Early in my career, I had a supervisor who was obsessed with face time in the office. Regardless if I had worked a full 8, 10 or 12+ hour day and had completed all of my assigned work, he wanted me to stay in the office if he and the rest of the team was still working. Now, it would be different if I was hanging back to help other team members so we all could get home earlier, but that was rarely the case. He didn’t have additional work for me to do, he just wanted me on stand-by in case something came up. Needless to say, it got old really quick. After many months of working like this, I got up the courage to confront him and the lead manager about this arrangement. I told them that it didn’t make sense that I was required to stay in the office after a full day’s work if there wasn’t anything left for me to work on. Me staying late and sitting idle to accommodate his personal preference was unfair and unnecessary. The lead manager, unaware of the arrangement and sympathetic to my grievance, agreed, but my supervisor got defensive. After stammering through the typical team rhetoric of “there’s no ‘i’ in ‘team’” and “we should all be in this together”, he eventually confessed that the real reason he kept me in the office was so that other team members wouldn’t think he was giving me preferential treatment. In other words — optics. My work was fine and he liked that I was a fast learner, he just feared that the optics of me heading home before everyone else would reflect poorly on him as a supervisor. I worked on that team for over a year before switching to a new one, but I never forgot how backwards his logic was. With him in the rear view, I figured the worse was behind me and I would be able to work with more reasonable and astute managers as I climbed the corporate ladder.
I was wrong.
The business world is littered with terrible bosses. So much so that it’s virtually impossible not to encounter, at least, one at some point in your career. I’ve dealt with enough poor managers that I measure all of them by degrees of terribleness rather than excellence. It’s funny how organizations have all these company-dubbed “leaders” and yet so few of them can actually lead. Some experts say we generally suck at selecting good leaders because we focus on the wrong criteria. Others contend that the same skillset that makes an employee successful doesn’t necessarily make them great people managers. In general though, when we talk about the proliferation of bad managers, it’s a ‘lack thereof’ discussion. In other words managers are failing because they’re lacking in something like training, time, soft skills, leadership support, accountability, etc. While I don’t disagree with these assertions I do think there’s one thing that bad managers have an abundance of — fear.
I think fear is at the crux of every bad boss. And, the deeper the fear, the worse the boss. The reason so many bosses are terrible is because they manage their fear(s) foremost instead of the person or issue at hand. The supervisor I mentioned earlier feared a tarnished reputation. A micromanager, for example, fears loss of control. Rather than delegating, they gain comfort in knowing that their hand is in every single work task and deliverable. To them, they’re covering their bases, but to their direct reports they’re dealing with a helicopter parent. A boss who’s a staunch traditionalist fears change. They’d rather hold tight to the familiar than contemplate anything new, different or updated. In their eyes they’re maintaining stability, but from their team’s perspective they’re being stifled. And so, I suspect, this hang-up is true for every subpar manager. Whether it’s the fear of making a mistake, looking stupid, being unfairly blamed, being taken advantage of, not living up to expectations, or whatever, it’s ultimately their fear that’s piloting the team rather than sound management skills.
Granted, I don’t think being a great boss hinges solely on fearlessness, I just think that managing from a place of fear should be discussed in leadership trainings. Broaching the subject of fear is a path toward improving self-awareness as a manager/leader. So much of what distinguishes great leaders are intangibles like integrity, emotional intelligence, empathy, focus and accountability, yet those are the areas where many managers struggle. And what better place to tackle similar, unconventional subjects than a captive group of managers in a training workshop. Companies should save their time, money and breath on worn out topics like time management and personality tests and zero in on more substantive issues. It’s not about problem solving per se, but about shining a light on something that managers rarely consider. Will it solve everything? No. But is it a start? Yes. After all, what do companies really have to lose?