5 signs your boss might be a jerk.
I love chatting over coffee. In fact, I would rather have meetings in Costa Coffee/Starbucks than in any boardroom. There’s something about the atmosphere of coffee, people, and an “out-of-the-usual” setting that really enables business meetings to “zing” when they involve coffee and a croissant.
I also find myself in the position of a sort of “Father confessor” hearing not sins (well maybe some) so much as the gripes and complaints of my fellow directors and executives. I am a sort of Agony uncle. perhaps it’s my grey beard and lack of hair, my wizened age-worn face or my incisive observational capabilities in which they find comfort? Who knows but I am party to many a conversation that would make their boss's toes curl.
So I regularly catch up with friends who work in a range of business sectors. They are typically (though not exclusively) directors or owners of SMEs in manufacturing, tech or construction. A few of my closest companions work in tech but as I say, it’s a broad “church” of perspectives.
Full disclosure here: My boss is OK. Always room for improvement (more lunches, a slushy machine etc.) but generally good at the important stuff so in case you're reading mate, this isn’t about you! Also, I don’t use names to protect the innocent and the not-so-innocent.
The five biggest gripes in the C-Suite about bosses who need to sort their s*** out.
It’s evident in all my coffee conversations that since the COVID-19 pandemic (and probably well before then but it was less of a discussion point) with people going back into the office, the enforced hiatus of relative isolation from your boss followed by the cold-reality of being thrust back into their immediate presence on a daily (or hourly) basis, that the obvious “challenges” that many people perhaps brushed under the carpet day to day when it comes to their bosses have now been forced into the light of harsh reality.
So all I want to do here is list some of these gripes and perhaps you can resonate with or recognise some of these in yourself. I don’t know and frankly, this is more catharsis by proxy for the original tellers of these gripes but, take from it what you will.
Gripe 1: They swan in and out of the office leaving a trail of emotional destruction for me to clean up.
This is a common one. They work at home and you run the office day to day. They parachute in once every few weeks and like some sort of bipolar Putin either they are on top form exhibiting the sort of largesse that would shame an oil sheikh or, they are Scrooge-esque in their approach to making the office drinks and channel their inner Grinch causing mayhem.
When this boss finally leaves the office you step onto the shop floor to see the utter destruction wrought. People either wander aimlessly in varying degrees of confusion and deer-in-the-headlights shock or a complete breakdown of the working day with the team in some sort of jello-like laughing-gas-induced uselessness. Your job for the remainder of the day is to spend time listening to each one of them as they relay the conversations they had with the “big cheese” and either putting out the emotional/stress fires or dampening their enthusiasm for the vague-yet-forceful promises made about an office jacuzzi and employing a full-time massage therapist for the Development team.
Emotionally, you end up preparing a long game wherein those promises made actually materialise as a cheap Slushy machine in the summer, but the staff have t buy the ice cubes and the flavouring.
Good times.
Gripe 2: They always have a reason why they didn’t hit THEIR target and it’s always someone else's fault.
They run the numbers, every week. It always includes projects “we are sure to get”. Every phone call has the audio backdrop of them tapping keys on a calculator as they vaguely “Uhuh, yup, No way!” at random points in the conversation you are trying to have about Shelly in Accounts whose husband has run off with the Llama trainer from the local zoo. “It’s February for goodness sake! We haven’t even reached the end of the first quarter!” you scream, mentally whilst trying to gather yourself for the inevitable conversation ending resonating down the line of “We are gonna smash it this year!”. The most dangerous weapon this boss has is access to the CRM system and the DOSO (Deal Offers Sent Out) board.
As the year-end looms and the optimism of glorious success is still thick in the air, you begin to hear the tell-tale sounds of retrenchment, the “Ah well, such and such let me down” or “This bloody customer has been procrastinating for weeks now” (When in reality they said it sounded like a really good proposition but they would need to get board approval). “I can’t believe they STILL haven’t signed off, it’s a no-brainer!” and as they work through the emotional stages, aligned as they are to culminate on the anvil of week 3, quarter four, they eventually arrive at acceptance. “Well, I suppose 10% growth isn’t that bad”. ”We NEARLY hit the target but customers didn’t play ball”. All this whilst being the Sales Director with three salespeople in your team. All this whilst being the one to set the targets in Q3 LAST year. All this whilst allowing the team to coast through Q2/Q3 because of that damn calculator and access to the CRM system. All this, whilst saying “We don’t need to spend on marketing, our sales have always come to us!”
And you? You try to maintain enthusiasm whilst avoiding the slide into your annual state of resignation, lining up for the inevitable post-mortem at which the real reason will never be voiced, it will always be someone else's fault. You copy the Excel spreadsheet “Budget and Strat Plan 2022” to “Budget and Strat Plan 2023” and begin your adjustments, gazing at the staff spreadsheet wondering how thin you can spread the butter of morale before the mutiny sets in, and they gather with pitchforks to storm the staff car park, hunting down the MD’s Bentley Bentega, the Sales people’s Teslas and the SD’s Range Rover SVR.
It’s like the Wicker Man, but with patent leather seats, iPad dashboards, and “Kiwi matt green” paint, you can almost smell the burning Pirellis already.
Merry bloody Christmas.
Gripe 3: They rewrite history to absorb the glory, making your idea theirs.
History, they say is written by the victors. But sometimes, the one who wields the pen is also the one who writes the cheques and who is going to argue with that? It seems that narcissism knows no bounds and as the project comes to a glorious and frankly brilliant conclusion, this boss is asked one day, probably on national media or more usually in the boardroom of the company who might want to acquire the said product, how the idea came about…You, as side-kick and whose neurons were the very progenitor of the whole thing, lean in with a knowing smile to listen as she regales the room with the tale of your brilliance…
“Well, I was in Hamley's, looking for the perfect present for my son Tarquin and I looked up to see the smiling face of a Paddington Bear. Long story short, that glorious Red Hat of his got me thinking about Linux. Poor Linus Torvalds never really did create the perfect Recipe Storage and Indexing application for the original GUI so naturally, I thought that with constant multi-threaded processing and a bit of React we could you know, create a Nigella-worthy simple user interface to a cloud-based application with a NoSQL back end and target the specific demographic we did to leverage the “we love hummus” crowd. More tea?”
You lean too far forward and there is silence as the resounding thud of your head hitting the glass boardroom table sails around the room, coupled with the simultaneous (if inaudible) sound of you unsheathing the sword with which you would like to eviscerate your boss in the same way she eviscerated your role in the birth of the product itself.
You apologise, you wipe the grease stain from the glass, and you smile as the MD opposite congratulates you on having such an “avant-garde and creative boss. You must have learnt so much from her.”. You smile, and all the while your self-esteem is evaporating like so many characters from a Marvel film at the click of a finger.
Gripe 4: They treat you as a friend but you are basically their PA.
“You don’t look big by making others look small.”
You really like this boss, they are affable, friendly. They buy you coffee, they support you in front of others. They tell their close friends YOU are the reason for their success.
This is good, and it’s nice. but when they REALLY want to impress people they ask YOU to get the coffee, they as YOU to take the social media pictures, and they ask YOU to write stuff for them that they can put in their emails. The flatter to deceive. This is not good.
This is more emotional blackmail than anything. It’s essentially gas-lighting. They tell you how wonderful they are, how they would not be where they were without you and then, they somehow make YOU feel guilty for asking for a pay rise, or for suggesting that they buy the team lunch. Sometimes they will follow your advice but most of the time, they ask other people until they get the response they want and then expect you to execute. They are “askholes”.
Gripe 5: They talk a good game but never execute fully.
This is by far the most common one. Particularly it seems for MDs of their own businesses.
Execution comes in many forms but essentially it’s doing what you agreed, contracted or planned for and not finding a reason to swerve it faster than Pastor Maldonado coming out of the pit lane in front of you.
A friend of mine is essentially the right-hand “person of non-specific gender” to a particularly garrulous and dare I say apparently vain-glorious but highly effective in the “making oodles of money” stakes Managing Director.
Dreams are the fuel, but the execution is the engine of success.
We all know someone who can really talk an idea up, can over-sell, and can at times be somewhat economical with the actuality in order to facilitate the crossing of palms with silver (namely theirs with other peoples). What makes this situation totally unwholesome though is that in a non “standing on the shoulders of giants” way they rely on others to execute their sometimes outlandish, misdirected or frankly surreal plans often on the alter of “I am not a completer-finisher”. No, you are just lazy and rely on others to clean up your mess as if you never actually left home emotionally.
Don’t get me wrong, they have a highly-effective team and they can and DO execute but sometimes, they need to see the MD executing in the trenches, they need to see them don the gloves, pick up a shovel and dig with them. For my poor colleague, it seems after 3 years of “leadership” he feels he is living in an existential experiment based on the class system inherent in the British military around the time of the first world war.
The general dreams up a “cunning plan” which usually involves danger (not his) or “mass casualties” (again, not involving him) in the taking of a sometimes trifling amount of land. He sits well behind the enemy lines, eating quail and drinking Chablis, a map on the wall and his trusty assistant at hand to relay to the troops the folly or plan.
Any failures are of course down to the field staff or the foot soldiers, not the wise and omniscient General.
Or worse, the General has a set of very specific tasks to undertake in order for the plan to come to fruition but alas, time, Quails, Chablis and various lunches wait for no man (or woman) so the small, but important, tasks that needed to be undertaken to form a stable foundation for the storming of the MVP target demographic never actually get done. Often at the last minute, they are handed over to his assistant to undertake, with the peril of failure looming large. Usually, this handover happens at midday on a Friday, requiring a zen-like focus or a loss of one of the weekends to make sure that it DOES NOT FAIL.
Bonus Gripe: They are emotionally unaware of what the right thing to do is.
“If you know what the right thing to do is and you fail to do it, you are doing the wrong thing!”
Imagine, your company wins a big contract and your boss is cockahoop, effervescent with joy. “We can invest more in a bigger team now”, “We can reward the whole team for what they have done to get to this point”. When I am over I will get lunch for everyone”. This last one is one that is low-hanging and you feel, safe to share with the team — it’ll perk them up.
Fabulous, that’s what the team needs. they want to know that their efforts have contributed to the success and that it’s not just the MD who gets the magazine covers, the plaudits, and the lunches. So you, in your wisdom in knowing the emotional landscape suggest that when he/she is next over, they take the entire team out for lunch to celebrate and thank them. Not going to cost much — £300 max and for a £1 million-plus contract it’s a rounding error.
The day of the office visit rolls around and the MD has decided to ensconce themselves in the board room, “making calls” or “having meetings” all day. To top it off, they have a meeting over lunchtime. No worries, give me the card and I will take the team out. This is met with a not-unimpressive level of procrastination and faux concern “No, I want to be there with them, I might be able to make it, just have to send these few emails”. Your heart sinks, you know where this is going.
Lunchtime rolls around, the staff remain at their desks waiting for the MD to emerge and do the right thing. Like the “Marie Celeste” they are nowhere to be seen, they have morphed into the Scarlet Pimpernel and no amount of seeking will find them. With 30 mins left of the lunch break, the staff wander off like forlorn Wildebeest to the local deli to grab a limp-leafed, slightly dry sandwich and a cup of tepid coffee, returning to their desk in a state of resigned “c’est la vie” to continue with their task of making the company great and funding the second home of the MD.
2 pm rolls around and Ian, the PFY in Accounts gets a call and a request, well demand, from the MD that he go to Waitrose and forage for an Avocado and Prawn sandwich on Italian artisanal focaccia with an oat-milk chai latte.
You open up your sandwich box, reach in to retrieve the ham and cheese slab and sigh, looking at the spreadsheet and thinking “There’s just no helping some people”.
It’s not easy being right
I hope you enjoyed this read, I hope you DIDN’T resonate with any of these situations but if you did, feel free to comment and share — it’s only in like-company that we can face adversity with aplomb, style, verve and courage!
One more thing: Weekends and Holidays are NOT for you to recharge ready for going back to work, they are for you to relax and enjoy. If your boss EVER says that “You can recharge at the weekend/over the Christmas break” do feel free to tell them to explore gravity from a high building.
Have a fab day and if you are ever in Hull, UK let’s have a coffee!
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