Bad Bosses Ruin Companies (And People Too)

One of the beautiful realities about white-collar work that no one explains to you until you arrive within it is that executives do not care about anything except financial returns, despite claiming to care about everything in all-hands meetings. It is the greatest double standard or two-faced nature of most corporate work: executives will prattle on about caring for your stress, your burnout, your health, our diversity goals, “we’re all a family here,” “we see you struggling,” etc. — and then they run back to meet with similar-minded and similar-looking people and talk about rows and columns on spreadsheets and sales funnels. That’s basically their entire existence, and they justify most of their relevance from it. It’s a shame that Brett, Jr., back at the five-bedroom house, has fallen down an incel rabbit hole online… but daddy has EBITDA to discuss, baby!

cc: Robbie Abed

Not all executives are like this. Many are.

As a result, executives barely (if ever) know when managers are toxic — because what executives want from managers is simple:

1. Keep the trains running.
2. Keep the bullshit away from me.
3. Kiss my ass and my ring periodically.
4. When I tell you to jump, you say “How high and in what direction?”
5. When I am ready to advance you, and only then, can these terms change.

That’s how most work is structured. There are kings, there are middle cogs, and there are peons. You rise up sometimes through aptitude, but often through politics and playing the right games. A lot of dunces get the keys to the executive washroom because they played golf at the right club at the right time, or shoveled shit for 11 years for some guy who barely understands the vertical he’s in. It’s more common than we admit.

cc: Shelly O'Donovan

But, as we know as mere workers, bad bosses cause a lot of problems.

Here’s a new newsletter from Stowe Boyd , entitled "Reliant On Our Imaginations."

A breakdown, within said newsletter:

A poll conducted by Monster reveals that more than one-third of workers consider their boss to be “horrible” (38 percent) and 54 percent of respondents gave their boss a negative rating [1 or 2]. Only 17 percent of respondents gave their boss an “excellent” grade. To conduct the poll, Monster asked visitors to their site, “On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate your current or former boss?”

U.S. findings were:

38 percent of respondents answered “1 (horrible)”

16 percent of respondents answered “2”

16 percent of respondents answered “3”

13 percent of respondents answered “4”

17 percent of respondents answered “5 (excellent)”

LOL, 4 in 10 saying “horrible.” That’s good news.

I think the biggest problem a lot of people have with bosses is that bosses often don’t realize the impact they have on lives. They think of themselves as gatekeepers and stewards of productivity, motivating the peons and making the trains run. Without them, the company would surely falter! In reality you could automate most middle managers in a New York cocaine heartbeat and no one would even notice that a robot is doing their job (in fact, most employees might think, “Wow, Larry got better at managing”), but they can’t see that — because they must protect their own relevance.

cc: Tracie Murray

In the course of being a bad manager, though, they mess up families and dinnertime and husband-wife intimacy and the ability to enjoy a ballet recital and happy hours and so much more. Because they’re always there, nagging, wanting control, wanting desperate relevance and someone to jump for them because no one at home is doing that anymore and work is the only fiefdom that remains.

As a result, we often don't expect anything of relevance from those who lead us.

You would think that executives would eventually realize the cost hit of bad managers — constant turnover, people being unproductive, people taking sick days due to stress and all that, just generally poor processes because the processes are designed with control and not output in mind, etc. But at big companies, the cost of bad management is a rounding error. At small companies, it’s a bigger cost — but usually those companies go belly-up, and the real reason is shitty management, but everyone says “We had a bad product-market fit” or something, and moves on to their next endeavor.

cc: Udi Ledergor ????

There is a cost to all this stuff, of course.

Executives tend to not really care about those costs, though. What’s more important to them about managers is what I wrote above — they want someone who kisses their ring and keeps bullshit away from them. If that person is also a fire-breathing dragon to subordinates, it doesn’t matter to the executive — because of course Marty Middle Manager won’t spit fire up the chain. He only does that down the chain. Get it?

It all becomes a brutal cycle.

Managers impact lives. If you run an organization, or a division of one, let me say it again loud and proud: only advance people who know what they’re doing or have pre-existing organizational respect. Bad managers cripple silos and harm middle-age. We need to understand this to make life better for the worker bees.

cc: Vartika Gupta

Yes/no?