What’s your boss like? Do you think you’re the only one to have to endure their particular ’style’ of management? Gareth Chick, director at Spring Partnerships, seems to have encountered his fair share of ’horrible bosses’. He says: “The pressure they are under often leads managers into situations where it’s all too easy for them to judge their people, and then out comes the Beast.” Here are his Top 10 Bad Habits – in no particular order:
1 “I expect my team to be mind readers, then I get frustrated when they’ve not grasped the situation”
2 “I let people off the hook then I use sarcasm”
3 “I do my four-step dance: I judge them, then I dictate to them, then I patronise them and then I resent them”
4 “I can be a poisonous monkey when no one can do a thing right”
5 “I involve lots of people and ignore their workloads”
6 “I just jump in, give them the sharp elbows and take over”
7 “I scrabble around and go round corners on two wheels”
8 “I go into ’I can’t do it, it’s too big’. It builds to a head – then I have three days of running around like a headless chicken”
9 “I’m the deer in the headlights. Very task focused, I take tasks back”
10 “I become even more of a control freak – I then have to patch things up and it feels like I lose credibility”
And Gareth’s advice? “Become the Master Craftsman of questioning, and I promise you that the Beast will be tamed.”
Good luck with that then…