The Problem
“Have you ever worked for a bad boss?” I said with a straight face. I ask this question all the time to everyone I know. The response is always the same. With mock astonishment, they say, “You’re joking, right?” Without waiting for an answer, most explain, “Of course I have.”
In my own experience, after graduate school, I worked at one of the world’s most prestigious management consultancies, one with appalling leadership. For example, my first assignment was a huge client success. My Vice-President (VP) witnessed the entire meeting where the client praised the project outcome I prepared and my recommendations. On the way back to our office, the VP drove me and my manager through the red light district. As we approached a stoplight, he pulled over and offered to buy me a prostitute for an hour. Horrified, I prevented my passenger-side electric window from lowering. My manager laughed and my VP smiled as I turned to face them both. “You two ought to be ashamed of yourselves,” I said sharply. We sat in extremely uncomfortable silence the remainder of the trip.
To avoid future encounters of this type, I sought work with a different VP. In a subsequent assignment, with this new VP, our team evaluated the U.S. Department of Education’s student loan portfolio. Our task was to determine whether to outsource loan collection responsibilities to the private sector. With our manager’s approval, a colleague and I took over when our teammates gave up trying to find missing data required to complete the analysis in the various loan programs.
We were successful in all but one program. My colleague and I presented the results to our manager, who told us to either find the missing data or make it up. We tried in vain, delivering the final report to our manager, noting we would not make up anything to complete the project. Subsequently, our manager gave us copies of the report submitted to the Department. I looked and found that he made up the missing numbers and included them in the report. I confronted him. He just waived me off as if I didn’t understand. I did understand and I didn’t like it.
Weeks later, this new VP called me into his office. As I sat down, he handed me a letter from the Cabinet Secretary of the Department of Education. It was a letter of commendation for a job well done. The project resulted in hiring private sector loan processors, who replaced terminated Department personnel. I resigned my positions shortly thereafter.
In my next job with one of the world’s most renown consulting and accounting firms, my boss, the Partner-In-Charge (PIC), flew to Southern California to meet the client and review our work on the countywide justice systems integration project. The county praised our team’s performance. The PIC then took our team to a fancy dinner and then to a naked female wrestling show. I opted out of the show.
Many of those opposing such “leadership” suffer indignities, and they quit. The vast majority stay and absolve themselves of responsibility as a means of coping but at great personal cost. I can attest to the personal physical and mental health cost of not leaving a toxic employer fast enough.
The few who endure and attempt to fix poor leadership have immense courage. These brave individuals don’t typically have “leadership legitimacy,” making it tough for them to gain respect from others in the organization. They rarely create enough internal pressure to change the bad leadership and eventually the employer fires them.
It’s easy to become numb to the pervasiveness of these unconscionable leaders, yet none of us can afford to stay on the sidelines. If we don’t get involved, we become complicit, endorsing the toxic leader and what put him in that position. I say him because the glaringly obvious common denominator is white men. They are in charge of most organizations in our society in both quantity and power, and the majority lead poorly.
It’s a fact that we live under the rule of white men. White men, who never considered women or people of color as anything other than property, wrote our constitution. Our system operates accordingly and always has. We’re taught that the rule of law prevails, so it comes as no surprise our organizations suffer from unprincipled, white male dominance.
Meanwhile, there is an overabundance of theories, training programs, books, research studies, blog posts, and consulting firms focusing on how to lead competently. These resources propose to know how to lead and how to improve leadership.
So, with all these resources, why is it that inferior leadership prevails? The answer is that leaders hold self-sustaining power. Bad leadership dominates with authority, sustaining their poor management style. In the public eye, most organizations with poor leadership hold stellar reputations. Their names are household brands. They promote aesthetically pleasing, online web pages about their forward thinking employment policies, boast about their high integrity, broadcast select client testimonials, post social media messages on how their work produces a slew of societal benefits, and publicize their award-winning work culture. Preeminent publications rank these firms as the best places to find work/life balance. Clients hire them without question. Ivy League graduates flock to these firms and “golden handcuffs” increase their retention, particularly in tight labor markets. But at what cost?
The Solution
A large global survey declared, “…it cannot be overstated just how influential a bad boss can be in causing people to leave.” This study found 35% of employees indicated managers didn’t care about them as one of the top three reasons for leaving their job. In fact, the study found 40% of all workers plan to leave their employer.
As organizations scramble currently to find talent and few workers are willing to supply it, this is a perfect time to tell your unsatisfactory manager that they are not the main character. Employees must leave organizations with poor leaders and switch to those with competent ones. Depriving these compromised organizations of required human resources will send a message to the market that it’s time for beneficial change.
So, what are the characteristics of competent leaders? There are a select few critical attributes found in capable leaders, including those psychologically stable individuals that:
- Invest in an enterprise vision based on input from the top, middle and front line, aligning both the organization’s purpose and the abilities and behaviors of individual employees
- Communicate from a position of perspective-taking of others before acting on what they say or do to foster understanding of diverse ideas and to maintain a safe environment based on trust
- Establish organization initiatives, driven by the enterprise purpose, with leaders authorizing from the top, who empower a chain of reinforcing leaders deepening commitment all the way to the front line
- Create a diverse organization determined to enable collaboration through delegation to self-organizing and managing teams
- Foster prompt and continual expression, modeling, and reinforcement of desired abilities and behaviors amongst others
It’s time to tell these unsatisfactory leaders that they are not the main character. Given today’s workforce shortage, employees must leave organizations with inferior leaders and switch to those with competent ones. Depriving these compromised organizations of required human resources will send a message to the market that it’s time for beneficial change.
Source
Harrison, Don. Introducing the Accelerating Implementation Methodology (AIM) A Practical Guide to Change Project Management. Lakewood, CO: Implementation Management Associates, 2017.
