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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Last week’s column introduced Michelle McQuaid’s “Bad Boss Study,” which seems to show bad bosses in the United States outnumber good ones two to one, although given how few details of the study are available, the title might actually mean it’s a bad study about bosses.

It would have to be awfully bad, though, to completely invalidate the results. While the ratio might not be two to one, we can safely conclude there are a lot of bad bosses out there.

The question: What can executives do to prevent bad bosses in their organizations? It’s a question with two complementary answers. The first: Develop their organizational listening skills. The second: Don’t wait for bad.

Organizational Listening

Organizational listening is the art of Knowing What’s Going On Out There. This isn’t as easy as it might seem.

Many executives and middle managers rely, as a matter of habit, courtesy, and efficiency, on their chain of command. They all will, eventually, end up with bad bosses in their organizations, and they’ll never know.

That’s because (this really ought to be too obvious to require explanation), they’re relying on the bad managers to reveal themselves. That isn’t going to happen. Worse, if one bad manager has a second one further down in the chain, the first will conceal the second. Even those managers who aren’t bad personally will, if they rely on their chains of command, inadvertently conceal bad managers who are lower down in the hierarchy.

Early in their careers, most managers learn that they’re supposed to “respect the chain of command.” They take this to mean they should rely on it for all employee interactions. They take it wrong.

Respecting the chain of command means only assigning work through it … a practice that’s essential for maintaining a healthy organization. Executives and middle managers who fail to respect the chain of command in this way end up with overworked employees — and the better an employee is, the more overworked he or she will be. The best employees gain visibility because of how good they are. They’ll already be the go-to people for their direct manager; because they’re visible they’ll also be the go-to employees for the manager to whom their manager reports, and so on, and so on, and so on.

But assigning work has little to do with Knowing What’s Going On Out There. So establish, with everyone in management, that listening to everyone who has information to share is an important use of a business leader’s time and attention.

Starting with you, and starting with a redefinition of the old open door policy.

Not that an open door policy is a bad idea. It’s just that when an employee makes use of it, other employees, and their manager, can see them making use of it. All that’s needed is an employee’s manager asking, in a kidding sort of way, “Hey, I saw you talking with Jane. It wasn’t about me, I hope!” and it’s game over, because it takes a good poker player to avoid giving away the subject, and the contents, of the conversation.

So expand your open door policy to an open-door-or-meet-offsite-for-beverages policy. That will protect employees who have something to say and a concern about what will happen it their manager finds out they said it.

Don’t wait for bad

Bad is a bad word. Avoid it. Few bosses are simply “good” or “bad.”

At least, not at first. By the time a manager becomes a truly bad boss, their boss has missed a lot of salvage opportunities.

Every manager is better at some dimensions of management and leadership than others. None are so good that no further improvement anywhere is possible; few have so little aptitude for the sport that they can’t improve in some ways.

Your goal: Help all of your managers be better at leading and managing tomorrow than they were yesterday. You will, on occasion, have to demote or terminate the few who are hopeless, but that isn’t your goal. In a very real way it’s an admission of failure.

Set that tone with employees who take advantage of your new, expanded open door policy. If one says, “I report to a bad manager,” ask, “Where does she most need to improve?”

The answer will be more informative than just allowing the employee to vent. Even better, you’ll hear something you can do something about.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

“Oh, you hate your job? There’s a support group for that. It’s called Everybody, and they meet at the bar.”

It’s a Drew Carey line. Think he was exaggerating? He was. By 35 percent. That, according to the “Bad Boss Study” led by Michelle McQuaid, is the fraction of U.S. employees who are happy at their job. The remainder would, if given the choice, prefer a better boss to a raise.

How reliable are the numbers? Beats me. While the results of this study have been widely reported, the study itself is well hidden. I know nothing about the methodology, whether survey questions were without bias, the sample and error bar sizes, whether the study was subjected to peer review, or, for that matter, anything else that would affirm its validity.

It is, that is, pretty much par for the course for this sort of thing. Caveat emptor.

But even if we imagine the study was poorly done, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the leadership provided by U.S. managers is pretty bad.

Why is that? And what, as a leader yourself, can you do about it in your organization?

Here’s one place to start: Stop reading the Harvard Business Review. This will save you time and money, and will have the same effect with respect to bad ideas that frequent hand-washing has on infectious diseases: It will help you avoid exposure.

There is, for example, “One Out of Every Two Managers Is Terrible at Accountability,” (Darren Overfield and Rob Kaiser, 11/8/2012, and thanks to Mike Bowler for bringing it to my attention). According to the authors, “… far and away the single-most shirked responsibility of executives is holding people accountable. No matter how tough a game they may talk about performance, when it comes to holding people’s feet to the fire, leaders step back from the heat.”

How do we know? Their “database of 5,400 upper-level managers from the US, Europe, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific gathered since 2010” tells us so. But speaking of missing methodologies, theirs is conspicuously absent.

Want evidence of the authors’ contempt for evidence? They ascribe much of the problem to “The youngest members of the workforce, especially in the U.S.,” who have a poor work ethic, an entitlement mentality, and “have grown up in a sheltered environment; they expect praise and recognition and can be indignant when it is not forthcoming.”

The evidence? “… blogs at US News, Daily Finance, Forbes.” That’s right. Several other bloggers say so too.

The authors don’t even bother to explain why they think holding people accountable is a good idea. They simply assert it as a management axiom.

But it’s a practice whose drawbacks exceed its virtues. Holding people accountable – “holding their feet to the fire” in the authors’ terms – assumes the root cause rather than discovering it. It simply presumes that if something goes wrong, someone must be at fault, and that the manager knows who that person is.

But if there’s fault, it’s almost always the manager’s, because when something goes wrong the most likely causes are such barriers to success as bad processes, frequent interruptions, inept delegation, politics, a failure to provide proper training, or otherwise leaving systemic problems in place that exemplify Peter Drucker’s principle that “Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.”

And if the root cause really is a bad employee, who made the hiring decision?

Now, imagine the manager dodges all of these pitfalls. Something goes wrong and it is one person’s fault – not malfeasance or sabotage, but an employee simply botching a responsibility. Does anyone seriously think that, given a choice between negative reinforcement and positive coaching, the negative reinforcement leads to a superior result?

The answer: Yes, some people do think so. They’re called “bad managers” because negative reinforcement turns teams into a giant game of Whack A Mole, where employees keep their heads down so they aren’t the ones to get whacked when something goes wrong. Let the manager know there’s a problem? That’s an invitation to be the scapemole.

So as holding people accountable leads to employees doing everything they can to keep their manager in the dark, it also leads to managerial ignorance. Perfection!

My recommendation: If you want to fight the scourge of bad management, start by helping the managers who report to you choose their sources of information wisely.

Like, for example, avoiding The Harvard Business Review.

The superior alternative is right in front of you.

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