Hear
Who hasn’t had a bad boss, one of those that gave us nightmares? We could see the negative and positive side of these horrible leaders: on the good side, having a bad boss teaches us to be better bosses; On the horrible side, those who think there is a kind side are that they did not have a rubbish boss.
my last book Defusing the bomb: a story of dangerous leaders (Vergara, 2024) is, neither more nor less, than a novel where we expose brutal and toxic leaders and how they take care of the organization and its people. Characters everyone knows like Silvina Lagarca, the human resources director who only sends emails that no one reads; the CEO, Gustavo Lafossa, who buries you alive in order to have power; José Balaguer del Corral, a hypocritical director; or Agustina Lamarka, the marketing director who sells her mother in order to achieve results. Nothing that hasn’t been seen before. There is nothing better than a story to understand the damage that these types of bosses do to people and the organization. It is permanent damage that undermines the foundation of the company’s culture and mission.
We call the forms and techniques used by these unpresentable leaders “bossism,” a concept without euphemisms that is a synthesis of the bad characteristics of leaders that are disastrous for the organization and insufferable for those who suffer from them. There are many dimensions that can be studied on the topic of bad leadership. There are leaders for whom people are strategic assets and, for others, they are simply disposable. There is also another dimension, which refers to respect for the organization’s rules or the destruction of its values. Respect for rules can create good leaders or inert bureaucrats; The destruction of organizational values, on the other hand, can create organizational destructive monsters.
Based on the previous dimensions, four types of leadership appear to take into account and three of them to avoid. First we have the idealist, a leader who needs the people because his power is based on his charisma. The charismatic leader bases his power on the people who follow and idolize him. There are idealists who put all their focus on people to achieve the objectives that that leader has, but they forget about the organizational perspective or, outright, despise it. They are foolish idealists who believe that a project can be built in the ether without the need for an organization to leverage the projects. In fact, they hate organizational structures because they “suffocate” them, and they try to generate ways of working that no one understands how they work or they generate such a horizontal structure that they end up suffocating the poor employees, who have to do everything because “in this company “We all do everything” and no one ends up doing anything. People appear with bombastic titles like “Market Project Leader South American Cluster”… without people in charge.
At the other extreme are the bureaucratic, inert or “flanes” leaders, who rely on extreme respect for organizational rules to maintain the status quo and do nothing in the service of anyone. People are not relevant to these officials who do not play for anything and anyone but themselves. The organization helps them grow in hierarchy, the only thing that matters to them. The bureaucrat will impose order based on strict respect for the structure; the inert will do nothing; and, the “flan”, will put on his best “rubber” face, but he will not decide anything and will not play for anyone. He will die in his function, but with a happy face. Useless idiots.
Except for the leader, who seeks the growth of the organization, respecting its values and generating and promoting talent to achieve a virtuous circle where the organization and professional growth go hand in hand, the rest of the leaders described are, in reality, anti-leaders. .
We leave for last the worst kind of bosses, managers and bad leaders that may exist. While there are many dimensions and descriptions of bad leaders, we chose three in particular that stand out in the book: the abrasive leader, the narcissistic leader, and the psychopathic leader. These three characteristics make an organization a winter and the people who work in it, victims that boil in a cauldron. We do not leave aside other bad behaviors of leaders, but we consider that abrasive, narcissistic and psychopathic personalities are serious and irreversible enough to generate a bad leader with no turning back. The three dimensions generate the worst of leadership and are the genesis of organizational bombs that are impossible to defuse.
We have to end it bullying existing in organizations caused mainly by useless bosses and bullies. There is the generis of the bad apple. The best thing a company can do is eliminate this type of boss, which will surely result in a better organizational climate. Employee well-being is not achieved with meditation exercises, yoga, stretching or offering healthy bars. A culture of well-being requires vulnerable leaders who stand in the middle, not on top of people watching, like in the novel I wrote, from the forty-fifth floor. They have to be leaders who listen and resolve. Although this seems simple, for many companies that have leadership problems rooted in the same organizational culture, change can be difficult.
It is not difficult to end these problems if what you want is a healthy company, with values, where the value proposition attracts and retains good talent. The challenge for many organizations is to get out of the comfort zone and confront the bad apples in the drawer before it is too late. Ending the scourge of bad bosses, those who alter and ruin everyone’s lives, will result in a better organization, something that everyone, shareholders and employees, will be grateful for. You simply have to prioritize values and culture over short-term effectiveness, which does not serve to build a healthy organization. To achieve this, CEOs, leaders and shareholders must make it a priority on their agendas. Surely in the long term they will notice that the absence of garbage bosses will translate into a comparative and competitive advantage in which it is worth investing.
