“How can we tell him what happened without making him mad?”
The year was 2006. I was the Leadership Development Branch Chief for an Agency in the National Capital Region.
While on my way to the weekly Branch Chief’s meeting with our Director, I passed the Branch Chief of Security as he asked that question to his assistant. In our meeting, the Security Chief reported an incident that had occurred that week in a way that sounded about as serious as “the power went out and the ice cream melted.”
Our Director noted the report and continued around the table, asking each of us for our weekly updates. I remember thinking that whatever had happened, the Security Chief had done a great job of reporting it in a way that no one could object to. And while I had no idea of the actual severity of the incident based on the report I heard in that meeting, I felt confident that our Director (who had a reputation for humiliating people in public if they told him something he didn’t want to hear) likewise had no idea of what had really happened.
That event was the spark that inspired my doctoral research and became the basis for my dissertation.
Let me offer an uncomfortable truth for your consideration: pretty much everybody lies at some time for one reason or another. Most people don’t enjoy being dishonest and even find it stressful when they feel forced into it. So, if we accept that the stress associated with lying can be bad for our physical and mental health, why do we do it?
History offers numerous examples of people lying to protect others from harm. And at a personal level, we may lie to avoid hurting someone’s feelings, to avoid an unwanted or potentially dangerous interaction with another person, or to avoid putting our jobs at risk. My research on this topic focused on specific situations where people felt the need to lie to protect themselves or their team from a “bad boss.”
What Constitutes a “Bad Boss?”
Before we continue, here is the definition of a “bad boss” that I used when I began my research in 2007.
Behaviors included being unresponsive to employees when they reported problems, ignoring the problem after it had been reported, and most importantly, responding in an aggressive or verbally abusive manner to the employee making the report. In fact, the most frequently occurring expression that the participants in my study used to describe the behavior that discouraged them from reporting problems upward was that the manager “shot the messenger.” In other words, the manager either actually blamed the employee for the problem or misdirected their anger and frustration about the problem to that employee.
My research indicated there were a variety of ways people lied to their bosses when reporting business-related problems (i.e., bad news). In some cases, the subordinate delayed reporting an issue as they waited for the “best time” to report it or just didn’t report it at all. In other cases, they omitted, altered, or softened certain details that might have triggered an adverse response from their boss.
In other words, the subordinate withheld, distorted, or otherwise misrepresented their reporting of business-related problems to protect themselves from adverse manager behaviors. This created potential risk to their organization because it could have resulted in managers making significant decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate information provided by their subordinates.
My original research (published in 2009) assumed that there was only one kind of bad boss, which I now call the “actively bad” kind. These are the ones most people think of when you do the “best boss – worst boss” exercise with a group.
I used that exercise in the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense for roughly 15 years. I estimate that I guided over 4,000 federal employees through the exercise during that time, and noticed that, no matter where I conducted the exercise, certain behaviors almost always wound up on the list. The most frequently mentioned ones were:
- Poor self-control manifested as bullying, threatening, abusive, explosive, or otherwise volatile behavior.
- Mistaking aggressiveness for strength. (Good leaders do need strength of character and decisiveness of action to stand up to challengers who insist on playing a zero-sum game, to protect their team from internal and external threats, and to model desired behavior for their team. But strength and aggressiveness are two very different things.)
- Dishonesty (including taking credit for the work of others).
- One-way loyalty (demanding loyalty without returning it).
- Humiliating subordinates in public (which not only harms the subordinate but can also cause reputational harm to the boss in the eyes of anyone who witnessed the event).
- Treating employees like servants, or as disposable parts, rather than as valued members of a team.
- Favoritism, including nepotism (by the way, nepotism can be breathtakingly corrosive to teams).
- Ruling by fear (intentionally trying to make working for them a traumatic experience as a means of control. This is a costly and self-defeating approach that demoralizes individuals and teams, kills commitment and innovation, and can easily chase out your best employees. It can also make it hard to backfill the people who leave, as word-of-mouth spreads about what it’s like to work for that boss.)
- Unrealistic expectations. Good teams can go “above and beyond” in bursts when special situations arise. Bad bosses make the “above and beyond” level of effort into the “new normal.” Dedicated employees often do everything they can to prevent the system they are working in from failing (this can not only lead to the best employees burning out but also enables the boss to ignore problems).
- And, of course, shooting the messenger.
It is worth noting that the “bad boss” behaviors listed during the exercise were almost always people-oriented (how that boss treated the members of their team) as opposed to task-oriented behaviors (how well or poorly that boss did the non-people parts of their own job). As Maya Angelou said, “…people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Another significant insight into this topic, gained in the years since I conducted my original research, is the existence of another distinct type of “bad boss.” This is what I call the “passively bad boss.” These are leaders who may be very pleasant but often avoid making decisions, frequently get bogged down in the research phase of problem-solving (i.e., analysis paralysis), or second-guess themselves, including frequently changing their “final” decisions. While the passively bad boss may not be as overtly toxic to their team as an actively bad one, they still frustrate their teams and kill forward momentum because they don’t provide a clear path ahead when dealing with problems.
How to Encourage Honest Communication
Unfortunately, even good bosses get lied to, often for reasons outside the leader’s control. However, there are things you can do to encourage your team to be honest with you. These include:
- Make it a regular part of your message that you want to hear about problems early, before they can cause unnecessary damage. This cannot just be a “one and done” message. People need to hear it from you regularly, so they realize you really mean it. This becomes more important as you move up the ranks because of the insulating effect of power—that is, the higher up the ladder you go, the more intimidated people may feel about “speaking truth to power.”
- Create a “psychologically safe” workplace where people feel that they can ask questions, offer opinions, make suggestions, take risks, or admit when they have made a mistake without being afraid of how you will react. Without this, a leader’s “early warning system” is compromised, and their situational awareness is diminished.
- And most importantly, while you cannot directly change the behavior of the members of your team, you can change your own behavior. Pay more attention to how you react to others and learn to push your own mental “pause button” to allow yourself time to think before you speak in tense or challenging situations. Don’t let your emotions drive your behavior.
Never forget that bad information leads to bad decisions. You may not want to hear about problems in your organization, but as a leader, you need to hear about them. As the old saying goes, “If you aren’t hearing about any problems, you’ve got a problem.”
To learn more about my original research on this topic, you can find an 11-minute video summary on YouTube.
Bill Velbeck, PhD began his federal career in uniform as a Hospital Corpsman in the U.S. Coast Guard. Upon his honorable discharge, he began a twenty-year career in the healthcare field. Following the events of 9-11-2001, Bill returned to federal service working in areas including leadership development and internal performance improvement consulting.
