Managing the Boss from Hell
July 27, 2007
By Mary Medland
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They curse, they yell, they threaten and pound their fists on the desk. When they’re really revved up, they’re apt to throw things. Anyone who has spent time in the workplace has probably had a brush with that soul-chewing monster, The Boss from Hell.
In the case of Sarah Richards, things could have turned really ugly. “I was threatened by my frumpy psycho-boss while she was holding a chopping knife,” says Richards, reminiscing about her superior at an old restaurant job. “She thought I was hitting on her husband.” Needless to say, Richards quit. (And she had zero interest in the husband.)
Laura Laing reached her breaking point when her boss demanded that she work around the clock. Laing, then the development and volunteer director of a nonprofit, showed up at the office one morning at 11 instead of 8, the usual hour. She had a good reason: She’d been working all night. “I had been up until 3 a.m. attending a midnight drag-show fund-raiser, collecting and counting the money and so forth,” she says.
But no excuses were brooked. “My boss complained that I was late.”
Sayonara, Laing said.
Just what options do you have when dealing with difficult higher-ups? Should you try to change your boss’ crazy behavior or just resign yourself to taking a hike?
The answer depends on which experts you ask.
“I’ve seen statistics that show that between 60 percent to 70 percent of employees simply walk out or seek employment elsewhere in the organization,” says Alex Stein, PhD, a professor of management at Goucher College. Depressingly, he also notes that mean bosses are often highly successful within their organizations. “Abusive bosses view everyone around them as a tool for their own betterment,” he says. “Sometimes the managers who are the most feared are also the most respected.”
It doesn’t help that other, milder-mannered managers are generally loath to criticize their peers for fear of limiting their own professional growth. The result, Stein says, is “tacit acceptance” of abominable behavior.
Stein distinguishes between a boss’ legitimate criticism of an employee and a boss’ abuse of an employee. Most workers do not resent criticism if it is given in a way that does not make them feel like inferiors, he says.
Natalie Kauffman, director of the Center for Career and Service Learning at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, believes that workers have more self-defense tools at their disposal than they often realize. “You are not going to change someone who is unpleasant, but you can respond in a way that gives you more control of the situation,” she says.
For instance, if you are confronted with The Cursing Boss, Kauffman recommends that you very calmly say, “I am uncomfortable with that language.”
“Usually the response is utter shock,” Kauffman says. “Such bosses are not used to that sort of response, which ordinarily stops them cold.”
When it comes to The Shouting Boss, she recommends saying — again, calmly — “Please lower your voice; my hearing is fine. Now let’s look at what you are angry about and see what I can do to help.”
Jessica DeGroot, who leads the Philadelphia-based ThirdPath Institute — an organization that helps professionals lead meaningful, balanced lives — says tension in the workplace can arise when “Dinosaur Managers” clash with “21st-Century Managers.” “A good working relationship encourages employees and managers to think about how to get the job done most efficiently,” DeGroot says. “Managers should be asking how they can support the employee in the workplace to get the best result. More progressive managers will ask the employee: ‘What is the best way for you to work? What is it that you don’t have but that you need to do your job well?’
“The 21st Century Manager understands that there are many ways of getting the work completed,” she concludes.
The Dinosaur Manager is more inclined to gnash his terrible teeth, swish his terrible tail and stomp all over the underlings if they’re not doing things the way he (or she) wants.
But dinosaurs went the way of, well, the Edsel — and dinosaur managers might be headed in the same direction. A new book provides hope that surly behavior might be on its way out of the office.
In The No-Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, Robert I. Sutton, PhD, writes that even one unpleasant person can have a dramatically unhealthy effect on an office. “Bear in mind that negative interactions have five times the effect on mood as positive interactions — it takes a lot of good people to make up for the damage done by just a few demeaning jerks,” he writes in an excerpt that appeared in the Feb. 20 issue of The American Lawyer.
Allowing abusive bosses to carry on unchecked can lead to “a reign of psychological terror [that] can spread throughout your organization that is damn hard to stop,” he writes.
It’s up to you. If you think you can talk to your difficult boss, try. If you can’t talk to your boss, or if talking doesn’t help, it may be time to go. Your boss may be crazy, but you don’t have to be.
