First days on a new job are often straightforward. Meet new colleagues, set your email signature, get to know the boss. Not for Ted, a scientist in the Midwest.
On his first day at a biology research lab, his new manager sat behind him and timed him as he completed various tasks. When she thought he was too slow, she rebuked him. Unrealistic deadlines followed along with the expectation that employees come into the office before she did at 7:30 a.m. and stay until after she left at 8 p.m. His manager was toxic.
“Definitely I was upset,” said Ted, who requested his last name not be published to protect his privacy and future job prospects. “As soon as I left, I was grateful because now I know all the major red flags from experience.”
He’s not alone. A study from ResumeHelp last year found that roughly 70% of workers had “considered quitting due to bosses’ behaviors.” Meanwhile, over 80% reported “a negative impact on team morale. and 74% observed a negative impact on team productivity due to their manager’s conduct.”
The results show that bad bosses often are at the center of many bad workplace experiences. Experts say such data underscores the need for managers to learn to effectively lead and avoid making the same mistakes over again.
“That leads to anger. It leads to burnout, and leads to poor performance on the organization’s part. And frankly, it can lead to lawsuits,” said Bill George, executive fellow at Harvard Business School and former CEO of Medtronic. “So there are a lot of good reasons why we should clear out the toxic managers and focus on the good ones.”
The ResumeHelp study found that the three most annoying boss behaviors were “ignoring or dismissing team members’ suggestions for improvement, dumping their work on others, and overloading team members with unrealistic workloads and deadlines.”
Several workers Yahoo Finance spoke with, all of whom asked for anonymity to protect their professional reputations, described other behaviors from bosses that created a pernicious environment.
One worker who was employed at a large financial institution said he repeatedly found typos in his boss’s memos to upper management. When he attempted to edit the errors, she repeatedly shot him down.
Another described an encounter with a sales manager who covertly tried to get her fired while she was on maternity leave and then later, oddly, tried to recruit her for other jobs. Another described overwork and verbal abuse that grew so severe she eventually quit.
George, whose work centers on authenticity and purpose in leadership, argued that many bosses misunderstand good leadership and emulate the wrong role models.
Moguls like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are famous for their uncompromising attitudes, their unrelenting desire for employees to accomplish the impossible, and, at times, their ruthlessness, which George said “destroy people and destroy relationships.” He drew a distinction between great visionaries and good leaders.
Take Apple Inc. for example, George said. While Steve Jobs conceived great products, it was ultimately Tim Cook’s management that made Apple the world’s most valuable company.
“[Steve Jobs] was the guy that started the business but then you have to have somebody like Tim Cook to take it over and build it,” he said. “You can get an idea of contrast. He is an excellent leader, Tim Cook, one of the best in the world.”
He cautioned that neither micromanagement nor overworking employees were prerequisites for success. In fact, he said both practices are counterproductive. In the case of Elon Musk, George observed that Tesla has faced fierce turnover and regular product recalls due to overworked employees.
“Just overloading people is going to lead to chaos and can lead to mistakes that lead to quality problems,” he said.
He also argued that employers should be humble, saying that good managers take responsibility for their mistakes.
“I think any leader who cannot admit his or her mistakes is a toxic leader … the best thing you could do is say, ‘I made a mistake. I apologize to you. I will try not to repeat it,'” he said. “I think to admit your mistakes is an essential part of leadership and it’s a sign of strength. ‘I’m confident enough I can admit I made a mistake.'”
That’s what Lynn Taylor, a workplace consultant and expert, did. An outgoing personality, Taylor was stunned to learn people were intimidated by her when she was a young manager early in her career. Recognizing that her demeanor made her subordinates less likely to approach her, she changed her tack. It worked.
“We had an incredibly low turnover. People just didn’t want to leave,” she said. “It became a tribe of people. We kept in touch with each other and in my most recent entrepreneurial endeavors where I got a patent, I ended up working with a couple [of the] people.”
That doesn’t mean managers should be pushovers, Taylor said. Instead, they should be kind and respectful without seeking the explicit approval of their employees.
“If you find yourself trying to impress your employees or trying to win them over with your kindness then you’re probably erring too much on the side of being a softy,” she said.
ResumeHelp’s career expert, Maria Correa, offered practical steps managers might want to consider.
First, she advised managers to set up regular meetings with their daily reports and incorporate some habits into their day-to-day life to ensure a strong relationship with their subordinates.
For instance, she recommended that managers listen when employees are speaking during meetings to make sure they “don’t miss out on any clues to stress, burnout, or even exciting wins that are happening.”
“Being self-aware, humble, and a people-centered manager will help make sure any blind spots you have about yourself and your management style don’t fall into the annoying category for your direct reports,” she said.
Good managers imbue their employees with a sense of mission and then “give them the freedom to go do the job,” George added.
“Today’s best leaders focus on the mission and values of their organizations and use their leadership to get everyone aligned in order to reach their goals,” he said. “Those who focus on maximizing short-term shareholder value ultimately wind up, as GE and Boeing have done, not only destroying their mission-based culture but causing shareholder value to decline.”
He added that without good management and leadership, employees’ mental health will continue to suffer and companies will flounder. And that’s bad for everybody.
“It leads to high turnover, it leads to burnout, it leads to anger,” he said. “And eventually the organization will not perform.”
Dylan Croll is a Yahoo Finance reporter.