Top 10 things to be the most hated boss

© Mandeep Singh, http://in.linkedin.com/in/mandeeps123


Top 10 things to be done to be the most hated

boss

The fast movers in today’s environment get

into team management roles at very early

years of their professional life, while it is a

good thing to be a successful person. It is an

important thing to remember with the team in

hand, especially now as your success is totally

dependent on how you manage the team.

With ambitions that exist in teams today, here

are a few top reasons which will ensure that

you do not become a successful team

manager

1. You leave office before your subordinate

does

While this is a very widely accepted practice,

especially as one grows in the hierarchy, it is

no longer true that a subordinate needs to go

through the grind. Employees in the new-age

environment feel they have as much right to

enjoy and live life happily as anyone in the top

management, probably more as they have

more freedom and lesser liabilities both on the

personal and professional front.

It is assumed that as a supervisor you would

take care of the pressures and the work-life

balance of your team. If there is work, you

would either be there participating in the work

thus reaffirming that the work actually is

serious enough to demand sacrificing personal

time or just let the work not affect them. The

visual appearance that you have been working

is required by the employees to get the feeling

of one status on demand for work. If you must

leave and the team has to work late, ensure

that you keep sending emails or are online

with the team till they are.

2. You raise your voice

This is a reminder to the employee of the most

talked about and hated work environments

from the history of corporate world, with the

change in work environment, all employees

expect dignity and have a high self-worth. The

plush offices, air conditioning and various

other benefits, come with an increased self-

worth of employees. Raising one’s voice acts

as a direct conflict to that, impacting not only

for the targeted person but others in the

vicinity who start to have doubts on the

organizations culture and value system. If you

must shout to avoid a deep pain in the

stomach, ensure you do so in a closed room

with a single person at a time, this keeps

others speculating and just adds to the many

grapevines which the company already has.

3. You make employees skip people related

programmes to finish work related tasks

With increase in focus on people as an asset,

the number of people programmes being run

in every organization is increasing. When a

conflict arises between prioritizing for time to

be spent on work or that programme, you

make a statement to your team.

If the message communicates you value work

tasks more than anything else and are willing

to sacrifice things which benefits the team in

order to achieve your goals, you are perceived

to have a selfish approach to ensure your

personal deliveries are met without caring for

how others in the team feel.

If you must want the team to skip the

programme, then you either do a

compensatory programme for them or just be

in the programme, you have to send the

message that I value every individual in the

team and am willing to let them make the

decision on living life in the workplace the way

they want to and not necessarily by sacrificing.

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4. You have a favourite, the team is not a

favourite

All said and done favouritism is actually a real

thing and a good thing, it increase the morale,

keeps the person motivated and actually helps

you in retention. However, it is a risky affair to

enter into such a relationship, those who are

not in the favourite list, feel left out, feel de-

motivated and are always troubled about you

as a person. Simply put, you need to either

make the entire team as a favourite, by doing

multiple things for all of them or not have any

of them. Successful leaders have an entire

team as favourite. If you must have a favourite,

don’t have one in the workplace.

5. Your team is not amongst the most talked

about teams in the company

As a leader of the team, people are looking at

the value you add to them and the pride you

are able to instil in the team as a highly

successful and a well-knit team. You need to

have some unique proposition that is

presented to the entire organization by your

team. What is the team talking about to others

and what do others talk to them about. They

get the feel to be awed by others and be able

to stack upto the pride of being associated with

a boss like you, else, you’re just one of the

many people they will crib about. Broadly

speaking the same principles we use to sell

products. Build a reason for people to be in

your team.

6. You make critical decisions in your team,

whether they relate to work or non-work

People need freedom and they despise it

when they get into a controlled situation. You

as a leader have to build a processes to let

others make choices, if you do find your team

members looking upto you for decision making

even in non-work related matters, you should

get a hint. You have controlled the team by

fear and are not giving them enough space to

experience decision making.

Decision making is associated with the feeling

of growing up, that’s the biggest thing people

want out of life, giving it to them is the biggest

way of keeping yourself in the vicinity of being

called a good leader.

7. You are not willing to fire a person in your

team

Whatever be the theories about carrot and

stick culture, what is definitely sure is that if

you are not able to send clear messages to the

team members that you do mean business

and will not hesitate from using the stick, you

would end up being looked as a leader with

whom one can take liberties. This leads to

direct negative impact on the work deliveries

and more importantly on others who are

following the rule. They no longer find you a

true leader and worthy to be guided by. One of

the deliveries a team member looks from a

leader is to ensure law and order in the team,

something like the work that a chieftain has to

do in the tribe, if you fail there, you fail to be a

good leader. Remember it is your tribe, so

maintain it.

8. You don’t have parity at intellectual level,

as a supervisor you know less

The most important thing recognized in today’s

work environment is knowledge, if you cannot

control your people by knowledge, you can’t

control them by anything. It is important to

have knowledge and be updated with the most

critical things in your work area. There should

be very few instances where team members

working with you find they are not getting any

knowledge value add from you.




9. You don’t have friends in office

The position of a team member in the office is

largely dependent on your demonstrated

power in the workplace, who are your friends

and who is in your network. This is purely an “I

am a successful person” in the office

statement. If you’re not, you’re probably

teaching the team to be unsuccessful too,

which is going to be resisted by the ever

ambitious employees of today’s age.

10. You are not aware of organizations

processes and procedures and often end

up breaking them or using someone else’s

help to understand them

The organization is set up with a framework

which is sold to the employee as a hiring tool.

If you don’t know what’s happening in the

company and what you need to do, chances

are you will end up being on the “I care for

myself” kind of approach, while it is good to be

a person who creates his own rules, as a

leader it goes down really on the wrong side.

Your team starts believing that you have

chosen to be an independent chieftain with

your own little tribe caring nothing about the

organization, where you call the shots and

nothing else matters. So far as things are on

their side, it is good, when it turns, you’re the

worst boss around, this is contrary to the

professionalism which is so much appreciated

by people and is one of the key factors for

people to join companies.


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Top 10 things to be the most hated boss