And kill morale!
We spend at least 9–10 hours a day in our workplace. In addition to that, we spend 2 hours traveling between work and home. Give or take, an average person spends 60 hours per week on work-related matters. That means we spend 35% of our time on our job, 32% on personal and family things, and the rest on sleep on our adult life. It goes without saying how important it is to understand the value of one-third of our adult life we are spending on.
People leave bosses, not the job
It can’t be more true. I found man types of bosses- some were inspirational, some were pencil pusher, some were empathetic. I am including all my mentors, previous bosses, and the experience I heard from my friends to make a combined case what cringes me in a boss.
Self-promoting narcissists
This is the most common type of cringe-worthy bosses. These bosses always take credit on anything and everything and almost never promote their employees. These kinds of bosses always see their employees as their “work-bitch” to “get things done” and never appreciates the effort, talent and sophistication go behind the “getting things done.” These people are sometimes on the top of the talent list and sometimes are very mediocre. The attitude is agnostic of their talent, but not agnostic of their motivation. They are solely motivated by their gain in their organization and don’t have a long term view on building a team that can support their vision.
Unempathetic assholes
Empathy is one of the most important qualities people expect in their leaders. But corporations are full of unempathetic assholes. You don’t want your boss to be your friend, but surely you want someone who would understand your situation and react to that humanely. For example, if you need a half-day off in a 2-hour notice to drop-off your kid to school because of an emergency, an empathetic boss would understand that. Or, if you have been working for 12 hours a day, an empathetic boss will appreciate it and ask you if you need something from him/her. Empathy is actually some small gestures, it really doesn’t need your boss to praise you all the time. It needs a time-to-time small boost of your morale and a genuine appreciation of your hard work. An unempathetic asshole boss will most of the cases take you “for granted” or “quid pro quo” and take the human part completely out of the equation.
Scared chickens
Some bosses are not cut out for smart employees. They just want to grow with the status quo and have the sub-par people to work for them. If somehow they hire a smarter person in the team, they get super scared and try to humiliate the person as much as possible. They don’t give the smart person any chance to do something meaningful and exciting. They will pave the way for that person to fail and fire them at the first chance they get.
Political beasts
Those bosses don’t work at all. They delegate 99.99% of their work to their employees and do only one thing- politics. Corporate politics is a part of getting escalated in the ladder. These bosses spend all-day to please their bosses and do nothing else. They don’t get anything done and somehow they always get promotions because they have a great relationship with their bosses. Their subordinates are left out in the desert.
Manages up, shits down
These bosses always suck up to their upper management. They are classic suckers and don’t give a damn about their direct reports or the bottom. They would do anything that their up would ask and just burden everything on the down. Most of the cases they lack on respecting people at the bottom. Again, they treat them like “work-bitch” and take everything from them as “for granted.”
Narsiccist+ Asshole
These bosses are not only self-promoting, but they also want you to die in the small corner of their shithole. They will not promote you and they will put blocks in your way out. They are the worst kind. You will always feel undervalued with these bosses and you will be hopeless sometimes because it’s not easy to escape from their hell.
Uninspirational boring pencil pushers
They are not the worst kind, but they are too boring to work with. Among a few traits- they use three colored pens to make notes, push you unnecessarily on typos, or they would engage in 1000 words e-mail for a small yes/no decision and involve ten functional team leads in the e-mail thread. Generally, these bosses are mediocre or low level in talent and scared of losing their job. Most of the time they have minimum influence with the upper management decision-makers. These kinds of bosses almost never take a risk and this makes his team less important in the long-term. Working under this kind of boss is like sitting in a boat in the middle of a river without any tool or air to move the boat. The boat will float for a while, but you will be killed eventually because you have no food or water or any storm can kill you earlier than that.