Despite what might seem to be a very negative venting of my resentments and  disappointments — a mile of clichés could perhaps sum up my situation, ax to grind, sour grapes, sore loser, to name but a few — I can assert that the problem of poor leadership is pervasive in management today and that such bad bossing is as instrumental in the demise of a company as any of the other excuses that the key bosses offer to explain their own short-comings.

Nearly all of the companies that I have worked for over the years have folded and one in particular is presently on the verge of bankruptcy with financial collapse a near certainty as this is being written. And the same de-motivating bully bosses are still there mismanaging the company down the tubes. Nearly all of the talented people are gone, some long ago defected to other companies, some were fired for not being team players and others have gone off on their own to become very successful entrepreneurs. Those remaining are the uninspired, the weaklings and the timid, the corporate animals, too, that know the survival tactics and those that are there because they’re beholden to the machinations of the corporate political game.

What none of these people realize is that those that left the company, the truly talented and inspiring leaders, are the ones whose superb performance would have launched the company and its management into greatness.

Editor’s note: 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. He’s shared his excellent “Managing the Meanies: A Survival Guide”  series on Really Bad Boss over the past several weeks. We thank Buck Hamilton for his contribution and wish him continued success.

Several months ago my wife and I were having dinner with some friends when the subject of my writing came up. One of our companions asked me about the subject matter of what I was currently writing and I started to tell her about this article, about poor leadership being wide-spread and about how such bad-bossing is so instrumental in business failures. It’s a pernicious underground problem that cannot be quantified, I explained. This friend of ours, an investment broker who spent many years with one of the top New York firms, looked at me with an impatient and incredulous expression and commented with a bit of a dismissing wave that such a subject’s been written about already. My quick reply to her was a rather trendy but poignant, “Yeah, but people just don’t get it”. She agreed.

A lack of proper training

As for me, the various companies that I have worked for over the years have spent small fortunes on my professional development and have sent me to seminars and training classes covering the whole spectrum of disciplines including process control, quality management, statistical product control, successful selling techniques, management boot camp and plant safety, to name but a few. Beyond these seminars I’ve been through a number of internal corporate cultural programs where the company’s mission statement is methodically dissected and analyzed, bold management statements made about customers, service, quality, how our customers will be driven to prefer us and on one else, really a whole bunch of vacuous rhetoric that pretty much looks good when printed on paper but nothing else. I have never had a single shred, not one hour, of professional training that even hinted at cultivating motivational leadership skills.

Let’s blame climate change

So the key point is this: if your company has been performing poorly no doubt someone at the top is blaming the market, pointing at your competitors or perhaps accusing the sluggish economy, the Internet or off-shore competition. I don’t know, maybe they’re blaming climate change, but surely the finger is being pointed at some influence other than toward themselves, senior management. The failure rests with them and they alone and the question needs to be asked as to what extent the failure is connected to bad-bossing and the outright cancerous attitude that pervades a company that’s afflicted with bully-bosses. The corporate environment is a shelter for the mediocre. In fact, the very nature of most corporate cultures encourages mediocrity, a haven for those that are incompetent. The great achievers, the entrepreneurial types and the ones who really contribute to the success of a business, are branded as not being team players and are either forced out or elect to leave on their own accord. Typically these capable malcontents either go to a more appreciative competitor or stride out into the market on their own where they set up an unbelievably successful competing business and drive the host company into the ground.

Next Tuesday: I steal office supplies because I hate my boss

Editor’s note: 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.

The Inquisition

Shortly after my colleague left his company, there followed an inquisition. Like a CIA security breech his defection sparked interrogations – hysteria of a sort – panic and accusations. His former boss was incredulous; how could this have happened? There was a frantic activity around ferreting out a conspiracy; who knew about his defection? Who was complicit in this treasonous conduct? Disbelief and shock thundered around the halls of the corporate headquarters. Like the final scene in the Wizard of Oz, someone was really upset, but did anyone venture to take a hard look inside the company? Did anyone inquire into the real reasons why he left? In many ways the inquisition was indeed a smoke screen, a clever deception scheme to divert attention away from the truth and that is that my friend defected from his company, went to a competitor and took nearly all of the former company’s business with him because he had tired of paying homage to the ego alter.

Small in stature

I struggled with a similar bad-boss relationship a few years ago, all the time asking myself why I was so stupid as to tolerate the abuse. Arguably the worst boss that I ever worked for, this insecure guy was a real Machiavellian character, a dangerous corporate animal that everyone was afraid of…or rather, we were afraid of his moods and he knew it. Smaller in stature that the rest of us, he always stood with his hands in his pockets and he seemed to wear a perpetual grin, a quirk that I always found to be disquieting. This was particularly evident while he was working you over, disciplining you while showing a full toothy grin. I recall thinking that this was the strangest behavior – perhaps he was always nervous I thought – until it was explained to me that such a grin, a full display of teeth during a confrontational situation is a 100,000 year old simian left-over from our primate origins. Still a sign of aggression in chimps, the human expression is no less dangerous a warning.

This guy really rounded off the panoply of bad boss criteria. He was the ultimate corporate survivor, determined to be left standing when the final roll call was made. Despite being a senior manager and an officer in the corporation, he never made a critical or important decision, was never involved in high profile affairs, and as such was immune to the corporate witch hunts and purges. It’s a sad note to have to remark that this guy, like many other bad bosses that I’ve known, is still mismanaging those unfortunate enough to be reporting to him.

Next Tuesday: “Yeah…but people just don’t get it.”

Editor’s note: 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.

Cronyism is the management style of keeping the boss surrounded with favorites despite the glaringly obvious fact that these people are incompetent, if not outright harmful to the business. At its extreme this corporate-tribes phenomenon has the favorites fashioning themselves after the boss – all wearing sweater vests, for example – or embracing the beliefs of the boss, his faith or hobbies. Everyone sees through what’s going on except the bully boss because he’s too preoccupied with having his ego stroked. One of my colleagues referred to this bully manager’s favored inner circle as the boss’s “sucklings”, in confidence to me of course; this bully-boss played favorites and if you were in his inner circle then you could do no wrong. The rest of us were never consulted. The problem of course was that the inner circle was stocked with incompetents and the company ultimately, after thrashing around and struggling in the death-grip throes of mismanagement, faced bankruptcy.

The Court Jester

Back in the 1990’s a paper company I worked for had a marketing manager named Jack. He was a dangerous corporate buffoon who was so snuggled up with the senior bosses that he was untouchable. Not only was he incompetent, I can also say that much of his professional behavior was unethical. Like the king’s jester, he was a dangerous member of the corporate court. It was on more than one occasion that I was brought to the sickening realization that I had been set up to stumble into one of his traps. I was on a flight to Los Angeles with one of the senior managers and we had the occasion to talk. I asked him what was up with the court jester, and how it could be that he was still employed. The senior manager looked me hard in the eyes and replied, “Because he’s a good yes-man”. That company, by the way, eventually folded too but not until after I had left and went with a competitor.

Driving away talented people

A colleague of mine, a really talented and capable young manager, recently left his company too and for very similar reasons. He often complained to me about the stifling regime that he worked under, specifically the abusive low self-confidence thug that was his boss, a guy that single-handedly de-motivated the entire sales organization. This capable friend of mine couldn’t tolerate the stress of coping with this bully-boss any longer and after some considerable anxiety and self-inflicted guilt finally left the company and joined a competitor, an archrival who was thrilled to have him aboard and backed up their remarkable windfall with a significant raise in salary to boot. Funny how that always seems to work; our incompetent managers drive away the really talented people, yet these bully-bosses seem to remain unexposed while the company suffers the loss of sales revenue, the defection of key accounts, a drought in new products and the dearth of creative thinking.

A couple of weeks ago, we ran a post about the increasing levels of job dissatisfaction in this country and the impact that will ultimately have on our ability to compete in the global marketplace. Buck’s post reinforces the belief that the persistent combination of bad management and dissatisfied employees are a dangerous combination that can ultimately spell the decline of business in America as we know it.

Next Tuesday: Baring teeth as a sign of aggression

Editor’s note: 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.

As kids we called it “ganging up”, gathering together as much muscle as needed in order to demonstrate your influence. It’s a management style used by corporate bully-bosses and surely a behavior that these de-motivators learned as kids. Such corporate bullies have issues upstairs, so to speak, self-confidence vacuums that cause them to enlist the support of other bullies in order to force their influence and demonstrate their irresistible control over others. In short, they can’t influence or persuade you by themselves. They don’t have enough self-confidence for that, so they must gang up and do it as a team. If you don’t think that this is so, think again. It’s behavior that bully-bosses learned as kids and they’re using the same techniques today. The trouble is it’s a technique that’s overwhelmingly de-motivating to those on the receiving end.

I was in the lobby of the Hampton Inn at the Buffalo airport stamping the snow off of my shoes at 7:30 in the morning when my Napoleonic bully of a boss called me on my cell phone. I had just cleared eight inches of freshly fallen snow off of my rental car. It was still snowing hard and the sky was so gray and the cloud ceiling so low that it almost seemed artificial. I heard his voice and my demeanor stiffened as I braced for what was coming; I always dreaded talking with him. He was about to brow-beat me into convincing a customer to take several shipments of bad product and he had enlisted yet another bully to participate in the intimidation. This other guy was a yes-man sycophant and the two of them together surely could do some damage. My boss was in a particularly bad mood since previous attempts to strong arm me had failed; I had not acquiesced to his unethical demands – demands which could have been harmful to the customer – and obviously this pounding had been rehearsed beforehand by the two of them. They left me little wiggle room other than to do just what they insisted or no doubt face unemployment. The encounter left me red-faced and furious. It was a classic case of a pre-arranged ganging up, a desperate bully-boss technique when the guy needed to demonstrate his prowess. His confidence in his own persuasiveness was so low that he was compelled to recruit another to help with his dirty work.

This bully-boss would never confront a major issue alone and it nearly goes without saying that he surrounded himself with a few favored managers, trusted confidants that carried out his every wish. The trouble was that these guys were nearly all lesser figures, unremarkable characters who allowed this incompetent to shine. It was absolutely demoralizing to the rest of us; one of the favored had the IQ of a dolt, but he called the boss “sir” and was flatteringly responsive to his every need. These corporate courtesans were skillful at telling the boss what he wanted to hear, never gave him bad news or shared an opinion contrary to his. None of them would ever eclipse him with their mediocrity. And so the business was mismanaged into near extinction under this boss’s reign and no one in senior management ever ventured to peel back the layers and look inside.

Next Tuesday: Cronyism and its destructive effects

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.

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.

Great communicators make great leaders, and the opposite is true as well

I have had bosses where the ebb and flow of dynamic conversation was absolutely prohibited. Having such a dialog would have empowered me, given me too much confidence and in turn would have diminished their control over me and the situation. One guy that I worked for had a desperate dislike for opinions – my professional advice and contributions, that is – and whenever I shared my thoughts on a matter he would quickly rebuke me. He was the one asking the questions, and my opinions, should he have entertained them, would simply diminish his control over the situation and me. Great communicators do indeed make great leaders and the opposite is true as well. Most bully-bosses are poor communicators, they tell you only what you barely need to know and not a fragment more. Keeping you in the dark and always guessing is their way of maintaining absolute control. It’s also their way of never making a poor decision, or any decision at all for that matter, bad decisions that someday might indict them for incompetence.

The corporate bully-boss that I just described above was a classic case-study in the realm of poor communication. Working for him was like being a laboratory rat in a complex labyrinth; you never really knew which corridor to go down. Should you just happen to work your way down the right path you’d be rewarded with no feed-back whatsoever, advance down the wrong path and you’d be jolted with a shock. It took me several years to figure out that the complete lack of direction from him was his way of never stumbling into a bad decision, and along with his dual-faced profile that he showed – lord and master to those below him, obsequious subject to those above – was the manner in which he skillfully survived in a senior management position for some twenty years of so!

Insecure managers are extremely dangerous people.

The tragedy here, and it can be described as no less so, is that those running the company don’t see these corporate de-motivators for who and what they really are; morale-busters just as pernicious to the health of the business as any other threat. One such de-motivator told me during my yearly performance review that I wasn’t a team player, a ridiculous condemnation that went into my file. I confidently shared my opinion with him that most people in the company, my colleagues as well as higher ups, would disagree with him. It was only because I offered contrary opinions to his from time to time, resisted his bullying threats and de-motivating intimidations that he branded me as such. It was me who was a threat to him. He perceived me to be more competent than he and when around I exposed him as the fraud that his own insecurities thought him to be. Insecure managers are extremely dangerous people.

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.

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.

The formative years

It was during my formative years as a young manager when I surely developed my leadership skills. Most of the eighteen men and women that I supervised were easily twice my age, union employees who were protected by a negotiated contract. I was young, very inexperienced, and they knew it. It was on this job that I learned how to be persuasive. If I walked around acting like a tyrant I’d never get anywhere with them. Sure there were a few die-hard union incorrigibles who wouldn’t allow themselves to be swayed by my persuasiveness, but for the most part my style worked and frankly it was one of the most fun jobs that I ever had.

Beyond supervising, one of the important functions of that early management position was writing up the papermaking recipes. On one formula I had mistakenly noted the color formulation to be six hundred ounces of liquid red dye, enough of the pigment to color an Olympic size swimming pool crimson. We were scheduled to make gray colored paper that evening and the dye content should have read sixty liquid ounces.

The importance of being fair

One of the guys who worked for me, Stanley, a Polish immigrant who had been orphaned and displaced during the Second World War, called me in the middle of the night to alert me of my mistake. After tripping over the night stand and knocking over the lamp I answered the phone and heard Stanley’s broken English over the din of the paper machinery in the background. He’d been at the job for over thirty years and had instantly picked up my error – before committing to making the paper, I might add – and just wanted to let me know. Given that this was a union shop, and considering that he would have been following my instructions, Stanley could have simply added the incorrect six hundred ounces of red and the resultant disaster would have not only ruined thousands of pounds of paper, not to mention lost productivity and costly paper machine downtime, but would have also derailed my career at a very young start. I had always been fair with all of them and Stanley knew it, so rather than taking me down the road of humiliation and disgrace he chose to do the right thing and corrected the problem. What do you suppose Stanley would have done had I been a tyrant, an abusive martinet that no one could tolerate?

Had Buck been a heel of a boss, Stanley would have left him high and dry. I’ve seen it happen a dozen times, and I have to admit I’ve let a bad boss or two suffer the consequences of their own stupidity just because I could. It wasn’t necessarily the most mature thing to do, but they had it coming. Leadership – true leadership – earns respect, and that respect goes a long way with employees.

Next Tuesday: The one asking the questions is the one in charge

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.

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.

A Napoleonic Tyrant

A classic case study of such a dangerous low self-esteemer was at my first job at a grocery store in a small town in western Massachusetts. The store manager, Mr. Blowhard, was a Napoleonic tyrant that all of the employees were afraid of, rather a Caine Mutiny captain Queeg kind of guy whose low self-confidence anxiety made him a monster. I dreaded coming to work and he made it difficult for me to do my job. Nothing was right for Mr. Blowhard and every encounter with him brought on a storm of abusive. He would often stand by me while I was packing groceries and once he harangued me so badly that my nervousness caused me to fumble and drop a bag full of goods. It was a real spectacle with grapefruit, oranges and canned goods rolling around the check-out area, while I made the whole situation worse trying to recover the spilled articles.

He and I just didn’t hit it off. I was his whipping boy because I was only seventeen at the time and I needed the job. And he knew too that kids my age respected their elders. Heck, it was my first job and as far as I knew all bosses would be this way. Fed up with having to deal with me he transferred me to one of the other stores in a neighboring town some twelve miles away, somewhat of a hardship for me at the time given that I didn’t have a car and each day had to find my way to and from the store.

“You made me look bad, kid”

The manager there, Ralph, was glad to have me. When I reported to him on the first morning, standing there ready for duty in my grocer’s apron, dress shirt and necktie, he shook my hand, welcomed me to the store and gave me the details of what I needed to do for the day. Well, I reported to this remote store for the entire summer, worked overtime and weekends and it seemed like I never had enough time to finish my job, stocking shelves with goods, working the cash register, packing groceries and rounding up shopping carts in the parking lot. The time flew by each day, I loved the job, the customers, my happy coworkers and I loved Ralph the super-confident manager. His store, by the way, was the most profitable in Berkshire County.

At the end of the summer when my tour with the store at the neighboring town was over I reported back to Mr. Blowhard, ready for work. He berated me and accused me of holding out on him. I was perplexed by his accusations and the confusion showed on my face, which prompted him to tell me that I had received nothing but praise from Ralph for the work I had done all summer. “You made me look bad, kid”, Mr. Blowhard said and this was no doubt because when arranging my temporary transfer he had promised Ralph the worst one of the lot, me. I learned some years later, by the way, that Mr. Blowhard was fired from the company for embezzling, a felony he committed to cover a huge accumulation of gambling debts.

Next Tuesday: The Royalty Syndrome

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.

The Morale Buster

This kind of manager is always quick with a caustic remark. One of the managers I reported to would put you down in an instant, usually with a biting sneer, almost a snarl, and often in front of your colleagues. In doing so, this morale buster was diminishing his subordinate and the perceived threat that he or she presented.

I recall well my first morale-diminishing encounter with this man. While I did not report directly to him, he was the head sales and marketing guy for our group and I was the sales manager of one of our paper mills. I had been transferred in to build the business and infuse some life into its anemic sales performance – a challenge that I thoroughly enjoyed. Each month we scheduled day-long reviews of the business, meetings in which I would present the sales numbers demonstrating our progress, new business and accounts, and consistent recovery and growth. We’d begun to really kick our competition in the pants and they were noticing. It was a real success story; month after month of positive reporting. But with this morale-busting boss, while I was making my presentations, I’d find myself wondering why he was squinting at me. Yes, he sat at the conference room table month after month, rarely making remarks or contributions, his laptop as his shield, eyes narrowed to slits like a viper.

It was almost as if he was trying to focus his prismatic predatory eyes, shifting his head in a slow side-to-side rhythm, as if preparing to strike, his tongue darting in and out sensing my fear. I recall being consumed with curiosity as to what the deal was with his strange squinting behavior. What was up with this guy? It was some time later that I learned from a body language expert that narrowing of the eyes, or squinting, is a sign of aggression, an attack signal. This bully-boss was evaluating what I was saying, determining that what he was hearing was a threat and that I was his prey.

Mute in the presence of superiors

This same bad boss, who was a rude and abusive tyrant with his people, was mute in the presence of his boss or someone he regarded as his superior. In the presence of one of the board of directors for example, he was like a stone, terrified to speak for fear of exposing himself as the fraud he surely perceived himself to be. It’s not without irony that this was the same manager who declined to have several of us participate in his performance evaluation because he knew for certain that giving us the opportunity to critique him would have been a damning career move.

If bad-bossing is so obvious why isn’t such poor management exposed to those that count? The fact is this: the particularly manipulative morale-busters portray a different image to those above them; they’re skillful at it. And unless the higher ups peel back the layers and look inside, they’re never exposed. The low self-esteem boss is as skillful at filtering the truth as the illiterate is at concealing the fact that he cannot read. Years of “fooling” people ultimately result in them living a compromised life, full of fear, disappointment and missed opportunities.

Next Tuesday: A classic case study of the dangerous low self-esteemer

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.

12 bosses, less than 20% worth their salaries

Over the course of a long career in the paper industry I have worked for twelve bosses and I figure now that less than twenty percent of them were worth the salaries that they were paid. Only two of them could be considered skillful motivators, while a few were mediocre managers and quite a number of them were just outright terrible. Some of these former bosses are now deceased, a few have retired to Florida and sadly several of them are still actively in the paper industry, and as of this writing, continue to mismanage and de-motivate people.

Surely bosses that are afflicted with this often morale-busting behavioral trait are likely to mismanage themselves and their people into disaster. Such self-doubters will put you down — often with an audience — in order to advance themselves; they’ll keep you suppressed so as not to bring favorable attention to you from the higher ups. To keep you from shining they’ll give you few opportunities at which you can excel, or they’ll assign you the wrong ones so that it’s almost certain that you will fail. It has happened to me countless times and unless you’re working for an enlightened motivator it’s probably happening to you right now.

We put people in charge who have no right to be there…

Have you ever had a boss that you would jump off a cliff for if asked? Of course that’s a ridiculous question in its literal context, but you get my point. Conversely, have you ever had a boss that you would not lend a hand to if he or she was mired in quicksand? The fact is that we put people in charge who have no right to be there; they’re morale busters and are as harmful to the company as any competitive threat. But strangely nearly everyone in the organization sees it, yet senior management is blind to the malady and the mismanagement blunders on without change.

I have worked for all types of managers, from control freaks and Napoleons, self-doubters and egoists, to true leaders and motivators. They all had one thing in common however, and that was that I worked for them and as such my performance contributed greatly to the success and advancement of their careers. One thing that they did not have in common is the understanding of that fact. A simple truth is this: your people can elevate you and your company to great heights or they can drag you into the mud with their resentments when their creativity is stifled and their enthusiasm is suppressed.

The most dangerous managers in the workplace suffer from low self-esteem

I’m not a human behaviorist, nor am I academically qualified in the realm of psychology, but I can tell you that years of working with people and thus observing them closely has given me some remarkable insight. Arguably the most dangerous managers in the workplace are those that suffer from low self-esteem or diminished self-confidence, issues that these ill-managers struggle to conceal from the rest of us, vulnerabilities that are minefields that we as subordinates or colleagues can inadvertently stumble into. The bottom line is that the self-doubters are terrified of having you excel at your own job for fear that your superlative performance will threaten their own security.

Buck’s given us a lot of food for thought this week. Are the most dangerous managers in the workplace those who suffer from low self esteem? And maybe even more importantly, why are so many people in charge who shouldn’t be?

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.

I’m very excited to welcome Buck Hamilton as Really Bad Boss’ first ever guest blogger. His stories are honest, often amusing, and familiar accounts of really bad bosses and the damage they can inflict on their employees and the companies they run. This week begins the series we’ve entitled Managing the Meanies; A Survival Guide to Corporate Bully-Bosses.  Every Tuesday over the next few months, Buck shares his personal stories of bad boss behavior and how he managed to survive his own corporate bully bosses.

In part one of the series, Buck introduces us to the first of his many bully bosses. Peter was the quintessential bad boss – “grumpy and unapproachable” with a god complex…

An eager young supervisor

It was while talking on the phone with a friend of mine who just recently left his company for a new job with a competitor that I heard in his voice a level of passion and excitement that he had never shown before. As if having been released from Puritan stocks he was liberated from the former company, the massive oak mantle that he had been locked into had been lifted. My friend was the casualty of a bad boss and the dysfunction cost the former company hugely with the loss of his talents.

His demoralizing bad-boss relationship was reminiscent of my own story when I was coming up in the paper manufacturing business as a young supervisor. At the time I had been challenged with a nearly impossible task, one that had been tackled by several other managers before me without results and one that I was determined to succeed at. This overwhelming assignment involved the disposal of hundreds of tons of waste paper that had been irresponsibly accumulated by the company over the years, paper that had no use whatsoever other than to be gradually reclaimed into the process as raw material, and if successful, the bottom line return to the firm could ultimately reach well beyond half a million dollars.

I worked on the project over time, reading about and researching the technology of recovering the waste, understanding the quality impact of using such raw materials in the process, talking with the old-timers at the paper mill and securing their thoughts and input. Several trials yielded promising results and I was thrilled with the progress that we had made.

Grumpy and unapproachable with a God complex

Well, every morning the company’s general manager, Peter, walked through the plant making his tour, his hands thrust into his pockets and always looking grumpy and unapproachable. On one such morning he stopped and asked me about the status of the project and I told him of the progress we had made and that several chemical company consultants were coming in to advise us on the technology — free input, I might add, with no cost to the company other than the price of the chemical should it work. He lost it right there on the floor and blistered me for bringing in consultants, the only consulting he insisted that the company needed was from him and he walked away berating me over his shoulder. I was left standing there flushed with embarrassment, crushed by the granite weight of his rejection. The encounter left me demoralized and uncertain what to do with the project, paralyzed as to whether or not I should even continue to develop this technology.

The seminal moment

Despite the general manager’s deflating style I succeeded with the challenge and in time recovered hundreds of thousands of dollars in bottom-line savings for the company. My nasty encounter with Peter, however, was the seminal moment in which I realized that it was time to leave the company and move on to a competitor; I had no desire whatsoever to work for a company that promoted such poor management style. But most importantly, Peter had demonstrated to me the lessons of yet another episode in how not to treat subordinates.

Have any of you ever had a seminal moment? A moment where, while working in a bad job, or for a bad boss, you simply realize that you can do better? That you just have to do better? We’d like you to share your seminal moments with us. You never know, maybe your story will give someone the courage they need to realize their own seminal moment.

Next Tuesday…12 bosses, less than 20% worth their salaries…