“subordinates miserable”
hahaha...Letting their ‘bosses’ make them miserable? No wonder they are ‘subordinates’....
The people doing the promoting are those people who have already been promoted for being ‘bad bosses’.....
Duh....
Sounds quite a bit like “The Peter Principle” may be at work here. Perhaps something worse. Either way it is not good for American business, as are so many other things these days.
couldn’t be more true in US govt offices
I see evidence of the truth of this regularly at my work.
My experience has been that people who get results (or are perceived to get results) get promoted. Being domineering and/or manipulative plays helps to some degree. While that approach may not yield the best results, it may be enough to make the person in charge appear effective.
What I am sure of is that bosses who try to be everyone’s friend are a recipe for disaster. Bosses have to make hard decisions at times—not everyone will be happy with the outcome.
No data on the success rate of these companies...
My manager dared to correct her boss in a meeting. He had mentioned the date of an event and she merely corrected the date for him. During a break in the meeting he took her aside and sternly warned her never to correct him in public again.
There is some truth to this. But we must also acknowledge that the boss that cannot discipline subordinates and cannot fire dead weight will not have a high performing unit.
He went on to create an example: A beautician who's not as talented as the others has time on her hands, gets involved with the beauticians' union, and eventually winds up running whole industry.
This is a Ustinov's Corollary to the Peter Principle.
Promotion is easy, just golf with your boss and badmouth everyone he hates. Works like a charm. Oh yeah, almost forgot, always let him win.
I forgot to mention always remove your brown lipstick after a day on the links with the big boss.
I wonder if bad bosses, as measured here, are those that implement their bosses’ policies and demands to the letter, and absolutely inflexibly. If you do exactly what your boss tells you, and the company doesn’t run very well, and you don’t develop any talent, you probably won’t be blamed; your obedience is short-term gratification to your boss, and he’d have to share in any blame. And in sharing that blame, if he is amenable to change, he’ll at least feel empowered to make any change he deems necessary,
OTOH, if you are flexible and you succeed, your success might threaten your boss or stand out among his other subordinates.
The solution is for someone in top management to be VERY on the ball, and look at production workers as prospects, and look beyond how well policies and procedures are implemented to see how well talent is developing. Unfortunately, a growing movement to understanding motivating workers is being counter-balanced by a sense that all employees are here today and gone tomorrow; while workers need to be treated like prospects, they are treated, instead, like free agents. And the more they are treated like free agents, the more they behave like free ahents.
The current socioeconomic system selects for the biggest bastard, not the most capable producer. The bigger a bastard you are, the better you are likely to do in the Game.
I wish someone would have taught me that in high school, instead of all that useless “education”...