Bad Boss Case Study

A friend in California told me of a manager the other day at their company. The manager has been leading the department for over 10 years, and in that time has had the following occur: Dealt with three lawsuits about mistreatment of employees. Caused at minimum two employees to take medical leave due to “excessive stress.” Forced at minimum six people to leave the company and start retail careers (for significantly lower pay) that they now describe as “so much better.” These are the stories that are known, not the ones that may have not yet come out to the surface.

This acquaintance of mine mentioned that she recently was transferred to this department, and immediately upon getting there received phone calls from former employees trying to tell her to remain strong. This is a manager that is despised. And yet for some reason this manager remains employed, and according to multiple sources, it is not due to any legal reasons.

The company has simply decided that this person is a good manager, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Without any inside information from the company, the only logical reason that a manager with such a terrible history would remain employed is because he has some type of productivity score or value that indicates he is getting a lot of work completed, and this is worth the trouble that they cause on other employees. There is no way that a manager with multiple lawsuits against him is going unnoticed, so the only reason to believe that his employment is still tolerated is because the company truly believes he’s bringing back a profit. If this is true, however, it would be a grave misuse of statistics, and a clear example of bias in favor of perceived effective management strategies, rather than the effects of those strategies.

There is simply no way that all of the lost production and lost revenue finding new employees is worth the value of keeping this individual employed. If nothing else, this story is a good indication of how many companies do not actually understand why employee satisfaction is important. Perhaps they “know” on a basic level that satisfaction matters, but they are choosing to believe that the lower level employees within the company are the ones that are wrong about this manager’s effectiveness, and that alone indicates that the company does not understand the importance of employee satisfaction.