The Bad Boss of Bad Bosses

I was visiting with my mom on a day trip, much to her displeasure that it was only a day. She started telling me about one of her department meetings that was led by the Director. In that meeting the director and other managers told the crew that we don’t care about you. We don’t care if your grandmother died, if your boyfriend left you and took the kids or if your car broke down. We don’t care about you, the only thing we care about is that you come to work and do your job and service the customers with a smile.

To add a little more background to this story one of the employees grandmother had just passed away, the department suffers from seriously low morale and their service scores continue to drop. Many of the long tenured employees are trying to transfer out or are leaving and in some cases just stop showing up altogether. After this meeting the service scores dropped another 3 percent.

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The valuable lessons that can be learned from a bad boss is like the band-aid that heals the wound.
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This is a classic case of a bad boss who has no business leading people. How these types of tyrants are allowed to be in charge of anything other than a pet rock is way beyond my comprehension. I like to neutralize the effect of a bad boss and justify the pain with the valuable lessons that can be learned. Here are 8 things we can learn from this bad boss of bad bosses:

1. Care about your people for they are your greatest asset.
2. Fear only motivates people to do even less.
3. Don’t use a real example of a family member passing when giving a speech about not caring about your staff.
4. If you can’t care about your people you should not be in management.
5. If people are abandoning ship take a long hard look at the boss.
6. The way to fix a morale problem is not to put people down further but rather to lift them up. When your employees are having trouble in their personal life they can’t always leave it at the door, give them time to deal with and straighten out things at home so they can focus on work.
7. You can’t care about people coming to work, doing their job and servicing the customers with a smile if you don’t care about their total well-being.
8. Unhappy employees will always equal unhappy customers.

Learn these 8 lessons to avoid being a bad boss. Care about your employees as if they hold the key to your very life. If you choose to be a bad boss, it will eventually catch up with you and you will find you are a boss of no one.

Do you have any bad boss horror stories to share? Use the comments below or follow the conversation on Twitter @ #BadBosses.

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