#HorribleBosses — The Twitter space was agog on Tuesday, March 22, 2022 after employees called out CEO of Nigerian payroll startup, Bento Africa Ebun Okubanjo and co-founders, Chidozie Okonkwo.
The article published by Tech Cabal titled “Tyranny in the workplace: The chaotic culture of Bento Africa” showcased Ebun Okubanjo terribly treatment of his workers.
As stated in the article, the call out on Bento Africa CEO, Ebun was as a result of alleged verbal abuse, ranging from unconscionable curse words and verbal abuse, refusing to grant leave and time off, erratic termination without following due process – basically just deactivating their emails and slack accounts, he was also accused of allegedly telling laid-off employees that they wouldn’t get a job anywhere.
However, if you work for an ineffective boss a really bad one you likely know the difference between an inexperienced or incompetent boss and a truly horrible one.
You likely appreciate the normal imperfections that supervisors have and realize that most every supervisor will fall short in one area or another over time. But you also know that the worst ones have the audacity to work at it. There are people who actually work at being horrible and then substantiate their efforts by relying on deeply negative beliefs that they hold and espouse about employees.
Horrible bosses compel good employees to leave because they are more than ready to advance their own poor and ineffectual leadership and will create a completely chaotic and toxic organizational culture to do so. The result is that the entire organization suffers as employees become more and more disengaged while delivering less-than-optimal performance.
Here are 10 things that some of the most horrible bosses believe about their own employees.
1. You are far less important than they are.
Horrible bosses really believe that you are less important than they are. They aren’t interested in your needs or the needs of your colleagues, and so they won’t invest in you. They don’t concern themselves with your professional development needs. They won’t be bothered to consider what benefits or resources you might need to be successful. Horrible bosses believe that their needs are more important than yours, and they believe that what they care about is far more important than what you care about.
2. You should be held to higher standards than they are.
Even though they are the boss and should be expected to lead by example, they don’t. Horrible bosses don’t believe they should be held accountable in the same way as their employees. They believe that power can be abused and that they should—of course—be held to much lower standards than you. In their minds, they make the rules so they should be able to break them whenever and however they want. Rules and standards are put in place for employees who they perceive as inferior to them.
3. You are inferior to them – in most every way.
Horrible bosses are often on a power trip and seek opportunities to grab more and more power in an effort to cover for their insecurities. Indeed, they want to believe that they are superior to you and you are inferior to them by virtue of positional authority and status, and they will do whatever it takes to maintain the imbalance of power and are willing to work overtime to make sure you recognize it. If you don’t like the way things are, they stand ready to send you on your way because they perceive that you can be very easily replaced.
4. You don’t add value and are easily replaceable.
Most of us acknowledge that we are indeed replaceable. That is a hard concept at times because we aren’t actually replaceable as human beings, but in the workplace, we are all replaceable. Life doesn’t stop and organizations don’t just shut down after employees resign. But horrible bosses don’t ever want employees to forget it though. They find it difficult to express appreciation and gratitude for the value you add or what you contribute to the team, and they don’t even pretend to want to. To the contrary, horrible bosses will work overtime to diminish your value at the expense of inflating their own and with a goal to maintain a sense of superiority over you.
5. You could never be as smart as they are.
Surely this is no surprise to anyone. Horrible bosses believe they are the smartest people in the room because thinking otherwise would damage their overt superiority complex. When you and your colleagues complain that your boss never asks for your ideas or seeks your input, you should know that it’s because he can’t even conceive that your idea would be worth hearing because none would ever be better than what he puts on the table. The saddest part of this is that the more these bosses behave this way, the more obvious it is that they actually have an inferiority complex.
6. You don’t have a right to question their authority.
Horrible bosses really believe that you should just shut up and do what you are told. They’re not open to being held accountable by you or any of their employees, and they go out of their way to implement policies, strategies and techniques to discourage dissent and reward agreement. Horrible bosses intentionally create “yes men” because that’s all they want around them. And to keep them coming, they’ll reward the totally submissive behavior regardless of the damage to organizational health or performance.
7. Ethical behavior and respect are optional.
Horrible bosses don’t deem respect and professionalism to be core aspects of the job. They operate under whatever values and ethics will advance their interests and view these aspects of the job as negotiable (of course only by them). They are ready and willing to disrespect you personally and professionally whenever it suits them to do so and will justify unethical decisions by whatever means necessary.
8. You are to blame for their failures.
There aren’t many people who can throw you under the bus as well as a horrible boss can. They’ll take credit for the successes and place all the blame for mistakes on you and other employees. Horrible bosses can’t allow themselves to be perceived as making mistakes or being wrong. They can’t accept fault and won’t apologize without coming under serious duress. When things go right, horrible bosses stand ready to take credit, but when things go wrong, they will indeed make sure that everyone knows that it was your fault.
9. You should kiss up to them and rub their ego.
This is especially true when the horrible boss is the one who actually hired you into the company. Horrible bosses believe that it is your privilege to work for them and that you should be ever grateful for the opportunity. They believe that because they have “given” you a job, you ought to be more than ready to kiss up and be more than happy to do so. Horrible bosses believe that when they say jump, your only response should be to ask how high.
10. You deserve to be micromanaged no matter how good you are at your job.
Horrible bosses believe the worst about people. They view you and your colleagues as inherently untrustworthy and maybe even as liars and cheats. As such, they believe you must be managed—literally. These type of bosses often espouse prevalent leadership theories and talk the talk, but you’ll soon notice they never really walk the walk. Instead, micromanagement is what they do best because they don’t trust you, and they don’t care how you feel about it.
Horrible bosses believe strongly in management. They believe that budgets should be managed, programs should be managed, projects should be managed, time should be managed and people—most of all people—should be managed. These bosses can appear incapable of distinguishing management from leadership and have no interest in developing competence in either area.
Please note that this article were not originally compiled by this author but were edited where necessary.
