What We're Reading Now
You Might Be a Bad Boss
4 September 2012
Allison read Are You Sure You’re Not a Bad Boss? by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkmann on the HBR Blog Network and was glad to see a well-researched and new way to think about bad boss behavior that may not be as obvious as screaming.
Tags: allison read, leadership, management and supervision
If you read just about any research on employee engagement and satisfaction in the workplace, you’ll find that one of the most important drivers of success is the relationship between the employee and his or her direct supervisor. And yet we often promote the most technically capable or high performing employees into management positions and provide them with limited or no supervisory training. While the bad news is that many supervisors have no idea how to manage their employees, the good news is that we’ve seen a lot of those supervisors learn the necessary skills and become the bosses their employees need. That’s one of the reasons we designed our course, The Art of Being a Great Boss and why we often blog about this topic.
Now you may be thinking, “Hey! I don’t think I’m such a bad boss and I certainly don’t yell like the bosses described in last month’s Wall Street Journal article, “When the Boss is a Screamer.” However, you may be doing some of the more passive aggressive things or sending screaming emails so make sure you read that article and assess how you’re managing your frustrations in the workplace.
And you should definitely read “Are You Sure You’re Not a Bad Boss?” by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folman because they share some great insights from their recent research analyzing the behavior of 30,000 managers based on 360-degree evaluations soliciting feedback from peers, direct reports and senior leadership. It turns out that being a good boss isn’t so much about what you do. Rather, it’s the things you don’t do that may be getting you into trouble. The authors identify the 10 fatal flaws that bad bosses share and explain that many of these flaws are difficult to identify and therefore the bad bosses may never get the feedback in an explicit or constructive way.
This hardly seems fair but nobody said being the boss would always be fair. The good news is that you can candidly self-assess your performance in these 10 areas and seek out feedback from your most trusted colleagues. If you learn you might be in bad boss trouble, check out my blog post on one of our favorite books, It’s Okay To Be the Boss, by Bruce Tulgan. We find Tulgan can get a lot of managers on the right track and if you’re still feeling challenged, just give me a call. While you might not be the best boss you can be right now, I’m certain that with some self-awareness, effort and skill development you can become the boss your organization and your employees need.
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