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Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss

By Adam Bryant

• March 12, 2011

Mountain View, Calif.

IN early 2009, statisticians inside the Googleplex here embarked on a plan code-named Project Oxygen.

Their mission was to devise something far more important to the future of Google Inc. than its next search algorithm or app.

They wanted to build better bosses.

So, as only a data-mining giant like Google can do, it began analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys and nominations for top-manager awards. They correlated phrases, words, praise and complaints.

Later that year, the “people analytics” teams at the company produced what might be called the Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers.

Now, brace yourself. Because the directives might seem so forehead-slappingly obvious — so, well, duh — it’s hard to believe that it took the mighty Google so long to figure them out:

“Have a clear vision and strategy for the team.”

“Help your employees with career development.”

“Don’t be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented.”

The list goes on, reading like a whiteboard gag from an episode of “The Office.”

“My first reaction was, that’s it?” says Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president for “people operations,” which is Googlespeak for human resources.

But then, Mr. Bock and his team began ranking those eight directives by importance. And this is where Project Oxygen gets interesting.

For much of its 13-year history, particularly the early years, Google has taken a pretty simple approach to management: Leave people alone. Let the engineers do their stuff. If they become stuck, they’ll ask their bosses, whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management in the first place.

But Mr. Bock’s group found that technical expertise — the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep — ranked dead last among Google’s big eight. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.

“In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you,” Mr. Bock says. “It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.”

Project Oxygen doesn’t fit neatly into the usual Google story line of hits (like its search engine) and misses (like the start last year of Buzz, its stab at social networking). Management is much squishier to analyze, after all, and the topic often feels a bit like golf. You can find thousands of tips and rules for how to become a better golfer, and just as many for how to become a better manager. Most of them seem to make perfect sense.

Problems start when you try to keep all those rules in your head at the same time — thus the golf cliché, “paralysis by analysis.” In management, as in golf, the greats make it all look effortless, which only adds to the sense of mystery and frustration for those who struggle to get better.

That caveat aside, Project Oxygen is noteworthy for a few reasons, according to academics and experts in this field.

H.R. has long run on gut instincts more than hard data. But a growing number of companies are trying to apply a data-driven approach to the unpredictable world of human interactions.

“Google is really at the leading edge of that,” says Todd Safferstone, managing director of the Corporate Leadership Council of the Corporate Executive Board , who has a good perch to see what H.R. executives at more than 1,000 big companies are up to.

Project Oxygen is also unusual, Mr. Safferstone says, because it is based on Google’s own data, which means that it will feel more valid to those Google employees who like to scoff at conventional wisdom.

Many companies, he explained, adopt generic management models that tell people the roughly 20 things they should do as managers, without ranking those traits by importance. Those models often suffer “a lot of organ rejection” in companies, he added, because they are not presented with any evidence that they will make a difference, nor do they prioritize what matters.

“Most companies are better at exhorting you to be a great manager, rather than telling you how to be a great manager,” Mr. Safferstone says.

PROJECT OXYGEN started with some basic assumptions.

People typically leave a company for one of three reasons, or a combination of them. The first is that they don’t feel a connection to the mission of the company, or sense that their work matters. The second is that they don’t really like or respect their co-workers. The third is they have a terrible boss — and this was the biggest variable. Google, where performance reviews are done quarterly, rather than annually, saw huge swings in the ratings that employees gave to their bosses.

Managers also had a much greater impact on employees’ performance and how they felt about their job than any other factor, Google found.

“The starting point was that our best managers have teams that perform better, are retained better, are happier — they do everything better,” Mr. Bock says. “So the biggest controllable factor that we could see was the quality of the manager, and how they sort of made things happen. The question we then asked was: What if every manager was that good? And then you start saying: Well, what makes them that good? And how do you do it?”

In Project Oxygen, the statisticians gathered more than 10,000 observations about managers — across more than 100 variables, from various performance reviews, feedback surveys and other reports. Then they spent time coding the comments in order to look for patterns.

Once they had some working theories, they figured out a system for interviewing managers to gather more data, and to look for evidence that supported their notions. The final step was to code and synthesize all those results — more than 400 pages of interview notes — and then they spent much of last year rolling out the results to employees and incorporating them into various training programs.

The process of reading and coding all the information was time-consuming. This was one area where computers couldn’t help, says Michelle Donovan, a manager of people analytics who was involved in the study.

“People say there’s software that can help you do that,” she says. “It’s been our experience that you just have to get in there and read it.”

GIVEN the familiar feel of the list of eight qualities, the project might have seemed like an exercise in reinventing the wheel. But Google generally prefers, for better or worse, to build its own wheels.

“We want to understand what works at Google rather than what worked in any other organization,” says Prasad Setty, Google’s vice president for people analytics and compensation.

Once Google had its list, the company started teaching it in training programs, as well as in coaching and performance review sessions with individual employees. It paid off quickly.

“We were able to have a statistically significant improvement in manager quality for 75 percent of our worst-performing managers,” Mr. Bock says.

He tells the story of one manager whose employees seemed to despise him. He was driving them too hard. They found him bossy, arrogant, political, secretive. They wanted to quit his team.

“He’s brilliant, but he did everything wrong when it came to leading a team,” Mr. Bock recalls.

Because of that heavy hand, this manager was denied a promotion he wanted, and was told that his style was the reason. But Google gave him one-on-one coaching — the company has coaches on staff, rather than hiring from the outside. Six months later, team members were grudgingly acknowledging in surveys that the manager had improved.

“And a year later, it’s actually quite a bit better,” Mr. Bock says. “It’s still not great. He’s nowhere near one of our best managers, but he’s not our worst anymore. And he got promoted.”

Mark Klenk, an engineering manager whom Google made available for an interview, said the Project Oxygen findings, and the subsequent training, helped him understand the importance of giving clear and direct feedback to the people he supervises.

“There are cases with some personalities where they are not necessarily realizing they need a course correction,” Mr. Klenk says. “So it’s just about being really clear about saying, ‘O.K., I understand what you are doing here, but let’s talk about the results, and this is the goal.’ ”

“I’m doing that a lot more,” he says, adding that the people he manages seem to like it. “I’ve gotten direct feedback where they’ve thanked me for being clear.”

GOOGLE executives say they aren’t crunching all this data to develop some algorithm of successful management. The point, they say, is to provide the data and to make people aware of it, so that managers can understand what works and, just as important, what doesn’t.

The traps can show up in areas like hiring. Managers often want to hire people who seem just like them. So Google compiles elaborate dossiers on candidates from the interview process, and hiring decisions are made by a group. “We do everything to minimize the authority and power of the manager in making a hiring decision,” Mr. Bock explains.

A person with an opening on her team, for instance, may have short-term needs that aren’t aligned with the company’s long-term interests. “The metaphor is, if you need an administrative assistant, you’re going to be really picky the first week, and at six months, you’re going to take anyone you can get,” Mr. Bock says.

Google also tries to point out predictable traps in performance reviews, which are often done with input from a group. The company has compiled a list of “cognitive biases” for employees to keep handy during these discussions. For example, somebody may have just had a bad experience with the person being reviewed, and that one experience inevitably trumps recollections of all the good work that person has done in recent months. There’s also the “halo/horns” effect, in which a single personality trait skews someone’s perception of a colleague’s performance.

Google even points out these kinds of biases in its cafeteria line. The company stacks smaller plates next to bigger ones at the front of the line, and it tells people that research shows that diners generally eat everything on their plate, even if they are full halfway through the meal. By using the smaller plate, Google says, they could drop 10 to 15 pounds in a year.

“The thing that moves or nudges Googlers is facts; they like information,” says Ms. Donovan, who was involved in the management effectiveness study and the effort to encourage healthier eating. “They don’t like being told what to do. They’re just, ‘Give me the facts and I’m smart, I’ll decide.’ ”

The true test of Google’s new management model, of course, is whether it will help its business performance of the long haul. Just a few hours after Mr. Bock was interviewed for this article in mid-January, Google surprised the world by announcing that Larry Page, one of its co-founders, was taking over as C.E.O. from Eric E. Schmidt.

Though Mr. Schmidt explained the move on Twitter by writing , “Day-to-day adult supervision is no longer needed,” the company made clear that the point was to speed up decision-making and to simplify management.

Google clearly hopes to recapture some of the nimbleness and innovative spirit of its early years. But will Project Oxygen help a grown-up Google get its start-up mojo back?

D. Scott DeRue , a management professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, applauds Google for its data-driven method for management. That said, he noted that while Google’s approach might be unusual, its findings nevertheless echoed what other research had shown to be effective at other companies. And that, in itself, is a useful exercise.

“Although people are always looking for the next new thing in leadership,” he said, “Google’s data suggest that not much has changed in terms of what makes for an effective leader.” Whether Google’s eight rules will still apply as the company evolves is anyone’s guess. They certainly aren’t chiseled in stone. Mr. Bock’s group is continuing to test them for effectiveness, watching for results from all the training the company is doing to reinforce the behaviors.

For now, Mr. Bock says he is particularly struck by the simplicity of the rules, and the fact that applying them doesn’t require a personality transplant for a manager.

“You don’t actually need to change who the person is,” he says. “What it means is, if I’m a manager and I want to get better, and I want more out of my people and I want them to be happier, two of the most important things I can do is just make sure I have some time for them and to be consistent. And that’s more important than doing the rest of the stuff.”

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Developing Leaders and Managers: A Case Study

• Author: Sheryl McAtee
• Management, Supervision & Leadership

Jeanette started the weekend frustrated. On Wednesday morning, she had asked Bob to have his team draft an executive summary about an emerging challenge for senior management.  Based on feedback from her own coach, Jeanette was working on being clearer with her team about action items, deadlines and the reasons behind them.

With that in mind, on Wednesday, she told Bob that she wanted a two-page draft no later than the end of the day Friday. She and Bob discussed an outline for the summary, with key points to incorporate. Jeanette told Bob she planned to finalize the summary over the weekend, so her boss would have it Monday morning.  Jeanette felt pleased by her clarity, and expected good outcomes based on the discussion.

The end of Friday came, so Jeanette wrote an email to Bob to check on the status. Bob acknowledged that his team had given him a draft by noon, but he had not had time to look at it before the end of the day, and he needed to log off for a family event.  Bob attached the unreviewed draft executive summary to the email, “just in case you need it now.”

Jeanette was irritated. Of course she needed it now! She has clearly explained on Wednesday that she would be working on it over the weekend, and Bob’s lack of focus on a mission-critical item seemed irresponsible. She opened the draft Bob had forwarded and became even more irritated. The document was full of technical jargon and was three pages long – a full page longer than her instructions. It was going to take hours to fix it.

Jeanette considered a few options:

• Insist that Bob take responsibility for the project, directing him to review the draft and send her his final version by noon Saturday. While this would contradict Jeanette’s commitment to work-life balance, Bob needed the pain of the negative consequence, so he would not make the same mistake again.
• Write to senior leadership, communicating a delay in the executive summary, so Jeanette would not have to spend her own time on the project over the weekend, and so Bob could “right the ship” upon returning to work on Monday.
• Finalize the executive summary over the weekend, as promised to senior leadership. Share the revision with Bob and set up a coaching/feedback session on Monday to discuss the problems and what should be done differently next time – both with the timeline and with the document itself.

Pause and think about how you would address this if you were Jeanette.  Would you have pursued one of these options? What other options do you see? What would you have done?

In the end, after taking some time to calm down, Jeanette chose the third option. While this required the most time for Jeanette, it got the senior leaders what they needed and Bob received the coaching that he needed. On Monday, Bob also shared the guilt he felt, recognizing that his boss had to work harder over the weekend because of his failure to manage his time and his team’s work better.

There are no right answers to this case study – how you address it depends on your personality, relationships, organizational culture and roles, as well as the project itself. The development lies in asking the right questions, owning your own development needs and considering the options that both build a better team and a better organization over time.

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Google's Quest to Build a Better Boss

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Building a Better Boss? As Google Found, It’s Simpler Than You Think

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Leave it to Google to be the company that believed they could figure out how to build a better boss.

According to a story in Sunday’s New York Times , the effort was code named Project Oxygen, and Google applied the same sort of rigorous technical evaluation to the project — “analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys, and nominations for top-manager awards….(correlating) phrases, words, praise and complaints” — that they might apply to, say, figuring out how to provide news without involving any human editors.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Google developing an algorithm that could somehow take this very human activity and make it something very different. They found that the “Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers” that they came up with were, as the Times put it, “forehead-slappingly obvious” so much so that “it’s hard to believe that it took the mighty Google so long to figure them out.”

What Google found out about management

Here are a few examples:

• “ Have a clear vision and strategy for the team.”
• “Help your employees with career development.”
• “ Don’t be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented.”

“My first reaction was, that’s it?” says Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president for “people operations,” which is Googlespeak for human resources.

The thing that surprised Bock, but will probably come as no surprise to most HR people and managers who deal with engineers or technical people, is this, the Times reports:

Bock’s group found that technical expertise — the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep — ranked dead last among Google’s big eight. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers. In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you,” Bock says. “It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.”

Pardon me while I sit here shocked for a moment, because it isn’t much of a generalization to say that engineers and people with a strong technical bent are usually terrible when it comes to people skills — the very keys to a strong manager. That Bock and the Google team would find that employees ranked technical expertise so low in a survey about management skills shows just how deep in the sand their heads are over at Google when it comes to having some intuitive knowledge of what makes good managers tick.

Putting Project Oxygen to work

Think I’m broad-brushing technical people this way? Maybe, but I’ve dealt with way too many tech people to not see that this lack of a people-skills gene is probably what makes someone a good engineer in the first place. And, I am reminded of it every time I deal with my Boeing engineer neighbor who seems to have zero capacity to deal with anyone else on the block the way normal, personable humans would.

The Times story points out that Google WAS able to apply their legendary focus to Project Oxygen they way they do anything else they set their sights on.

HR has long run on gut instincts more than hard data. But a growing number of companies are trying to apply a data-driven approach to the unpredictable world of human interactions… In Project Oxygen, the statisticians gathered more than 10,000 observations about managers — across more than 100 variables, from various performance reviews, feedback surveys and other reports. Then they spent time coding the comments in order to look for patterns… Once Google had its list, the company started teaching it in training programs, as well as in coaching and performance review sessions with individual employees. It paid off quickly. “We were able to have a statistically significant improvement in manager quality for 75 percent of our worst-performing managers,” Bock says… Google executives say they aren’t crunching all this data to develop some algorithm of successful management. The point, they say, is to provide the data and to make people aware of it, so that managers can understand what works and, just as important, what doesn’t.”

Effective leadership? Not much has changed

I’m all for anything that can help improve management and managers, because we don’t have a lot of Peter Drucker’s out there today who are breaking new ground and revealing wonderful new insights. And Drucker would probably be amused by this very interesting observation gleaned from Google’s Project Oxygen efforts — when it comes to management and leadership, not much has really changed.

“Although people are always looking for the next new thing in leadership,” said D. Scott DeRue, a management professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business who talked to The New York Times, “Google’s data suggest that not much has changed in terms of what makes for an effective leader.”

THAT may actually be the most important thing to come out of Project Oxygen. Yes, Google will undoubtedly be able to improve their managers with the research and insights they will get from the project, but in the end, they will know something else important too: management ain’t rocket science, nor is it computer engineering or something that can be solved and perfected with a snazzy new algorithm.

No, managing and leading people is about listening, helping them with what they need to do a better job, taking time when they need it, showing them where everything is going, and staying consistent.

I love Google, but isn’t it just like them to spend so much time, effort, and energy on something they could have gotten from just talking to any smart HR person — or cracking open a Peter Drucker book or two?

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Building a Better Boss

Bad managers can make or break your organization's ability to achieve its goals. Here's how you can help them improve.

Christian Shinkle, SHRM-CP, admits that he used to be a bad boss. Working as a restaurant manager years ago, he says, he was a “Gordon Ramsay-type,” alluding to the reality TV chef from “Hell’s Kitchen” known for berating contestants.

Shinkle would shout at employees, detailing their mistakes in blunt terms. And it was effective, for a while. “I was able to get things done, and I got promoted,” he says. 

But his behavior backfired several times. He recalls the turning point for him. As he was yelling at a new cook for being slow, some of his other employees staged an intervention of sorts. “Why are you talking to him like that?” they asked. 

Shinkle realized his behavior only made the new cook more nervous, and it disturbed the rest of his staff. He trained himself to think about how to solve the problem rather than flying off the handle each time someone didn’t perform as expected or made a mistake. 

“A lot of times, just by slowing down and looking at it from the employee’s perspective, you can understand why the employee made the mistake in the first place and figure out how to prevent it,” says Shinkle, who’s currently an HR manager for Jax LLC, which operates Golden Corral restaurants from its headquarters in Charlotte, N.C.

So, when he recently heard that a restaurant manager was shouting at workers, he told him: “We’re not paying people enough to get treated like that. If there’s a problem, you’re going to have to talk to them about it.”

Bad bosses—whether they’re on the front lines or in the executive suite—can make employees’ lives miserable. The behavior of a poor manager lowers morale and increases stress. Ultimately, research shows, organizations suffer from increased absences, lower productivity and higher turnover. 

“The person who sets the tone for the team and helps you be successful or not is the manager,” says David Deacon, a 30-year HR veteran and author of The Self-Determined Manager (Motivational Press, 2019).

But HR professionals are in a unique position to help managers improve, contributing to their companies’ long-term success.

“Managers are almost like a secret weapon for us,” Deacon says. “If we can align the managers in a way that gets them creating those team dynamics … that gets them propelling their teams forward, we can make an enormous difference for our organizations.”

The Damage 

Companies can’t achieve their goals without employees who are engaged and productive, and managers are the critical touch point. 

Half of workers who quit their jobs say they left because of their managers, according to the results of Gallup’s 2017 State of the Workplace survey. Employee dissatisfaction with their bosses has been linked to low engagement scores. Only one-third of U.S. workers are engaged in their jobs, and, globally, just 15 percent are engaged. Managers alone account for 70 percent of the variance in team-level engagement, according to Gallup.

And the damage caused by a problematic manager can be felt long after he or she is gone. 

“Having a bad manager, even up to five managers ago, can still have a residual effect on performance today,” says Brian Kropp, group vice president of Gartner’s HR practice. 

In their defense, managers are juggling workloads that have increased dramatically over the past decade. The average middle manager has 50 percent more direct reports than a decade ago, Kropp says, and spends about 15 percent less time with each of them.

This is partly the result of a changing work environment. Organizations are demanding that everyone do more. Technology is constantly changing. Managers are flooded with data, requiring ongoing analysis and quick decisions. 

“They have all of the responsibility without much authority or support to make decisions,” Deacon says.

Thirty-seven percent of 1,285 managers surveyed believe it’s “very challenging” or “extremely challenging” to manage the performance of others, according to a Society for Human Resource Management survey conducted in 2018. And 38 percent believe it’s very or extremely challenging to develop the right culture for effective performance.

What Bosses Do That Makes Employees Leave

Here are some of the top manager issues that cause employees to quit their jobs, according to a survey of 1,043 employed U.S. adults conducted by The Harris Poll for Yoh.

Lack of Training

Many managers are promoted because they excel as individual contributors or simply for seniority. And companies often don’t provide rigorous management training, focusing instead on processes and procedures. At most, managers may be taught how to write a performance review or a performance improvement plan.

“We put them in charge of other people, and someone teaches them to do a little extra paperwork, but nobody actually teaches them to do the people work,” says Bruce Tulgan, founder and chief executive officer of RainmakerThinking Inc., a manager research and training company. Tulgan is the author of The 27 Challenges Managers Face (Jossey-Bass, 2014).

When managers are trained, often the focus is on telling them how to respond when things go wrong. 

Organizations might be reluctant to invest in training because of the cost. However, the price tag for training may pale in comparison to the costly impact of bad managers, says Luana Graves Sellars, who provides HR consulting with Talent Curve Solutions, based in Cary, N.C.

Even if it’s not feasible to direct more training dollars toward managers, HR can help raise awareness within their organizations about what good management looks like.

As chief talent officer at Mastercard for five years, Deacon gathered anonymous employee feedback about supervisors in annual surveys. While the risk of false positives or negatives is high, Deacon says, “it signals loud and clear that how someone is managing people is important.”

Great managers understand the impact they have on their team members’ work environment.

“Good managers consciously and deliberately choose to create an environment for the team where good things happen,” Deacon says. “A great manager will figure out what each individual can and should contribute, and what the collective ambition should be, and will be very clear on what that looks like.”

The best managers are constantly asking: How do they need my help? How can I help them grow? By encouraging their employees’ growth, they give them something to work for—and create a more productive team as a result, he says.

In addition to more and better training, some companies are using technology to provide new managers with extra support. For example, research shows that people tend to think about quitting after their birthday or when it’s been a while since they last took a vacation. 

“We’ve started seeing companies use technology to nudge a manager around when these important events are occurring,” Kropp says. “These are the times you should check in with employees to see if they’re at an elevated risk.” 

How to Build and Qualify People-Ready Managers

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) is helping HR build better People Managers by creating the People Manager Qualification (PMQ), a new learning program scheduled to launch later this year. 

The program’s evidence-based resources are designed to help new and aspiring managers master the people-focused skills they need, including how to:

• Hire team members with the right skills.
• Have conversations to motivate team members and improve their performance.
• Develop team members’ skills for becoming effective learners.
• Leverage assessments of people to enable greater efficiencies.
• Evaluate team dynamics and resolve conflicts.
• Make the most of partnerships with HR team members.

The program will provide an interactive, dynamic learning experience featuring virtual, instructor-led courses with immediate takeaways. Managers will receive more than 40 hours of virtual learning programming, along with self-assessments and other learning-proficiency assessments, and they can practice what they’ve learned with virtual role-play exercises. The goal is to help managers develop skills that they can use immediately to improve their teams in the near-term. Most important, the program can help HR unlock human potential within organizations, empowering HR professionals to become strategic leaders in workforce development and corporate sustainability.

“If you ask yourself, ‘What can I do to build a better workplace for a better world?’ creating better people managers is the likely answer,” says Alexander Alonso, SHRM-SCP, SHRM’s chief knowledge officer. For more information, click here .

Raising Self-Awareness

Good managers don’t shout, bully, belittle or play favorites. But poor managers might not realize that these behaviors are counterproductive. 

“Most bad managers think they’re doing a fine job,” Kropp says. “They generally lack self-awareness. In those situations, trying to convince someone that they’re doing a bad job is rarely successful. They have to come to their own self-realization.” 

HR professionals can guide those conversations with managers to help them realize that there are better ways to achieve their goals. 

Here are some common types of problematic managers and advice for helping them improve, according to management experts:

Micromanagers. Employees say micromanagers are the worst type of boss, according to a 2018 Comparably survey of 2,248 respondents, primarily in the tech sector. Their constant second-guessing and smothering behavior frequently stems from their own insecurity, says Joan Caruso, managing director of The Ayers Group in New York City, which provides executive coaching.

They can change if they can learn what’s causing their insecurity. Often, it’s fear.

“There are managers, men and women, who have imposter syndrome,” Caruso says. They think if they let something slip, others will find out they’re not worthy of their position.

Caruso once coached an executive who was a control freak. She learned that he had survived a plane crash when he was young. As a result, “he never wanted to give up control,” she says. “What we try to do as a coach is help them unpack that.” 

She uses role-playing exercises to help micromanagers learn to delegate more tasks to team members. The exercises might also give them the ability to understand how their actions can be demoralizing for subordinates. She tries to help them realize that they’re empowering others when they let them make decisions. 

Neglectful managers. The opposite of micromanagers, these managers don’t provide their direct reports with the guidance, support and coaching they need. Tulgan argues that there’s an “undermanagement epidemic” going on in the workplace right now. 

Without adequate training, most new managers won’t spend quality time with their individual team members. They say they’re too busy. Or they think they’re communicating because they e-mail them or see them in meetings.

“What happens is managers lull themselves into a false sense of security,” Tulgan says. “They think they’re keeping track. But problems hide below the radar, and then they blow up.” 

Then, everyone’s scrambling to put out fires, leaving little time for quality one-on-one conversations with employees. The team is caught in a vicious cycle of undermanagement.

Todd Saffell, HR manager at Rueter’s, a 130-employee construction and agricultural equipment distributor based in Des Moines, Iowa, says he recently had two technicians quit after just six months with the company because their manager failed to provide a consistent workflow. They would finish one job, for example, and then wait hours for their next assignment.

“We worked with that service manager as well as others to develop long-term plans so the employees can see the workflow,” including what their next job will be, Saffell says.

As a result, workers are able to plan ahead better. “If you know it’s getting close to planting season, you’re less likely to take a day off because you understand the direct impact on that customer,” he says.

Bully bosses. They rule through fear and intimidation and leave workers cowering in their wake. Caruso gets their attention by asking: “Could you behave differently if your job depended on it?” Then she tries to determine if they bully everyone or just those they supervise. 

Usually, bullies will behave quite differently around those who outrank them. She considers that a positive sign. It means they’re aware of their behavior and can control it when it’s beneficial.

“For some, all they need to hear is that they’re never going to be promoted again if they don’t stop,” she says. But it can take a long time to break bad habits and even longer for those around them to believe that they’re truly reformed.

Caruso helps bully bosses identify their triggers and teaches them how to avoid or respond to those triggers. (They can agree, shut up or walk away.) Sometimes, she’ll even write scripts for them. She teaches them to ask questions before they react, such as “Can you help me understand the situation?” 

However, she admits, coaching doesn’t always work. 

“I can’t make them change,” she says. “The company can’t make them change. If they won’t, I have to go back to the CEO and say, ‘You have to create consequences.’ ”

Beyond the potential legal risk of creating a hostile work environment, bully bosses can damage an organization’s reputation. When employees quit, they might record their complaints on employer-review websites such as Glassdoor. Sometimes they’ll even name the offending manager. HR professionals can show such comments to the bully boss and explain that these reports could limit their future career opportunities, she says.

In some cases, faster action is required.

“If their behavior has heightened to the level that they’re scaring employees, I honestly don’t think they have a place in the workplace,” says Skye Mercer, SHRM-SCP, an HR consultant based in Iowa City, Iowa. 

Slamming doors and cursing at subordinates are unacceptable, period. Mercer says she would refer a manager exhibiting such behavior to the employee assistance program for an anger management class.

Divisive bosses. These managers play favorites, pit team members against one another and hoard information as power. 

“Bad managers divide and conquer,” Deacon says. “They like individuals to feel they’re at a disadvantage.”

But team members acting collectively can push for change. HR professionals should take these complaints seriously and search for data, such as engagement scores and turnover rates, to demonstrate a business reason to compel better behavior, he says. 

When working with divisive managers, Caruso will often suggest simple behavior changes to get the ball rolling. If a 360-degree feedback survey shows employees don’t feel appreciated, she will help the manager pick small things to thank employees for that week. She’ll ask the manager to record his actions and staff reactions in a journal to help him be more conscious of the encounters. And they’ll discuss the actions in their biweekly meetings. 

Helping problem managers improve can seem like a lot of effort. Business leaders might think it’s not worth the cost. But those leaders might change their minds if HR helps them understand the price of allowing bad managers to continue mistreating their teams.

“People leave bosses, even if they’re in good jobs,” Caruso says. “And they stay because of good bosses.”  

Dori Meinert is senior writer/editor for HR Magazine.

Lego sculpture by Nathan Sawaya.

Surviving a Bad HR Boss 

By sherrona lawrence, shrm-cp .

HR professionals have had bad bosses, too. Bad bosses add stress to your workday and can even make you question your career choice. I’m living proof that you can survive a bad manager. 

Here are some tips: 

Keep your cool. Bad bosses like to push you to your mental limit. Take a deep breath and concentrate on turning your negative situation into a positive one. Keep a smile on your face, even if it’s fake. It gives you some sense of control. 

Don’t be shy. Bad bosses have a way of taking credit for your work. Include your initials in your projects, and casually mention what you’re working on with business leaders.

Think big. Bad bosses can crush your dreams. Stay focused on your long-term career goals. Find a mentor outside your organization. 

Stay confident. Bad bosses can damage your self-image. Don’t doubt yourself. Seek support from friends and colleagues. Volunteer to help others.

Be prepared to move on. Bad bosses are sometimes protected by the company because they’re moneymakers, or maybe they’re related to the founder. In those cases, you have three choices: 1) learn to tolerate the bad manager, 2) find a new position at the company under a different manager or 3) find a new job elsewhere.

Sherrona Lawrence, SHRM-CP, is benefits administrator at Youth Advocate Programs Inc. in Harrisburg, Pa.

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