31 Telltale Signs You Are A Horrible Boss

No one starts out their career trying to be a horrible boss.  Yet, it’s amazing what a vast majority of folks seem to accomplish this feat with absolutely no training whatsoever.

Maybe we’re born bad bosses.  It just comes naturally.

Hopefully, you can shake off some of the worst traits.

The first step for any addict is recognizing his or her problems.  So, start by reviewing the list below.

How many of these do you violate?

These are the 31 telltale signs you are a horrible boss — and what you probably think of each of these points:

1. You give your direct reports little to no guidance.  Plans? Who need them?  You work in a very dynamic industry/company.  You prefer to make decisions on the fly — in the moment.  Long term planning and telling your team what they’re trying to accomplish this year individually and as a group? That’s something they did back in the 70s before email.

2. You are supposed to do performance reviews every year but manage to skip them.  When HR has forced you to do them, you don’t tell your people anything constructive. Ugh. Performance reviews?  Is it that time of year again?  They’re such a waste of time.  You’ve got to actually sit with each of your people in your office and actually talk to them not about you, but them.  There’s too much on your and their plates to waste time on that.  Surely, you can push them off a few months.

3. You like to bully your reports.  You hate it when your team members get too uppity or lippy.  What is it with this younger generation today?  You’ve got to take some of these people down a peg or two so they know their place.  It’s especially important to do this with people who attended a more prestigious college than you or seem to have some halo over them based on something they did in their prior job.

4. You spend more time playing office politics to get the next promotion instead of actually doing work your group is responsible for.  Hey, it’s how you get ahead right?  So why knock playing politics.  You probably wouldn’t be in your current job if you hadn’t brown-nosed to get it, so why stop doing something that’s worked before.  And in terms of you not getting enough work done, isn’t that why you’ve got people working for you?

5. Whenever possible, you rip off and take credit for the work of others — presenting it as your own.  Look, the way you see it, your team members work for you.  So what’s theirs is yours.  And when you’ve ripped off your peers’ ideas, you once had a thought of that idea before so-and-so made a presentation on it anyway.  So, it’s not really her idea, as you see it.

6. You put down your team members in front of others and never give them any credit.  This is about running a tight ship on your team. You can never let any of your people get too big a head on their shoulders. When they screw up, they need to know it — and everyone else on the team needs to know it so they don’t make the same mistake and so that they never want to get yelled at publicly.  Intimidation brings out greatness.

7. You’ve never been wrong – about anything.  You’re quite brilliant actually – if you do say so.  It’s sometimes hard for others to be around you when you’re always right.  When people have thought you were wrong about something in the past, it’s simply been because they didn’t clearly hear what you said.

8. There’s constant turnover in your group.  People are constantly quitting or being asked to transfer out.  Change is good.  New blood on the team helps bring in new perspectives.  So what if some people left?  They weren’t up to the challenge of what you’re building here.  It’s not for everyone.  It takes a special person to be able to work under you.

9. When a mistake is made, you’re quick to blame someone on your team as the fall guy or fall gal.  Well, it was their fault after all.  You did warn them to be careful early on before problems arose.  It’s on them for not being as obsessed with the details as you would have been if you were in their shoes.

10. You’re the king or queen of micromanaging.  You see it as a positive to be constantly looking over the shoulders of your team.  In fact, you often say that “Steve Jobs was a micromanager too” or “I’m just really detail-oriented and that’s been a big part of why I’m successful.”

11. You’ve raised your voice more than once in the past month. Listen, that’s the way you grew up.  At your dinner table, you had to raise your voice to be heard.  So what?  It’s all about everyone is clear about the point you’re  making.

12. You lie.  That may sound a little extreme to you.  You would rather think of it more as finding a practical solution to a problem and nobody got hurt.  You don’t see the world in black or white.  We live in a world of “shades of gray.”

13. You excel at sucking up.  Compliments and back-slaps are what make the world go around.  A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.

14. You’re always out on travel and rarely check back in with the group in the office. You like to tell people what airport you’re currently in and which one you’ll be in on Thursday and then Monday.  You have an important job.  Otherwise you wouldn’t be flying around the world.  You’d be sitting in a boring cubicle back at home.  It’s good for your people to see how important you are through hearing about your travel schedule.  If they can’t get their work done themselves, then they’re not right for your team.

15. You’d rather defer than make a decision. Why do we need to decide now anyway? Let’s wait.  Maybe we could do some more research.  We could talk to Charlie to see what he thinks.  We don’t have to rush to make a decision now.

16. You’ve got turmoil in your personal life. Well, sure, you never see your kids or partner anymore.  You can’t recall the last time you did something fun with your kids.  And there was that incident at school.  But someone has to make the money to keep paying the bills and it’s going to be you.  You’re just getting your work done to pay for everything.

17. One of the reasons you hate performance reviews with your team is that you wouldn’t really be able to say what their strengths and weaknesses are.  You feel uncomfortable talking to your people alone about the job they’re doing.  You don’t really know what they’re doing anyway.  And if you had to set a “stretch goal” for them?  You can’t even remember what their spouse’s name is or where they went to college, so how are you supposed to know what their stretch goal should be?

18. You like to hire C players who don’t outshine you to your bosses.  At best, you’re a B- quality manager.  Therefore, you can’t hire any A players for your team: (1) because they might be smart enough to see you shouldn’t have your current job and (2) they’ll make you look bad to your boss if they start outshining you.  Best to keep the folks below you clear C players.

19. You always say “I” and never “we.”  When you say “I,” you really mean it as “we” anyway.  What’s the team’s is really yours.

20. You’re vindictive.  Well, yes, it’s true you never forget a past wrong against you.  It’s probably healthy to be able to go back and show someone not to mess around with you, right?  It’s just about showing them they were wrong — not getting them back.

21. You tolerate bad work, let chronic under-performers go unchecked, and play favorites.  There are a few folks on your team that probably shouldn’t be there, but they’re old friends and they’ve been loyal.  Hey, doesn’t loyalty count for something these days?

22. You don’t update your team or, worse, deliberately keep information from them.  You operate on a “need to know” basis.  Not everyone needs to know.  You operate a Department of Defense kind of information sharing on your team. Some are Level 1; some are Level 2 and so on.  They just need to keep doing their jobs and you’ll handle the big picture stuff.

23. You’re seen to dump more work on your team than actually get stuff done yourself.  At the end of the day, you’re the boss.  You were given people to work fo you.  What are you supposed to do?  Do the work yourself?  You need to be out having dinner and hobnobbing while the worker bees back at the office do stuff.  That’s just part of being a leader.

24. You have a terrible track record of people who work under you going on to be successful managers themselves.  It’s not about developing great people.  It’s about results.  So what if other bosses have developed other great bosses. You will keep focusing on results.

25. You make your people work insane hours and never inspire them in any way.  All great teams worked hard.  So what?  Sure you inspire them.  You inspire them by saying you’ll fire them if they don’t work all weekend.  That’s pretty darned inspiring.  Why do you need to inspire them anyway? Why don’t we just all sit around and sing kumbaya.

26. You always like to harp on your team’s past failures.  Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

27. People say you sometimes “flip the switch” and become a different person when something sets you off.  Sure you freaked out on Bob last year.  You don’t understand why people still bring that up.  The guy screwed up big time and he had it coming.

28. You make people constantly wonder “How did he/she get that job in the first place” and are secretly paranoid that you’re going to be “found out.”  Shhhhhh.  You don’t want to talk about that.

29. You’ve never read an article, let alone a book, about becoming a better boss.  Who has time for all that self-help mumbo-jumbo?  You get results or you’re canned.  Pretty simple.

30. You never say thanks.  But someone you know who read Steve Jobs’ biography told you he was jerk boss too, so it’s ok.

31. Most people would say you’re a terrible listener but you “just don’t understand where that comes from.”  You listen.  People on your team are always talking or crying about something.  You’re not really sure where this whole idea that you’re not a good listener comes from.  In fact, when someone first told you about that last year, you spent 30 minutes explaining why that simply wasn’t true.

Forbes