What the blogosphere’s saying about bad bosses this week…

• The only good thing I can say about a bad boss is that you can learn an awful lot from them if you’re paying attention. Bad bosses provide a roadmap of exactly what not to do as you’re progressing in your career. And over at TLNT.com, John Hollon tells you why it’s good to learn from a bad boss.

• Janlogie’s Blog shares a few opinions about bad bosses, bad employees and the rights of both.

• Over at the bnet blogs, Suzanne Lucas shares 5 Things to Do When the Boss is Wrong.

• On Work in Progress – Bad Boss Misery, Johni Siegel shares tips on improving and maybe eliminating a bad boss situation.

• Sonja Crider shares her boss from hell story and tells us how she learned to work for a control freak.

According to UCLA business professor Samuel Culbert, annual reviews are “dishonest, fraudulent…and just plain bad management.” In an interview with NPR, Culbert says the entire process is falsehood since the boss has most likely already been told by higher ups what, if any, promotion or advancement is going to take place. The entire review process becomes, in essence, a charade. Instead of outdated performance reviews, Culbert suggests bosses just tell employees what they need to do to become more effective.

In every performance review I’ve ever received the boss had already, in fact, come to conclusions about my performance and any related increase in salary long before I’d ever sat down with them. My opinions and suggestions were rarely taken into place. It now seems that performance reviews in large part, exist to cover the employer from a liability standpoint. With written reviews, they’ve got documentation on file, accurate or not, on issues they’ve discussed with the employee.

What’s your feeling about performance reviews – worthwhile, or a waste of time? Share your thoughts in the comment section. You can read the full interview with Culbert on npr.or.

Even though I’m sure I hold the record for having he worst luck when it comes to bosses, and although I came home every day and railed against them for hours, there are a few things I never did when it came to my bosses. And if you need your job, which most of us do, I suggest you never do them either…

1. Bad mouth your boss to colleagues. It’s one thing to discuss specific tasks your boss has asked you to complete, but it’s another thing entirely to tell everyone in earshot that you think he’s an idiot. For one thing, you never know who you can trust. Some people’s answer to dealing with a bad boss is to turn into the office snoop. Trust no one.

2. Boss bash on social media. Lock your twitter account, guard your friend list with your life or just don’t post any disparaging remarks against your boss while you’re in her employ. The truth is, everything and I mean everything you post on the web can be accessed by someone else – even people you don’t ever want to see it. Leave the bad boss rants to in person meetings with friends you trust.

3. Steal from your employer – The temptation might be great, especially if you’re not being paid very well or you feel you need “hazzard pay” for putting up with a tyrant of a boss, but stealing from your employer is never a good idea. The big ones are easy, like not raiding petty cash or stealing money or products, but if you’re doing other work on the company’s time, photocopying your weekly church bulletin or stocking your home office with your company’s supplies, you’re stealing from your company and it will eventually catch up to you.

4. Bad mouth a former bad boss during an interview – It comes across as sour grapes and leaves your potential employer wondering what you’ll say about him when you get the chance. Instead, talk about what you learned from your former boss (which, if you’re paying attention can be a lot) and how you plan on using what you’ve learned in your new position.

5. Threaten your boss –It might seem as though it goes without saying but we’ve shared stories of bossnapping and slipping bosses drugs before. In both cases, employees ended up arrested and with hefty fines. No bad boss is worth that kind of trouble. If it gets to the point where you’re imagining doing your boss harm, it’s past time to go.

This week I’m featuring a couple of my favorite blogs, plus a link to Really Bad Boss in Inc. Magazine…

• eBossWatch uses an evaluation form to let people anonymously rate their current or former bosses. The site’s founder also runs GreatPlaceJobs a source that helps job seekers find jobs at award-winning great workplaces.

• The Earmark always manages to wrangle up a great list of really bad bosses, mostly of the political kind. Here’s the most recent.

• Workforce Management Today asks the question; Has the employer-employee relationship changed for good? A quote from someone they interviewed for the article pretty much sums it up, “Let them fire me. I don’t even care what happens anymore. I’ll just go work somewhere else and be totally unhappy in that job too.”

• On her blog A Meaningful Existence, Karen shares The top 5 reasons to leave your job – no surprise here, a bad boss is number one. And while this economy might have you staying put for a while, it’s important to note her suggestions, particularly about doing something everyday to move towards finding a better job, and a better boss.

• Over on Inc. online, Raven Hill offers advice on managing bully bosses and guess who was tapped for the piece. Check out the story and Really Bad Boss’ mention here.

In Part 4 of 10 signs you might be getting a bad boss, I conclude the series by talking about interviewers who ask illegal questions and about listening to your gut…

9. Are you married? What’s your religion? What are you anyway? I touched on illegal questions last week in sign#2 when I talked about the interviewer who, without asking outright, was fishing around to find out whether I had kids or not. In the case where an interviewer comes right out and asks illegal questions, run, don’t walk to the nearest exit. Any interviewer worth their weight knows that certain questions are off limits. If they’re asking you these questions, they either are trying to intimidate you, or have a hard time hiding their biases. Either way, it’s not a place you want to work. Some examples of illegal interview questions include:

• Do you have a visual, speech, or hearing disability?
• Are you planning to have a family? When?
• Have you ever filed a workers’ compensation claim?
• How many days of work did you miss last year due to illness?
• Would you have a problem working with a female partner?
• Do you have children? How old are they?
• What year did you graduate from high school? (reveals age)

For a list of additional illegal interview questions, click here.

10. The final sign you might end up with a bad boss isn’t based on research or scientific fact, it boils down to following your instinct. If you sit through the entire interview with the feeling that something isn’t right, then you’re probably right. Be careful not to confuse that instinct with nerves, but if you don’t have a good feeling about an interview, it might be a sign that you shouldn’t take the job. I’ve ignored that instinct several times in the past and regretted it each time. You never know, your gut might be telling you to let this one go because there’s an even a better one waiting in the wings.

If you’ve got some suggestions for things to watch out for during an interview, share them in the comment section or email them to denised@reallybadboss.com.

A supreme court ruling last week made it a little easier for companies to monitor employee cell phone and text use. The court ruled that employers have the right to read its workers text messages  if they believe workplace rules are being broken.

The ruling came in the case of The City of Ontario v. Quon. Sergeant Jeff Quon sued the city, the police chief and the police department in 2004 claiming his supervisor’s search of his text messages violated his Fourth Amendment rights. Quon had been using his government issued pager to send sexually explicit messages. When Quon went over his allotted 25,000 character limit per month, his supervisor reviewed his pager use to determine whether the limit was enough for official purposes. That’s when Quon’s sexually explicit messages to his wife at the time, and his mistress were discovered.

Quon sued claiming that the city didn’t have a text-message policy in place when the pagers were issued. The city did have official policies about computer, Internet and email use that limited the use to official purposes.

While I typically come down on the side of the employee in many matters, I can’t side with Quon on this one. If Quon had been using his personal pager/cell phone to send messages, that would be a different story, but I think any adult who’s spent any time in the workforce should know that employers typically monitor the use of any equipment they’ve issued, whether that’s a laptop, cell phone or pager. And, while I might get a lot of heat for this, I think that it’s within their right to do so – particularly if there are limits on the amount and type of usage they allow. As an individual, if you want to send sexy text messages until the cows come home, by all means do so, but do it on your own phone, on your own service plan where your expectation of privacy is legitimate. Read the full story on Quon and the court ruling here.

Do you agree with the court ruling? How do you feel about privacy issues in the workplace? Share your thoughts in the comment section.

Early on in the life of this site, I made an error that caused the site to go down for several hours. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it) at the time I had only a handful of readers visiting the site on a daily basis. However, if you’re a blogger, you know that any amount of down time is bad. What made it worse was that I was the cause of the problem. My saving Grace? Admitting that I’d made a mistake – a huge one – and finding a friend to help me who knew exactly what he was doing.

There are some bosses who never, ever admit when they’ve made a mistake – Even when faced with indisputable evidence that they’ve messed up royally, a really bad boss will go to his grave before admitting to making a mistake. It’s one of the worst and most common mistakes bad bosses make. Why? Many bosses feel as though admitting to a mistake reduces their credibility and thereby their ability to manage effectively. In fact, the opposite is often the case. A boss’ ability to admit to making a mistake says to his employees, “I’m not perfect, I know I’m not perfect, and now I’m going to show you how someone who’s really in control handles a crisis.”

Pretending you’re infallible, even as everyone around you recognizes there’s a problem, says “I’m unstable and probably shouldn’t be trusted to lead.” I once had a boss who made a serious error in calculating some figures. When confronted with her mistake, rather than admit to it, she tried to explain that she’d used a different method for calculating her figures.  Not different information or data, a different method for adding and subtracting.  Ridiculous, but true.  Other than arithmetic, I was, and still am unaware of any other method for adding and subtracting numbers.  We never looked at her quite the same again, referring to her as the manager who rather than admitting a mistake, created her own private system of mathematics.

After a couple of hours, my knowledgeable friend restored my site to its former glory. The fact that you’re reading my mea culpa today means that fortunately for me, fatal errors in the blogosphere aren’t terminal, and neither are my mistakes. Bosses, do us all a favor – admit when you’ve made a mistake. It’s the only way to begin the process of fixing what went wrong in the first place.