Posts Tagged ‘petition’

Sign the Petition: Act Now To Rid The World Of Bad Bosses

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Have you or anyone you love ever suffered at the hands of a bad boss? Then get the very best revenge of all by signing “The World Needs Better Bosses Petition” and sharing it with everyone you love.

Perhaps you’ve worked for a bully, like the manager who would take away his employees’ chairs if they hadn’t made a sale and insisted they work standing up until they got one. Or maybe you know someone like the legal secretary who was treated as if she was invisible with people refusing to acknowledge her existence.

Your bad boss might not have been an outright bully, but an expert in insensitivity and rudeness. Asking you to complete work with few instructions and them shaming you when it wasn’t up to their expectations. Or making embarrassing remarks to cut you down to size in front of your colleagues like, “If I wanted your opinion I’d ask.”

Frighteningly three out of every four people report their boss is the most stressful part of their job. I believe it’s time to put a stop to bad bosses and I’m hoping you’ll agree.

It’s not okay for bad bosses to ruin our careers, damage our health and destroy our relationships. It’s not okay for bad bosses to be an acceptable part of doing business. It’s not okay for organizations to turn a blind eye because they don’t know what to do about bad bosses.

We can make organizations address this plague of bad bosses on our careers, our lives and our families.

We just have to make enough noise to cause them to start exploring the proven, practical ways bosses can be made measurably better. Please help me make this plea so loud the sound of our demand for better bosses becomes a hygiene factor no workplace can ignore.

Please sign the petition and use every medium available to you – chats, media, email, facebook, twitter, pinterest, youtube, instagram – to ask our organizations to act.

Why bad bosses are bad for all of us

Here’s why this matters so much. Bad bosses are bad for employees, bad for business and bad for our communities. Let me explain.

• Bad bosses are destroying our health – it takes most people 22 months to free themselves of bad bosses by which time our stress levels risk becoming chronic. Not only does this much stress shift our brain towards anxiety or depression, it also wears down our immune system leaving us at risk of more colds, diseases, strokes and even heart attacks. Unfortunately, this doesn’t just impact those of us with bad bosses as depression can be contagious spreading the misery of a bad boss through our families and entire communities.

• Bad bosses are undermining our success – people with bad bosses earn less money and get fewer promotions. Not only that, but poor relationships with our supervisors costs our economy $360 billion each year in lost productivity. Instead of a workforce engaged in addressing the critical economic, environmental, health and geo-political issues of our times we’re deliberately slowing down, making errors on purpose, avoiding our bosses and taking unnecessary sick leave all because of the incivility and rudeness of bad bosses.

• Bad bosses are costing us money – when one organization decided to deduct from a boss’ salary the financial costs – legal fees, recruitment fees, training fees and management time – incurred by his bad behavior the total in one year added up to nearly $160,000. Of course ultimately it’s the employees and customers of these companies who pay for this as part of the “labor overheads” that limit profitability and drive down salaries and increase prices.

What can we do about bad bosses?

Personally, I believe there are very few genuinely bad bosses, but rather an abundance of bosses who are bad at their jobs. Yet most bosses are also never offered the knowledge, skills or experiences they require to succeed in their job.

The good news is there are now proven assessment and training methods to dramatically improve the wellbeing and performance of our bosses and those who work for them. So why aren’t organizations doing more to stop this unnecessary blight of bad bosses on our workplaces?

Why aren’t they:

• Training bad bosses – while organizations spend millions of dollars each year on “leadership training” a disproportionate amount of this investment still focuses on how to fix what’s wrong with employees by commanding and controlling them, rather than how to build on what’s right with employees by empowering and enabling them. Bosses need better training, coaching and on-the-job experiences to bring out the best in people rather than stomping all over them.

• Recruiting well bosses – bosses are usually promoted because they perform well on the job, but this only one element of a good leader. The level of emotional intelligence in our bosses and their ability to nurture wellbeing in others can easily and unobtrusively be measured and should be an essential requirement before anyone is put in charge of others.

• Measuring the performance of all bosses – “what gets measured, gets done” parrots every boss I’ve ever worked for, yet the one measure missing from every organization is a scorecard of their boss’ performance. Why not give employees the means of anonymously rating their bosses and to ensure accountability, publish the results in an internal league table and tie it to eligibility for promotion or bonuses. This should be a measure of organizational health demanded by every board, shareholder and analyst.

Together we can make these organizational priorities. So please sign this petition to put an end to bad bosses and make our world a little better.

Thanks so much for reading and passing this on to anyone else who knows the pain of bad bosses. You absolutely rock!