Being a Good Boss and Being a Bad Boss

Imagine yourself coming to your office early in the morning full of enthusiasm and fresh ideas to enhance your performance. You radiantly smile while opening the door; cheerfully greet everyone while walking to your desk and sit down feeling more than ready for a productive day. At this exact moment someone really angry rushes to your table with a huge pile of papers and shouts hysterically that youve made two orthographical mistakes in your report and, moreover, you are five minutes late. It is your nervous boss, someone you have to deal with every day. She promises to fine you for your lateness and makes you retype your report. Whatever exaggerated picture this might be, for many of employees it is a sad reality. All bad bosses are bad in many different ways as well as the qualities of a good boss can range widely. However, outlining the most salient characteristics of good and bad bosses can prove helpful for many of those who plan to obtain a managing position at either a business enterprise or even at a non-profit charity.

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The most important quality of any kind of a boss must be patience. Employees will sometimes be late for work and reports will be done to a less degree of perfection than a boss might want. Nevertheless, losing ones temper will only make things worse. If employees feel safe at a workplace and know they will not be fined for making a single blunder, their productive performance will only be improved. Another worthwhile quality is being able to truly care about ones workers. Similarly to a parent doing everything possible for a comprehensive development of his or her child, any boss primary task should be to create the best conditions at a workplace enabling the employees to actualize their abilities and talents to the fullest. One more valuable characteristic is maintaining the balance between being too demanding and too indulging. There is no doubt that a good boss that wants his or her company to succeed must raise the bar of working standards a little higher than he or she knows the employees are able to reach. In this way the employees will always feel toned and motivated towards a better performance. However, it surely does not pay to be too gritty or over-demanding. It will only make the workers exhausted and overdriven. A good boss always knows what his or her employees are capable of and will push them to their limits but not beyond them. Besides that, a wise manager should definitely be just a nice person: be able to listen attentively and be grateful for what the workers do, forgive and forget their failures. Such a boss is also an expert in time management and knows how to set priorities and objectives. He or she also should have a clear vision of the companys mission and perspectives.

On the contrary, a bad boss is someone always in a bad mood and who will work it off on the employees. Such a person will try to compensate for his unlucky day by making his direct reports even more miserable. A bad boss is also extremely self-centered: he or she will always celebrate their own success instead of the teams achievement. If you happen to work under a bad boss you will probably never get praised or even given any credit for what you do. As a result, employees lose motivation and do only the minimum. Another distinctive trait of a disaster boss is managing through intimidation and intriguing. If this is the case she (and this is normally the tactics of a she) will try to instill fear of losing their job into every employee and set them all up against each other. As a consequence, the office becomes a highly unhealthy and dysfunctional place and the staff is anything but a team. One more typical behavior of a bad manager is being too critical of anything an employee does while maintaining appearance that the boss is always right and perfect in everything he or she does. Being inappreciative and showing little respect are also qualities of an inefficient manager. If you are unlucky to work under such supervision, you will never be rewarded for whatever achievement you have managed to make. The only person who will get praised and given a bonus to the salary is the boss.

There is only one thing common for both a good boss and a bad boss workers can leave both of them. A perfect boss showing respect, appreciation and instilling motivation into employees is apparently not everything to make a worker happy. Employees leave good bosses as well as bad bosses when they are offered a higher-paying or more interesting position with an opportunity of being promoted.

Therefore, a good boss and a bad boss seem to have only one common characteristic they can equally be abandoned by their workers for a better job. However, there are a great number of qualities that differentiate one type of boss from another. While a good boss always cares, motivates, supports and rewards his direct reports, a bad one will shake off his or her bad mood on the employees, notice and celebrate only his or her own achievements, intimidate and terrorize the workers. While a good boss always knows the balance between being demanding and backbreaking, a bad boss will criticize and push the employees beyond their limits until they are completely overdriven and fatigued. Having a clear vision of the companys goal and knowing why certain tasks must be accomplished also marks off a good boss from a bad one. The personal qualities count as well: the abilities to listen carefully, to put ones ambitions behind the teams goals and be able to make the best out of every worker are some of the qualities that a bad boss is certainly lacking. Unlike a bad boss, a good one knows that praise, appreciation and reward of the employees are guarantee of the companys success.