Bad bosses suck, as I often document here. Of course, you knew that anyway — many of you know it all too well from first hand experience. But perhaps they do more good than I have given them credit for in the past. Carol Bartz, the feisty, tough, unusually plain-speaking CEO of Yahoo! (see this earlier post or this story), makes an intriguing point about bad bosses in today's New York Times that is weirdly related to my recent post On Noticing That You Don't Notice. Here is the link to the interview, and the argument I found especially intriguing:
I also think people should understand that they will learn more from
a bad manager than a good manager. They tend to get into a cycle where
they’re so frustrated that they aren’t
paying attention actually to what’s happening to them. When you have a
good manager things go so well that you don’t even know why it’s going
well because it just feels fine.
When you have a bad manager
you have to look at what’s irritating you and say: “Would I do that?
Would I make those choices? Would I talk to me that way? How would I do
this?”
There are several elements of this comment that made me stop and think. The first follows from my post on not noticing, as the implication is that when things are going great, you don't engage in very deep cognition about them, because little is happening to give you pause or upset you. In fact, this point is consistent with research on cognition and emotion suggesting that people in good moods do not engage in as much mindfulness,deep thought, or self-doubt as people in bad moods.
The second thing that intrigues me is as I thought about some of the more interesting bosses I've been reading about and communicating with, I've ran into quite a few who make a related argument. Perhaps most famous is the late Robert Townsend, author of the still amazing Up the Organization, who argued repeatedly that he learned how to be a good boss at American Express because his bosses were so bad and the company was so badly ran that he learned what not to do — very close to Bartz's point. Even closer is an amazing comment I posted here a couple years ago from a surgeon, who during his residency at a prestigious hospital, got together with fellow residents every week to vote on the senior or "attending" surgeon who most deserved the "asshole of the week" award — and wrote in a journal that had been passed down from generation to generation of residents. The great thing about this story is that he his fellow residents all vowed not to be assholes when they became more senior, and all — who now hold prestigious appointments through the country — have all worked to try to keep that vow.
Now, as much as I love Bartz's thought process, I do disagree with her that when people have a lousy boss and want to escape, she tells them " You have to deal with what you’re dealt. Otherwise you’re going to run from something and not to something. And you should never run from something."
That bugged me for two reasons. The first is that, if these complaints are about a lousy boss who reports to Carol, it is her job to do something about it, not to just tell the victims to suck it up and just deal with it. Indeed, there is so much research showing the damage that lousy bosses do to productivity, commitment, and well-being that Carol or any other boss who learns of a horrible boss below them in the pecking order owes it to their company to deal with it. The "victims" may be learning more, but those lessons come at a high price that hurts both organization's and people.
The second thing that bugs me is from the victim's perspective, which is that there is so much evidence that bad bosses do damage (recall this Swedish study on heart attacks), that if you care about your physical and mental health — and those of the people you come in contact with, your friends, lovers, children, and so on — that you should escape as soon as you possibly can.
Clearly, I don't agree with Bartz about everything, but I admire her enormously because she is so thoughtful and so straightforward, a refreshing voice in a world where too many people are afraid to express strong opinions.
This all raises a great question: What is the most important thing you ever learned NOT TO DO from working for a bad boss?
P.S. One another thing I agree with Bartz about — in fact a headline of the article — is that perhaps we ought to get rid of annual performance reviews, as there is good reason to believe that they do more harm than good, as I blogged about here and this Wall Street Journal article by Sam Culbert argues.
UPDATE: I always appreciate the quality and range of comments that readers make, but in this case, they are even better than usual. I suggest that you read them carefully. This post has been up less then a day, so I expect even more good stuff and to change my opinion again over the coming days. But my initial reaction to the comments is that I (and certainly Bartz) should have emphasized the dangers of bad bosses even more, the damage they do to people and as at least one comment implies, the danger that — just as abusive parents tend to produce abusive children – the odds are high that bad bosses will teach their followers to be bad bosses like them. Also, by just talking to people who have survived and learned from bad bosses, and become bosses themselves, we blind ourselves to all the able people who have left companies and occupations because they had the sense to leave, were so damaged that they had to leave, or worse yet, became lousy bosses someplace else applying what they learned — and after doing a lot of damage — got fired and demoted. Yes, there are examples of the opposite effect, of people who have become great bosses by doing the opposite of past lousy bosses, but the psychological forces of imitation, learning, and identification with authority figures all push people in the opposite direction. Perhaps the best way to learn for bad bosses is to watch and study other people's bad bosses — that way you get the learning without the damage and risk of imitating their incompetent and nasty ways.
Leave a Reply