In this week’s installment of Managing the Meanies, Buck reminds us of a lesson his father taught him, “the one asking the questions is the one in charge.”  Bad bosses who refuse to acknowledge our questions understand that providing us with answers empower and validate us, and that’s the last thing most of them ever want to do…

A very costly mistake

Another manager that I had worked with as a colleague some years ago, Mark the plant engineer,  learned this lesson too, but unlike my experience, with bitter results. Mark was a real hard case, a tough guy and walked around the paper mill like he had a broom handle for a spine. He was in tight with the general manager and Mark was quick to note infractions on the clip board that he carried, always reporting to the higher ups whatever he had discovered. Feared by everybody as being the ferret that he was, Mark was an internal affairs type that snitched and tattled for the sole gain of advancing himself and his career. Sure, he had control over our workers, the fear and intimidation type of control, but he had no positive influence with them and in general everyone was unresponsive to Mark. It wouldn’t be too strong an assertion for me to say that all of the papermakers positively hated him.

Well, the time came when Mark made a dreadful miscalculation, a very costly mistake that had huge exposure. He couldn’t hide the fact that he had messed up royally, everyone knew it and his failure was revealed for all to see. He sought me out in the mill, came to me for sympathy I suppose, and I tried to console him as best that I could. He was so distraught that tears ran down his face, his eyes bloodshot and watery, mucus ran from his nose. Gosh, it was awful and I was in conflict with the compassion that I felt for him and the urge to walk away after saying to him “Well, if you hadn’t been such an SOB you wouldn’t be feeling this humiliation, would you? Have you ever thought about what being such a hard case really every got you?” Mark had been disgraced and shortly after was gone from the company. More than a few of us were relieved to know that the company recognized what a morale-buster this plant engineer was and the negative effects he had on the performance of the business.

Acknowledging your question empowers you

My parents understood the maxim that the one asking the questions is the one in charge and surely bully-bosses know this too. “Listen mister, I’m the one asking the questions around here” would have been my father’s reply when I was a kid and for some mis-managers it’s the central tenant of their management style. As for myself, years of successful selling has taught me well that questions are the key as to how fluidly a customer interview will go; the one asking the questions controls the direction and the outcome of the meeting. If you have ever had a boss who simply wouldn’t give you any answers, a very frustrating situation, then contemplate just exactly what’s going on here. Understand that acknowledging your question with a satisfactory answer empowers you, at least in the minds of the bully-bosses; it validates you, lends you respect and establishes you perhaps in some ways as an equal. It renders them answerable to you.

Some years ago I worked for a guy who was afflicted with the worst case of royalty syndrome, and asking him a question — at least if the inquiring person was one that he perceived to be beneath him in the corporate hierarchy — would elicit the most agonizingly uneventful response. Ask this guy a question and he would look away, rub his face, scratch his head, sigh and grunt, all the time fidgeting…and then, absolutely nothing. You could leave his office and go run around the block a few times only to still find him there when you returned, paralyzed by his reluctance to relinquish even a shred of power. You see, he knew that an answer would then validate the inquirer and it was for me to learn after working for this guy for several months that a commoner like me was not allowed to ask the king a question.

Next Tuesday: A desperate dislike for opinions: The poor communicator

Buck Hamilton is a sales and marketing executive who’s spent over thirty years working in the paper distribution business. He’s a prolific writer who’s presently working on a book which narrates the stories of sixteen Vietnam War veterans. You can read his weekly series  “Managing the Meanies: A Survival Guide” every Tuesday here on Really Bad Boss.

This week Buck Hamilton’s back with a new post in his Managing the Meanies series. The Formative Years covers, well, his formative years, a period in which he developed his leadership skills, skills that would help him get out of a jam or two…

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.

In last Tuesday’s installment of his weekly series, Managing the Meanies, Buck Hamilton introduced us to his first classic low self-esteemer bad boss. This week, Buck defines the Royalty Syndrome, a terrible and unfortunately all too common bad boss affliction…

A common trait with many of the de-motivators that I have worked for is that they suffered from royalty syndrome, a terrible bad-boss affliction and one that always promotes poor morale amongst those unfortunate subjects who have to work under such a regime. One such manager I reported to was the king, at least in his mind, while the rest of us – those either at his level or below – were the little people. The guy embraced the policy that if he showed us any respect, he’d be empowering us, and to him that would have been a chink in his armor, a vulnerability. He was the kind of guy who wouldn’t rise to shake your hand. His management style was to diminish his subordinates by putting them in the proverbial frying pan during presentations, dancing for his amusement until he finally found fault. He’d work them over with interrogative skill to the point of exhaustion. Then the whole abusive process would start all over again. The worst part – during presentations, he’d be busy doing some other unrelated task; scrolling through reports on his computer, writing email or listening to his voice mail messages.

“Okay, who’s the first one that wants to step out and take a beating?”

Do you recognize the message here? “I’m the king and you’re an insignificant minion.” It was exhausting to any of us who experienced it but I can assure you that the higher ups, the guys managing at the top, never saw this side of him and the absolutely destructive management style that he practiced. This guy was an outright cancer on the company, perhaps one of the single reasons why the company failed, but no one of influence recognized this fact. To anyone that he perceived to be above him however, he presented an entirely different picture.

This same abusive tyrant was the company’s vice president of sales, and being in such a high profile capacity, really the single guy most responsible for the health of the business and its progress foreword. He scheduled bi-monthly sales conference calls and all of us were expected to contribute input. The trouble was that when asked to contribute no one would venture to speak for fear of being tongue-lashed and ridiculed. I’m serious when I say that this guy would entice the first victim into contributing some remarks and then would proceed to rip him or her to shreds. As such we would witness agonizingly long silent periods during the call, very awkward episodes where not one of us would speak for fear of having our heads bitten off. It was almost as if he had us all lined up and with a bat in his hand said “Okay, who’s the first one that wants to step out and take a beating?” As with other bad leaders that I have encountered in the past, I often wondered about just where and from whom this horrible manager learned to develop his demolishing, de-motivating style.

Next Tuesday: The Formative Years

Buck Hamilton is a sales and marketing executive who’s spent over thirty years working in the paper distribution business. He’s a prolific writer who’s presently working on a book which narrates the stories of sixteen Vietnam War veterans. You can read his weekly series  “Managing the Meanies: A Survival Guide” every Tuesday here on Really Bad Boss.

Last week in Managing the Meanies, Buck Hamilton introduced us to the classic morale busting bad boss. Morale busters often publicly humiliate their employee in a thinly veiled attempt at hiding their own incompetence and low self esteem. This week Buck tells the story of his first encounter with a classic low self-esteemer…

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.

In last Tuesday’s installment of his series Managing the Meanies, Buck suggested that the most dangerous managers in the workplace suffer from low self-esteem. This week Buck continues by discussing managers who have no problem verbally abusing their employees, often in front of colleagues. I like to call it “public displays of incompetence.” Those same bosses however, are strangely quiet when facing their own bosses…

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.

Last week I introduced you to Buck Hamilton and his series Managing the Meanies, where Buck, a sales and marketing executive, introduces us to and dissects the behavior of several of his really bad bosses. Last week it was Peter, the quintessential bad boss. This week, Buck delves into the psyche behind a lot of bad bosses…

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.

A few weeks ago, I got an email from a reader interested in sharing his own stories of bad bosses and the impact they’ve had on his life and career. Always interested in others’ stories and how they’ve coped with really bad bosses, I asked him to send me his. And what a story it is. 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, and he’s got a lot to say about our corporate culture of bad management and worse bosses.

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…