Getting Along With Your Manager, Part One
About a decade ago, in a story about workplace kindness, called The Wisdom of Thoughtfulness, I quoted Marcus Buckingham, then a senior management consultant at The Gallup Organization who said, “People join companies and leave managers.” He found that most workers rate having a caring boss even higher than they value money or fringe benefits.
It seems several years later managers still had not gotten the message. In 2007, a Florida State University study showed that bosses can resort to some pretty offensive behavior. At the time employees said nearly 1/3 of bosses give their subordinates the silent treatment, nearly 40% fail to give proper credit, just over 25% noted their supervisors made negative comments about them to other employees or managers, and just shy of 25% said their supervisors invade their privacy and blamed others to cover up mistakes or minimize embarrassment.
More recently, a Right Management survey found full 20% of employees rate their manager as incompetent, although one wonders how those same employees were rated by their managers.
Apparently there’s lots of room for improvement in the manager/employee relationship. And in a new book, Bruce Tulgan says, “It’s Okay to Manage Your Boss.” Recently we sat down with Bruce to ask him to ask him how to start. He shares his insights in an upcoming post.
Tags: employee attitudes, managers
