The Three Types of Bad Bosses
It’s a fact. Bad bosses drive employees crazy and hinder the growth of organizations.
Over 16 years, I surveyed intelligence and security officers and private and public sector employees worldwide to rate 8,000 bosses.
I asked those surveyed to describe their worst boss in one word.
After venting with words like “jerk” and “jackass,” 90% of the answers could be categorized as “autocrat,” closely followed by “micromanager.” The last 10% of these awful boss descriptors fell into the “best buddy” category.
The three types of bad bosses
The Autocrat
The Autocrat dominates their employees, insisting on complete obedience, like a ruler with unlimited power. The autocrat is so sure of themself that it makes their underlings less sure of them. Some of these folks are what psychologists call, near-psychopaths.
The Micromanager
The Micromanager spends so much time doing employees’ jobs for them, or telling them precisely every move to make, that there is no time to get any of their own work done, and there is no leeway for creativity. Employees feel no ownership.
The Best Buddy
The best buddy spends all their time befriending employees so that they have no time to lead. Employees wonder if the Best Buddy’s kind ineffectiveness is putting their department at risk. Best buddies rarely challenge employees to higher performance.
Bad bosses violate the brain’s sense of safety
While bad boss behaviors vary widely, they tend to fall on the extreme ends of the range of human behavior.
They can be incompetent nice guys or highly competent tyrants. They can be fearful of protecting employees or protective to a fault. Some take all the credit; a few, usually Best Buddy bosses, hit employees with a fire hose of false hopes and inauthentic praise.
All bad bosses, whether autocrats, micromanagers, or best buddies, share one thing in common: they inflict social pain and violate the brain’s sense of safety, putting employees under stress.
Your mind detects violations of certainty, status, or fairness, and begins to ring like a fire alarm with social pain.
You can just feel what it’s like to work for them—that gives you a glimpse of social pain.
Great leaders are none of these things
Great leaders don’t display autocratic tendencies, aren’t micromanagers and don’t attempt to be everyone’s best buddies.
They are collaborative, fair, open-minded and give their employees space to do their work without breathing down their necks.
The best bosses establish the social bonds we all crave and give precious gifts of time and attention to build trust. The common denominator in all great leaders I have known is that they focus on giving through:
Listening
Time
Attention
Concern
Encouragement
Treating subordinates as they do their peers
Want to know how you’re doing? Ask for concrete examples
Do you fall into any of the three categories above? The only way to know for sure is to ask your team for feedback.
Due in part to our general lack of self-awareness, none of us like receiving feedback because anything we hear is likely to violate our self-perception.
Receiving feedback from your team can feel awkward and sometimes be tough to hear, however it’s a necessary step in helping you to understand what you’re doing great and what could be improved.
My top tip is to ask for 'advice' and not for 'feedback'. And use the future tense. Can you give me some advice about what I should be doing more of going forward to help the team? What should I do less of?
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Until next time.
Mike