When Bosses Go Bad -- and Get Rewarded

We've all seen it -- the bad boss who should get canned, but who gets promoted instead. The clueless, mean-spirited manager or executive who is hated more than anyone else, but who, somehow, rises higher in the ranks than anyone else.

And we wonder, is it just our company? Just our industry? Well, take heart. It happens everywhere, according to a study on bad bosses presented earlier this month at the Academy of Management's annual meeting in Philadelphia.

Asked what happened to a particularly "bad leader" they've worked for, nearly half (45 percent) of employees surveyed reported that the offending boss was promoted. Another 19 percent said nothing at all happened to the person, and only 13 percent said the bad leader was forced out of the organization.

The three researchers, from Bond University in Australia, who conducted the study said it was "remarkably disturbing" that 64 percent of the bad bosses were either rewarded with promotions or left alone.

The online survey of 240 people in the United States and Australia was part of a larger study, in which one-third of those surveyed also reported that working for these bad bosses caused them serious stress, including fatigue, insomnia and bad dreams.

While the Australian researchers may have been surprised that so many bad bosses get promoted, some who study this particular breed of office animal say the survey was right on target.

"The more incompetent someone is, the faster their career takes off," says John Hoover, author of How to Work for an Idiot: Survive and Thrive Without Killing Your Boss. Hoover notes that, in a typical organization, the path to a higher salary and perks, such as stock options, lies in getting promoted. The problem, he says, is employees and managers often get promoted out of their areas of competency -- and their comfort zones. They become incompetent, insecure, defensive -- in short, bad bosses.

"We institutionalize bad behavior because the only way people can be rewarded is to be taken out of their element," says Hoover, who is also an executive coach with Partners in Human Resources International, a New York-based HR consultancy.

When people are comfortable, they're liked by their co-workers, says Hoover. "It's when they get promoted away from it that they become gargoyles."

And it gets worse, he says. These bad bosses surround themselves with incompetent sycophants who provide camouflage and can serve as convenient "sacrificial lambs" if the boss's own incompetence causes problems, he says. When someone higher in the organizational chart leaves the company, this entire "pod of incompetence," as Hoover calls it, gets bumped up the ladder.

One might think that these bad bosses wouldn't get promoted, that smart executives up the line would see them for what they are and show them the door. But, says Hoover, "When you look down a silo, you only see the cork at the top. You don't see what's bottled up behind it."

"If the metrics are working," he says, the top executives "assume the whole organization is working like a well-oiled machine."

There are a couple of things HR can do about all this, says Hoover. One is to help redesign the organization so that people can get raises and perks without having to get promoted. "This will keep people in their competencies," he says. Another approach, he says, is for HR to try to determine in advance -- through tests and other measures -- whether a person will make a good manager.

Elaine Varelas of Keystone Partners, a career-management firm in Boston, says bad bosses are often promoted because, at many organizations, managing people is not considered as important as making money for the company.

As a manager, you're valued "if you deliver the financials, if you deliver the deals," rather than on how well you deal with people, says Varelas, who writes a regular column on talent-management issues for The Boston Globe.

Top executives might be aware a manager is a bad boss, "but they might not know what to do about it," she says. "They might be worried that if they make a change, the results they want in other areas won't be delivered."

Varelas believes the prevalence of bad bosses will become more of an issue as baby boomers leave the workforce and competition for talent heats up.

"As organizations are more concerned about retaining people, we'll see something done about these bad bosses," she says. Because such bosses generate turnover, "retaining the right people will be seen as just as much a critical success factor as delivering on other, more quantifiable results."

From: Human Resource Executive Online