Employees love to complain about their bosses - and many of them have good reason to. But if any of your people are whining about your own management style, you may want to point out that you could not possibly be as bad as the boss described in a story over at CommonTies.com.
Working for Satan is Deborah Abrams Kaplan's tale of working for a truly nightmarish boss.
The company published advertising books – but the venture was "financially and morally bankrupt". Thanks to the boss' appalling management, books were at least two years behind. Needless to say, this problem lead to constant angry calls from advertisers who wanted to know where the books were. Kaplan was a brand new employee and she was not prepared for working at this place.
"'Satan' taught me to lie to clients," she writes, "telling them the books were almost finished."
As bad as that sounds, it barely scratched the surface of how bad things really were.
"I soon learned that this was not a normal work environment," she says. "Satan was rumored to have a cocaine addiction, and he often didn't return after lunch. Routinely he wouldn't show for scheduled interviews, leaving prospective employees sitting for hours in the reception area. Staff was repeatedly warned not to talk with them, for fear we might relay our experiences.'
So your assistant may be grumpy because you forgot to say thank you for working overtime last week. Your employees may be complaining about the cuts to the benefits program. But now you can point them to this blog - and the moaning is likely to stop.