Bad bosses: Will they ever reform?
“Why do we lionize bad bosses?” asked Rebecca Traister in New York Magazine. “From Scrooge McDuck to Dabney Coleman in 9 to 5,” Americans have let terrible supervisors get away with systematic cruelty because they make great characters. On The Apprentice, Donald Trump played a “brittle and shallow” boss who loved firing people. Bosses now know they will be punished for discriminating by gender or race. So the lesson “for those with power and the instinct to abuse it” is that anything goes, so long as they mistreat everyone.
For a vivid story of how bosses can go wrong, said Zoe Schiffer in TheVerge.com, look at the luggage retailer Away, a company with a brand that consumers loved, built in a “toxic work environment” that employees feared. The $1.4 billion startup’s culture was supposed to be based on “inclusiveness.” In reality, that meant employees were discouraged from communicating one-onone and felt as if they were under “constant surveillance.” CEO Steph Korey “was infamous for tearing into people” in public, calling one worker “brain dead.” Away’s so-called core values became a cudgel used to browbeat workers. In one series of messages that began at 3 a.m., Korey wrote, “In an effort to support you in developing your skills, I am going to help you learn the career skill of accountability,” before revoking their right to any paid time off. Employees were to told “utilize your empowerment” to work massive amounts of overtime—or get fired. Korey stepped down after our story on the company ran, but not before many employees had left. “Never work for your dream brand,” one former Away marketing manager said. “It’ll kill you.”
The story of Away should be a cue for “other hard-driving bosses to take a closer look at some unexamined behaviors,” said Sarah Green Carmichael in Bloomberg.com. For example, “consider the common practice of sending round-the-clock messages to staff,” which puts exhausted managers at risk of sending something they’ll later regret. Underpaying and overworking employees in order to stay “lean” also has costs: There is no prize “going to the company with the most burned-out employees.”
Not everyone in the startup world felt the criticism of Away was fair, said Jason Shen in Fast Company. “People are getting soft,” one tech investor told me after hearing about the issues at Away. In the startup world, many founders and investors believe that “making a dent in the universe is hard and employees should expect to work tirelessly.” But maybe we can all agree that at the very least “employees should expect to work somewhere free of verbal abuse, emotional manipulation, or extended unpaid overtime.”