit these types of glaring infractions – both the immoral and illegal ones – their actions have long term consequences that go well beyond the immediate impact on their families.

In many cases, you’ve got talented individuals who are in positions of power that allow them to shape the future of the towns, cities and communities they govern.  Shortsightedly, by choosing to involve themselves in questionable behavior, they rob their constituencies and society at large of the very talents and skills that got them to positions of leadership in the first place.  It’s hard to say if anything would have been different had Spitzer remained New York’s governor over the past year, but we’ll never know.  As long as people in positions of public leadership continue to choose self, over family and community, we’ll always wonder what could have been.

We all have at least one really bad boss story.  Share yours after the jump.

Share your really bad boss story in the comment section below.

Racketeering, conspiracy, wire fraud. Just another day in the life of impeached former Illinois Governor, Rod Blagojevich.  Here at Really bad boss, we love Blago almost as much as we love Kwame Kilpatrick.  If not for men like this, we wouldn’t have anything to blog about in our political category. Charged with caring for the concerns of his Illinois constituency, the disgraced former Governor instead was, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office, the mastermind behind a “scheme to deprive the people of Illinois of honest government.”  Shady government officials are no longer uncommon, or for that matter, shocking. But what makes Blago such fodder for Really bad boss is his complete arrogance.  Like Kilpatrick, he insists, even in the face of pretty strong evidence to the contrary, that he has done nothing wrong.  Prosecutors, the U.S. Attorney’s office and everyone else in America who saw the transcripts of the wiretaps where Blago referred to Obama as a “mother***er”, and where he referred to the senate seat as a “ f***ing” valuable thing,” are all out to get him. We also hurt his feelings when we questioned his hasty appointment of Ronald Burris to the then vacant senate seat.

 In the meantime, he’s so torn up, he’s hosted a Chicago radio show, signed a reported six figure book deal and was at Disney World with his family when the indictments came down yesterday.  There really are different rules for the rest of us.

Really bad bosses who blame others for their mistakes

Yesterday I talked about bosses who’ll never admit when they’ve made a mistake.  Today I’m going to talk about bosses who’ll acknowledge a mistake has been made, but always manage to find someone else to blame. Really bad bosses have a lot of bad attributes, but I have to say that cowardice – the driving force behind blaming someone else for your mistake – is probably one of the worst.   Whether you define it as cowardice or call it by another name, few things cause employees to doubt management more than a boss who constantly points fingers and refuses to take responsibility for his or her own mistakes.  It’s even worse if it happens in an environment where open communication and the sharing of ideas are discouraged.  In that type of  “do as you’re told” environment, where questioning a boss’ decision may lead to reprisal or even firing, employees will keep quiet, even in the face of the most mindless of management decisions.

Speaking of mindless management decisions, remember when the big three auto makers hitched a ride on private jets to meet with congress to beg for money and talk about the viability of their industry? Well I’m willing to bet that there was at least one low level employee at any one of those companies who thought “you know, it’s probably not a good idea for the head of our automobile company to take a private jet to attend a meeting to explain how broke we are.”  And, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit, if after returning from that meeting, one or more of those low level employees were involved in a conversation with one of their bosses that went a little something like this:

 Boss:   “why did you book a private jet for the meeting?”

Low level employee:  “but you said…and when I tried to tell you … but that’s not what you said before…”

Add “should I take a sip of the Kool-Aid now?” to the dialogue and replace the words “book a private jet” with any number of ill fated, harebrained schemes, and that pretty much sums up most of my conversations with Napoleon.

If a really bad boss blames you for something you didn’t do, the bad news is, you usually end up taking the hit.  The good news is – so will he, eventually; he just doesn’t know it yet. Bosses who blame others for their mistakes will eventually lose every employee worth having.  And, the ones that stick around are just sticking around long enough to collect on the bets they made on how long this really bad boss will last.

Next week: Repeating the same mistake over and over again

Fred Goodwin laughing all the way to the bank

We don’t know much about this guy here in the USA but his behavior sure sounds familiar.  Fred Goodwin, former Chief Executive of RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland), has received widespread criticism since it was revealed that he’d be receiving a £16m pension. That’s about $23.3 million stateside.  Much like the disgraced bank execs in the U.S., Goodwin was forced to step down in October 2008 when RBS became nationalized after taking on bad debt and realizing a £24bn loss.  Of course, Goodwin argues that he’s earned his pension and that according to his contract, he’s doing nothing wrong by accepting it. To add insult to injury a recent whistleblower account of corporate waste at RBS revealed, among other things, that Goodwin’s office received a makeover using £1,000 a roll wallpaper and that company execs ran up chauffeur bills in excess of £100,000 a month.

Do the super wealthy really see things that differently than the rest of us?  Corporate greed is certainly not an American phenomenon. We all know that it is in fact, very, unfortunately universal.  But aren’t moderation and self restraint also universal? How about common sense?  Or is it too much to ask when money and power are involved? I always read these stories with that “one eyebrow cocked” look on my face because for the life of me I don’t get how they don’t get why most of the world finds this kind of behavior unforgivable.  The more I read stories like these, the angrier and more disgusted I become. 

We can still see you Kwame

Embarrassing text  messages between Kwame Kilpatric and former mayoral chief of staff  Christine Beatty (not his wife) were made public yesterday.  We are really big fans of Kwame Kilpatric.  Why?  Besides the fact that he gives us so much to work with,  the only thing worse than a really bad boss is a really bad boss who doesn’t know when to sit down and shut up.  After weeks of vehemently denying the affair, perjuring himself in court  and refusing to resign even though EVERYONE KNEW HE WAS LYING, prosecutors revealed the existence of  the text messages that would ultimately seal his fate.  Now that the messages have been made public, they reveal quite a few salty exchanges between the two. Nice mayoral conduct Kwame and yet another example of bosses behaving badly.  To read the nastiness in detail, click here.