The Top 7 Ways to Not Be a Bad Boss

And How to Prevent Your Managers from Hurting the Bottom Line

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Philip Mandelbaum
01/14/2023

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Year-end reviews reveal some internal rifts this time around? You could inculpate the looming recession, or those remarks about inflation. Or you could search for solutions. Let’s face the facts: if your organization isn’t retaining or recruiting top talent, you have a management predicament.

If your workers are the heart of your operation, your managers are the central nervous system. (And, as Kramer says, “you’ve got to have a central nervous system!”) While your on-the-ground employees — from the marketers in your new hybrid office to the machinists in your properly ventilated factories — dictate the company culture, good managers facilitate and strengthen the connections among employees and teams, evangelizing your brand values and mission.

While good managers help their direct reports, their departments and their organizations achieve excellence, bad managers cost the US economy nearly $400 billion each year. In fact, half of all workers have left their job “to get away” from their manager at some point in their career.

I have. I resigned because I didn’t feel respected, valued or included. And I’ve been a manager. What worked for me was listening, and helping them identify and embrace their needs, goals, gaps and opportunities. I get it: finding a supportive work environment isn’t easy, and nor is being a good boss.

Your brand is your baby. So the department heads you hire must not only understand people, they have to know your people — and your purpose. Even if they surpass all your corporate forecasts, your managers haven’t done their job if their team members leave work feeling angry, unfulfilled, or physically unwell. This is not sustainable. Just ask Amazon.

What can you do? Simple.

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5 Steps Toward Better Employee Engagement

Demand your C-suite and middle management uphold the same standards as those applied to your nine-to-fivers
Change your year-end reviews to quarterly 360-degree reviews, so everyone is held accountable and everyone’s voice is heard
Kick off an employee engagement initiative with a “manager effectiveness” survey (Canva, Etsy, Bombas, McDonalds, Intercom and Oracle all use Culture Amp); when protected by anonymity, workers won’t hesitate to offer their honest feedback
Ask the right questions, and trust the answers you receive in return
Develop a manager training program, leveraging the adaptive learning model to customize the training to each manager

Survey results can uncover necrotizing blindspots. Offering your employees the opportunity to expose your business’s unique weaknesses would demonstrate your commitment to their wellbeing; acting on the survey results would go even further — and surely get back to your customers, many of whom only want to shop and promote brands that represent their values.

But why wait? Here are seven things your managers can do right now to change bad behaviors and expedite the process of improving employee morale, efficiency and productivity.

How to Go from Bad Boss to Great Manager

Based on decades of experience, interviews with workers and hours of online research, I’ve compiled a list of seven ways your managers may be screwing up — and what they should do differently.

A great manager shows how not to be a bad boss, slapping five with their employee in celebration of their success

1. They don’t accept feedback

Virgin Airlines founder Richard Branson says that a good leader listens twice as much as they speak. If your employee one-on-ones and performance reviews focus solely on employees and management’s perceptions of their work, and your managers don’t ask for feedback from anyone but their peers or superiors, you are demonstrating to your staff that you believe your managers are above personal growth and don’t value their experience.

Tips: Establish guidelines for your managers, requiring they solicit feedback formally and informally from their team members. This should include:

Distributing an anonymous employee survey or questionnaire on a monthly or quarterly basis
Actively striving to create a work environment that encourages open dialogue
Concluding every team meeting with a reminder that their input is always appreciated and confidential
Splitting their one-on-one employee check-ins into two segments — one for reviews, and one for feedback — or restructuring them as back-and-forth conversations aimed at shared success

2. They don’t recognize achievements

More than eight in 10 US workers say they’d be willing to work harder for an appreciative boss, and 70% say they’d feel better about themselves and their efforts if their boss thanked them more regularly. Don’t believe them? Well, happy workers are 13% more productive.

If your managers fail to celebrate successes or show appreciation but never forget to flag a mistake, they’re creating an environment of fear in which employees may meet — but never exceed — expectations, not due to motivation but to prevent punishment.

Tips:

Host a company meeting on how celebrating successes creates a more successful work environment, and showcase past examples from within your organization
Create an incentive program for your managers who leverage team feedback to gamify work responsibilities or create their own incentive program for their employees
Reward team and individual achievements with monthly employee spotlights and creative gifts or perks

3. They micromanage

If your managers have difficulty spreading work across their team and, when they do, only assign one project at a time and check in frequently, they’re micromanaging.

While it may seem to your managers like they’re encouraging focus and accountability, they’re actually demonstrating distrust — “and any gains realized from process improvements will be offset by the deleterious effects of disengagement.” This is why a recent Forbes article investigates whether micromanaging is “a form of bullying.”

But don’t fret: While nearly seven in 10 employees have considered changing jobs due to micromanagement, and more than a third have actually left, almost all employees have experienced it at one time or another — which means you’re not the only business leader who needs to retrain their managers.

Tips: Develop a working group for your managers to share best practices for motivating their team as well as monitoring work without overwhelming or discouraging workers.

Managers should delegate intelligently, so they have more time to be strategic and more energy to inspire, ensuring, for each task, they:

Fully understand not only what needs to be done but why and by when
Determine the member of their team who is most qualified to successfully complete the task
Carefully explain the task, encourage questions and comments, and confirm the employee is prepared to take on the responsibility
Fully understand the employee’s level of expertise, check in only as necessary, and make themselves available in case any issue arises

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^{Women of Color in Tech is a community by and for women of color working in tech}

4. They aren’t inclusive

It may seem right to hire employees with similar backgrounds, or from the same networks, and it may feel uncomfortable to discuss cultural differences in the workplace, but studies show that organizations that are intentional in hiring — and developing and retaining — diverse talent are 19% more innovative, earn 140% more revenue, have more than twice as much cash per employee, and are 35% more likely to outperform their competitors. So, if your managers are building their teams solely from their own networks, internal transfers and employee referrals, and not following best practices for ensuring employees feel respected, valued and included, they — and you — are not only not keeping up with the times but putting your bottom line at risk.

Tips:

Coordinate with your HR department to develop your diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policy, focused on intervention and not only bias reduction
Actively recruit from a larger, more diverse talent base
Evangelize diversity and inclusion across your organization, and with your human resources department
Provide diversity and inclusion resources that empower individuals to take action, and stay flexible in content and delivery
Facilitate radical inclusion by inviting your employees to help their managers and the organization better identify points of conflict and possible resolutions
Guide managers in keeping the focus on workplace (and not personal) issues and keeping the conversation going to maintain accountability and improve employee wellbeing and company culture

5. They’re inconsistent or inequitable (with their policies or vision)

As entrepreneur and author Eric V. Holtzclaw writes in Inc., “Consistency is the difference between failure and success.” If your managers aren’t holding all of their employees — and themselves — to the same standard, or if their policies and vision shift sporadically, they’re demonstrating a lack of consistency that will adversely impact accountability, transparency and morale across their team and even the larger organization.

Tips: If you want your employees to respect and trust you as their leader, as well as their manager as your entrusted representative:

Commit not only to diversity and inclusion but also equity, collaborating with your HR leaders to develop corporate policy and standardized practices for (a) acknowledging that each group and individual enters the workforce under their own unique circumstances; (b) adjusting organizational structures to account for historical and present-day disadvantages; and (c) providing for each group and individual the appropriate access, resources and opportunities to thrive
Assign your management working group the task of defining a set of best practices for maintaining consistency and demonstrating equity across their teams
Track the progress of each manager in working with their employees to establish annual, quarterly and monthly team goals that align with those of the greater organization, as well as hosting periodic team meetings to encourage and celebrate progress toward these goals

A large group of employees in an auditorium practicing yoga, as part of a corporate retreat provided among corporate employee perks

6. They’re impersonal

Your managers should “wander around, randomly connect with employees, ask them what they’re doing, and how they’re doing,” said legendary venture capitalist Tim Draper. According to Marcus Buckingham, New York Times best-selling author and founder of The Strengths Revolution:

[W]hile there are as many styles of management as there are managers, there is one quality that sets truly great managers apart from the rest: They discover what is unique about each person and then capitalize on it. Average managers play checkers, while great managers play chess. The difference? In checkers, all the pieces are uniform and move in the same way; they are interchangeable. You need to plan and coordinate their movements, certainly, but they all move at the same pace, on parallel paths. In chess, each type of piece moves in a different way, and you can’t play if you don’t know how each piece moves. More important, you won’t win if you don’t think carefully about how you move the pieces. Great managers know and value the unique abilities and even the eccentricities of their employees, and they learn how best to integrate them into a coordinated plan of attack.

In other words, if your managers are all work and no play and don’t relate to their employees as individual human beings, with unique needs and goals, they’re missing the opportunity to nurture truly reciprocal and committed relationships. If they don’t express interest in what matters to their staff, your employees will feel less like contributing team members and more like service providers, decreasing the likelihood that they would go the extra mile or recommend your organization to other top talent.

Tips: Hire managers willing to think of themselves not as a boss but as a coach or mentor, and ensure they provide continuing education opportunities, help their staff set and reach goals, and incorporate the following to make the workplace fun:

Birthday and work anniversary celebrations
Personalized holiday gifts
Weekend retreats, after-work events and team lunches
Wellness programs like yoga classes or massages
Extra time off and half-day Fridays during the summer
A gamification system with point-based individual rewards like gift cards and team rewards like open-bar happy hours

7. They’re inflexible

Studies by Owl Labs, Buffer and others have revealed that remote workers typically spend 10 minutes less a day being unproductive and are 47% more productive overall. Historically, 50% fewer employees quit their jobs with companies that allow remote employment. And seven out of 10 millennials, who already account for more than one third of the workforce, would give up other benefits to work remotely.

Before COVID, 97% of all employees were seeking flexible work in the long term and more than three quarters said they’d be more loyal to their employers if they offered flexible work options. Since, 94% of employees who began working remotely as a result of the pandemic have expressed their desire to continue working from home at least part of the time for the rest of their career, and 99% of those working remotely before COVID have said the same.

Why? Because remote work helps workers maintain a proper work/life balance, which improves employee morale. And since happy and healthy employees are better employees, this balance translates into more and better work, improving ROI for the business.

Remote workers work more than the standard 40-hour workweek 43% more often than onsite workers (source)
Companies with remote staff experience 41% lower day-to-day absenteeism and significantly less ‘executed’ vacation time (source)
Employees who work remotely half of the time save the equivalent of 11 workdays not commuting, and full-time remote workers save the equivalent of 33 or more (source)
The work completed by remote workers has 40% fewer quality defects (source)
Companies that offer work flexibility experience more than 20% higher profitability (source)

As a result, the majority of HR leaders and business executives rethought their workforce/workplace strategy in 2022. If you didn’t, it’s way past time.

Tips: Create a work-from-home policy, including guidelines for accommodating employees in extenuating circumstances, and offer it to everyone. If the nature of your work does not allow for full-time remote work, include additional remote work days in your gamification system or other employee incentive program.

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