Horrible bosses may be driven by ego and a desire for self-promotion.
But in my experience, 99% are striving to do their best under enormous pressure to produce results.
They genuinely care about staff and take their people management responsibilities seriously. Unfortunately, the pressure that they are under can generate situations where it is all too easy to consider other people as getting in the way. And then out comes the Beast.
Delegates attending our ‘Coaching Excellence’ programme are asked to reveal their worst management habits when they are under pressure as part of their opening personal introduction.
These habits are listed on a flip chart and remain with the group over the two days of the programme as part of a kind of ‘group conscience’. Although it is not a competition, attendees inevitably ‘fess up’ to the Beast that rises within them when people are ‘just not doing it right/doing it fast enough/caring enough’ etc.
In fact, it can become a sort of ‘you think that’s bad, you wait until you hear mine’ type of game.
Here are my current top 10 – not necessarily the worst habits I’ve encountered, but chosen for their almost poetic descriptions. In no particular order:
- “I expect my team to be mind-readers, then I get frustrated when it’s clear they’ve not grasped the situation.”
- “I let people off the hook, then I use sarcasm when things get in a pickle.”
- “I do my four step dance – I judge them, then I dictate to them, then I patronise them and then I resent them. I become the Pompous Superhero Dictator.”
- “I can be a poisonous monkey when no one can do a thing right. I make people duck.”
- “I become focused and selfish. I involve lots of people and ignore their workloads.”
- “I just jump in, give them the sharp elbows and take over.”
- “I scrabble around, ramble and get hyper. I go round corners on two wheels.”
- “My confidence goes. I go into ‘I can’t do it, it’s too big’. It builds to a head – then I have three days of running around like a headless chicken.”
- “I’m the deer in the headlights. Very task-focused, I take tasks back. I know everyone can see, but my logical mind goes – I exclude/head down.”
- “I become even more of a control freak – I then have to patch things up and it feels like I lose credibility.”
The reality is that these habits are almost physically unstoppable. People know that they’re doing it and that it’s not good but they can’t seem to stop themselves.
And, of course, if employees stay with their manager for a while, they excuse their poor behaviour because they know that it’s not personal and understand that it is born out of sheer frustration. They learn to ‘manage’ their bosses. They know the physical signs and learn how to survive them.
But the real risk of behaving in this way is that other people go into self-protection mode while the storm lasts. Instead of taking personal responsibility and stepping up to the plate, they defend themselves and wait for it to pass. In other words, managers’ poor behaviour actually makes matters worse.
But people know this. So why can’t they just STOP? Well, it would be like saying to a 60-a-day smoker: ‘You know it’s killing you, you know your clothes smell, you want to stop – SO JUST STOP!’ Oh well, when you put it like that…
In the late 1980s, Stephen Covey wrote a seminal book called ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’. But there are also ‘Seven Habits of Highly Pressured Managers’ and it is them that are the real enemy. They are:
- Asking closed questions (like machine gun fire)
- Filling silences (anything over a few nanoseconds)
- Answering our own questions (if we waited for others…)
- Letting people answer a different question (can’t be rude)
- Accepting ‘I don’t know’ as an answer (they wouldn’t lie)
- Asking several questions in one (it’s quicker)
- Using ‘we’ instead of ‘you’ (we want to be inclusive)
Physical habits are incredibly hard to break so bosses should try to help themselves in the following way:
- Recognise that poor behaviour is just a symptom of a greater universal habit – that of solving problems
- Recognise the seven habits listed above and catch themselves before they fall
- Commit to the hard work involved in changing default mode from being problem-solving to asking questions
- Practice asking questions until it becomes the physical default.
Simply trying to cut out one’s worst habit is not a good idea. In a strange way, there is a lot of the ‘authentic you’ in that moment. Frustration is natural – but it’s what people do when they feel the Beast rising that’s the important thing.
Here are three key ways that HR directors can help managers tame their inner Beasts:
1. Be tougher – In the face of poor behaviour from managers, you need to take a much stronger cultural lead. It is crucial to stop excusing beastly behaviour from leaders and stand up to them, making them aware that you will not tolerate this type of behaviour any longer.
2. Clarify managers’ responsibilities – The scariest, but most effective, strategy for dealing with difficult people is to threaten to expose them for who they really are. The role of an HR director is to hold their executive board colleagues to account about how they perform their duty as role models and whether they have created a pleasant working environment or not.
It is important to stop simply accepting the mantra of Beasts who attest that the ends (short-term results) justify the means and that there will be no long-term sunny uplands unless something is done today. As a result, it is vital that leaders understand and accept that they have a key responsibility to be less of a problem-solver and more of an environment-creator.
3. Don’t be afraid to take the lead – Ensure that employees remain engaged by introducing continuous improvement processes so that they can’t use their boss’s behaviour as an excuse to simply abdicate responsibility. This means that HR directors need to take the lead and show the way.
What do you think?
Gareth Chick is director at employee and leadership development consultancy, Spring Partnerships.
One Response
the Beast of Bad behaviour
I couldn’t agree more. We all get stressed and tend to behave a little less well when that happens, but some basic honesty with the troops ("things are a bit pressured at the moment; I’m sorry if that means I’m not at my best") often produces offers of help, support, advice and many other good things from team members. More importantly, it shows you’re human, and makes you so much easier to relate to – warts and all!