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I’ve encountered all manner of bosses in 18 years or so working, from completely passive to completely on top of you about everything, from empathetic and caring to absolute assholes at every turn. The sheer fact of the matter, that we often ignore, is that a lot of people are never cut out to be bosses — it’s not an intuitive process for many — yet because of how we structure work, someone needs to be a boss. Because of how biases work, usually that someone is someone who resembles a previous boss, or someone close to the existing power core. Almost always, an existing power core got to those perches through an utter focus on compliance, process, deliverables, and cost. Notice the words I didn’t use: learning, empathy, caring, compassion, flexibility, etc. Over the years I’ve been blogging about work, a few people now and again have asked me: “Why don’t bad management styles and bad managers evolve out?” The short answer is what we just discussed above; bad managers beget bad managers. It’s like a virus spreading.
One of the big tenets of a bad manager is that they think they’re good (very common), and one of the big reasons they tell themselves they’re good is that they think they control their team, i.e. “I love ’em, but I can be tough on ’em when necessary!” In reality a lot of managers just ignore all their direct reports, but we’ll ignore that reality for a second.
