The following are approximately the first 1000 words from Chapter 19 of Jonar Nader’s book,
How to Lose Friends and Infuriate Your Boss.

The boss from hell

Flying with eagles while swimming with sharks

If you think taxis are hard to find on a rainy day, try looking for one in the United States on the eve of Independence Day. After waiting two hours, and trying every kind of transport (even wedding car companies) to get back to my hotel, a taxi company took pity on me and sent a driver who was nearby, training a new recruit.

The traffic was moving at a snail’s pace. Eventually, as we neared an exit ramp, the veteran driver decided to dash into the right-hand lane to grab an opportunity to get out of the traffic jam. Everything the driver did was, in my assessment, reasonable and safe. Unfortunately, a state trooper who was parked by the side of the road did not approve of the manoeuvre. He pulled us over, stomped across to the driver’s door, yanked it open, and started shouting obscenities. The driver followed his instructions and got out of the car, only to be further verbally abused by the trooper, who was obviously demented. I could not believe that anyone would strap a pistol to this maniac’s waist.

When the driver returned to the car, he looked shaken and close to tears. I waited until he had settled before I asked him what he thought about the trooper’s behaviour. To my amazement, he did not seem to think it was excessive. He said it was not unusual, and that people had come to expect that kind of treatment from law enforcement officials. He did not think he had done anything wrong in changing lanes, but he would pay the fine. ‘That’s how the system works,’ he said.

The driver then asked me what I thought about the incident. I said that if the American public found such behaviour acceptable, the country would go to ruin. The trooper’s violence and his abusive manner were one blink away from flashpoint. If the driver had so much as breathed at the wrong time, I would not have been surprised if the trooper had assaulted him physically. Yet, the driver did not want to lodge a complaint about the incident.

I encouraged him to take the matter to the authorities, and convinced him that we could not hope for a better future if people did not stand up and fight against that type of treatment. He was a forty-year-old family man who did not feel he had the power to change the system.

I gave him my contact details in case he wanted to use me as a witness. I did not tell him that I was an author on tour, lest he ask me the name of my book. He might have concluded that I was setting him up to lose friends and infuriate the police force! What I said to him must have weighed on his mind, because several days later, he contacted me and asked me to help him to make an official complaint.

The trooper had felt empowered to abuse the public because he had several weapons at his disposal: a gun in his holster; restraining devices strapped to his belt; and a badge that gave him the power to make other people’s lives miserable while feeding his own ego. He was the trooper from hell.

The boss from hell uses similar weapons to intimidate employees and suppliers. Egotistical managers draw strength from their title and their position. They hand out fines in the form of reprimand notices, and engage in ‘wrongful arrests’ by threatening people with dismissal. Bosses from hell are usually small-minded people who would never get away with terrorising others if it were not for the power their title bestowed upon them. If they were ever stripped of their rank, their colleagues would eat them alive.

The mind boggles

Whenever I meet abusive bosses, I try to fathom how they achieved their position of authority. Why does no-one put a stop to their oppressive behaviour? Why do staff members put up with it? How can people be so destructive? Do they know what effect they have on their organisation?

Over the years, I have come to better understand the issues surrounding abusive managers, and I have been able to categorise managers into several types. More importantly, I discovered some ways to handle them, or at least to minimise the impact of their actions on me. This chapter focuses on how the boss from hell operates, and what employees can do to shelter themselves from the fallout.

Where there’s one, there are two

I once managed to catch a rat at a community hall, and I boasted to the council rangers that I had solved their rat problem. One of them said, ‘Where there’s one rat, there’s likely to be another.’

It is much the same in business. A manager who is prone to shouting at employees is likely to have a shouter as a boss. A mean-spirited boss probably treats subordinates in a way that senior executives have indicated is acceptable behaviour. This tends to answer the question about how the boss from hell can get away with sadistic conduct. When the chain of command is infested with the same disease, no-one in the chain finds it abhorrent to abuse staff members because the behaviour is considered normal and acceptable.

When a company allows bad managers to flourish, its staff members lose respect for it. They start to mistreat the company’s assets as a form of retaliation. They might even believe that the boss from hell has some sort of a stranglehold on the senior manager. How else can employees justify the company’s inaction?

Although staff members are not ‘a company’s greatest asset’ (because employees do not belong to the company), they can make or break a company. Therefore any staff member who can lose a customer, must be treated with the same respect as any staff member who can win a customer. A talented boss can take average employees and turn them into superstars, whereas an abusive boss can turn superstars into a loose confederation of warring egomaniacs who will undoubtedly spearhead the organisation’s demise.