Web site offers help with those ‘bully’ bosses

A woman e-mailed me on her last day with a bad boss. Her manager had serially made life difficult for employees and the e-mailer had become the latest victim of this “bully.” She wrote, “When an employee is no longer in the manager’s ‘good graces,’ life in the office can be pretty miserable. What makes a person outside of her ‘good graces’ is uncertain, never talked about directly, and is subtle, not always obvious to others.” She addressed the problem with the department director, but the director tried to ignore it. My e-mailer is confident that the problem has now been identified and “named,” and eventually the director will have to address it head-on. But the person who wrote me felt forced to quit her job. She poignantly wrote, “What I have found is that when this situation occurs it feels so awful and shameful, and you feel as though you must be doing something terribly wrong in order to be targeted in this way.” I fumbled for a reply for a week or so, and finally wrote, “I will tell you that my positive nature says that the manager is eventually going to ‘get caught.’ Unfortunately, the manager will go through a lot of people before that happens. I would not leave that company without sending this e-mail or something similar to Human Resources and the top company executive. Consider it your contribution to that workplace.” Dealing with bad bosses is as tough a problem as we face in the workplace. I am painfully aware of the famous Gallup study of more than 80,000 interviews, first published in a book called “First, Break All The Rules” by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman (Simon & Schuster, 1999). It found that the most prevalent cause for people leaving their job is their immediate supervisor, and that poorly managed workgroups are on average 50 percent less productive and 44 percent less profitable than well-managed groups. The man who reminded me of that survey is the co-founder of an exciting new Web site called Badbossology.com. My recent conversation with Gary Lahey convinced me that he genuinely wants to protect individuals and companies from bad bosses, and he wants to keep the site “responsible and devoid of ranting.” Lahey and his partner Ian Donen write on their site, “Badbossology.com is not a showcase for inappropriate or unethical tactics to get revenge on bosses. It’s not a place to make specific comments about a particular boss or organization. It’s not a site for complaining and whining. It’s not for people who won’t accept their responsibility to analyze and understand their boss’s negative behavior and to develop a plan to deal with the situation and improve it while they are there.” The site is well-organized and helpful. Lahey and Donen spent considerable time collecting material and insights before they launched on March 23. I am especially impressed that they urge employees to first ask the question, “What is your own role in the problem?” Lahey reiterates a point I’ve tried to make when he says, “A bad fit between strengths and aptitudes and the job may well be the cause of the problem, and not the boss.” Lahey and Donen want to make money, but they are committed to keeping their sites (they also run Workworries.com) free. They are looking for sponsorships and are hopeful that big companies who want their middle managers to get better will consider sponsorships. Lahey says, “We think this site might cause bad bosses to look over their shoulders.” The entrepreneurs talk a lot about safety and comfort in the workplace. If all of your energies are focused on protecting yourself, how creative can you be? And yet, the site has an admirable pragmatic quality to it. As Lahey says, “To be safe at work you have to understand politics. Be ethical, but it can be a rough game.”