Rude or Mean Bosses: a Lose-Lose Situation

June 21, 2015

Continuing on from my posts about work-life balance, I just read another interesting article in the New York Times, this one about the impact of rude or mean bosses. According to the article, these are bosses who, as part of their daily interaction with staff, routinely do one or more of the following:

• Interrupt people;
• are highly judgmental;
• neglect to say please or thank you;
• take too much credit for other people’s work;
• put other people down;
• walk away from a conversation because they lose interest;
• answer calls in the middle of meetings without leaving the room;
• or even openly mock people by pointing out their flaws or personality quirks in front of others;
• and more (see the article).

The article states that such incivility in the workplace is a problem that has gotten much worse in recent decades.  

Impacts

As you might expect, the researchers found that the impact on moral was terrible. And there was a surprisingly high negative impact on employee health. But they also found that company productivity and effectiveness went down. Sales in retail outlets were negatively impacted as well. In other words, it is a loss all around. The article goes on to show how organizations experience a net win if they encourage civility in management styles.

Why Do they Do It?

Given the obvious (and not so obvious) negative impacts, why would a boss continue to be rude or mean to their staff? The writers interviewed many such managers, and their responses were as follows:

• 25 percent said that they felt they would be less leader-like if they softened their management styles.
• 40 percent are afraid that they’ll be taken advantage of if they are nice at work.
• 50 percent said it is better to flex one’s muscles to garner power. They are jockeying for position in a competitive workplace and don’t want to put themselves at a disadvantage.
• 50 percent of them claim it is because they are overloaded, and more than 40 percent say they have no time to be nice.

No Time for Civility?

Let me focus on the last point: no time. I’ve written many articles in this blog about how the average knowledge worker needs to work smarter, not harder (most of my teachings on getting more efficient are to help you do that). With work weeks often reaching 60, 70, even 80 hours, the need to regain balance seems obvious. Yet we continue to subscribe to the theory that more hours are better. Much of this is due to peer or leadership pressure. And as the other bullet points above show, much of it is due to fear of not succeeding or competing well.

Whatever the reason, ridiculously long works hours have to stop, if not just to make you a better and more effective manager, as this article shows.

At the end of my productivity seminars I often announce “Now that you know how to be much more efficient, use the extra time you have either to spend time with your family, or to focus on improving yourself, or to work on your neglected goals. Don’t just use that efficiency to do more of the same rat-race work.”

I’ll continue to post articles about work-life balance in the months ahead.

Michael