10 Hurtful Habits Of Bad Bosses

Management training should not be an oxymoron.

Business schools teach technical skills, but only experience helps us understand how to manage people. Some companies make it a habit to cut training budgets every time the CEO has a lousy quarter. It doesn’t get better at the board level. Ask directors about training and you’ll get a blank stare. It just doesn’t rise to the audit committee level. The subject rarely comes up in the upper echelon — except at training powerhouses like General Electric and Google.

Lack of management skill is compounded by how companies promote. Someone is good at sales so naturally they are told to run the department. Now, you’ve lost a good salesperson and promoted a potentially lousy manager. The offending manager at Uber was an example of someone who, if properly trained, could have saved the company and himself a lot of anguish.

Few of us are natural born leaders. Once we get the job, our supervisory instincts are left to discretion or worse, we channel the only formal management training we ever had, our parents. This is a recipe for making sure your company is a petri dish for bad habits. It’s why we have so many lousy bosses.

When it comes to gender, it can be particularly troublesome. Bad boss behavior seems to has a pronounced effect on women. Companies are expending vast resources to create a warm welcome for women at the front door, yet once they are on the team, crude behavior sends them to the exits.

Millennials need a new kind of boss.

The problem gets worse if you factor in changing values of young millennials. Companies spend hugely to build highly collaborative, inclusive, diverse and skilled workforces. Then they risk their most valuable asset by leaving them in the hands of poor supervisors.

This shouldn’t be so difficult. We know what motivates people to do great work. There are excellent tests and feedback mechanisms that give insight into the kind of changes needed in the corporate culture.

Companies should rethink how they find and train supervisors, first of all. Then follow up with consistent testing, and train again and again, until the managerial machine is working. When employees like management as much as they like the company, the problem is solved.

A few surprising highlights:

The most common employee pet peeve is being treated in a ‘disrespectful’ manner. Disappointingly, for our more inclusive age, “sexist comments” occur with alarming regularity. As many as four percent encounter workplace racist comments and 10 percent felt they were subjected to “inappropriate humor.”

The job ahead is going to be tough unless we tackle these issues at the source, lack of readiness to manage people.

Here are some other survey findings:

• 40% ignore bad boss behavior.
• 12% confronted the boss.
• 5% tried to get them fired.
• Men (17%) go over the bosses head more often than women (13%).
• 46% of women and 34% of men miss work due to bad boss behavior.
• 21% resigned and 20% took a leave of absence.
• 2% just left the company and didn’t bother resigning.
• 5% called a helpline.
• 15% of women asked for a transfer within the company as did 13% of men.

Companies need to rethink how they groom future leaders — and be careful not to promote people who may have been talented at the job they used to do, but really haven’t honed their people skills.

In the good news category, body odor was mentioned as a factor in 4% of the cases. So we know there is at least one bad habit with a quick solution and we can start working on the nine others.

Here are some Vox interviews of UK employees talking about their experiences.