you really mean is that you wish to separate and individuate from your parents.’’ I will be eternally grateful for my mother’s retort: ‘‘Oh, for God’s sake, Ralph. What she really means is that she just wants to be with her friends instead of her boring parents!’’ To this day I bridle whenever I hear the phrase, ‘‘What you really mean is . . . ,’’ but that’s what reading emotion is all about: deciphering the meaning behind our actions. (By the way, both parents were correct in their interpretations.)
My Education Continues
In the last chapter I shared my first encounters with the working wounded as an employee assistance counselor in Alaska. After ten years in that role I was recruited to go Outside (Alaskan slang for the Lower 48) to embark on my next career incarnation: executive in a global managed health care corporation. I rubbed shoulders with a few abrasive bosses (luckily, none of them mine) during those years, without incident—they were focused on others. I eventually left the corporate racetrack to hang out my shingle as a management consultant—I was on the trail to becoming a boss whisperer.
Over and over again I would be called in by a company to help with a ‘‘communication problem’’ (management’s diagnosis). The typical scenario was of a boss in conflict with his or her subordinates, peers, or superiors. I’d interview the parties on both sides of the conflict, and on closer examination it would become obvious that one party (composed of the coworkers) was behaving reasonably and the other (namely, the boss) wasn’t. More often than not it wasn’t a simple case of differing ideas or objectives. Instead I would discover a chronic pattern of abrasive behavior on the boss’s part that had strained working relationships to the breaking point. Coworkers were well into the defensive modes of fight or flight. They were either fighting the boss through active or passive resistance (‘‘If he thinks I’m going to lift a finger for him after the way he treated me, he’s got a big surprise coming’’) or fleeing through withdrawal (‘‘I can’t deal with her anymore— I avoid her at all costs’’). I was puzzled. Why were these apparently intelligent bosses riding roughshod over their seemingly rational, dedicated coworkers?
Boss whisperers have a great advantage over horse whisperers in that bosses talk and horses don’t. I wanted to understand what I was seeing, so I started talking to these bosses, carefully phrasing my questions so as not to provoke defensiveness. We psychotherapists are pretty good at concocting gentle questions that explore emotion and behavior—you’ve heard them before: ‘‘And how did that make you feel?’’ or ‘‘And why do you think you reacted that way?’’ By listening very carefully to put myself in their shoes, I was gradually able to see the world through their eyes and gain insight into the emotions that drove their abrasive behavior. I learned a lot, but before I put what I was learning into practice I wanted to compare my findings with others who had studied abrasive bosses.
My research began at the local bookstore, where I had no trouble finding a shelf loaded with books on abrasive bosses. These books bore remarkably similar characteristics, beginning with their melodramatic titles: Jerks at Work (Lloyd, 1999), The Bully at Work (Namie & Namie, 2003), Corporate Hyenas at Work (Marais & Herman, 1997), Crazy Bosses (Bing, 1992), Snakes in Suits (Babiak & Hare, 2006), and Brutal Bosses and Their Prey (Hornstein, 1996), to name a few. Talk about catchy titles! Authors referred variously to their books as combat guides, survival guides, bullybusting strategies, or tyrant-toppling techniques. The books typically consisted of an overview of the problem, followed by the author’s commanding and colorful classification of boss types ranging from A(ssholes) to Z(ombies). Some examples: Certified Asshole (Sutton, 2007); Bully, Paranoid, Narcissist, Bureaucrazy, Disaster Hunter (Bing, 1992); Executioner, Dehumanizer, Blamer, Rationalizer, Conqueror, Manipulator (Hornstein, 1996); Self-Involved Toxic Executive, Toxic Disorganizer, Valueless Toxic Executive (Reed, 1993); Constant Critic, Two-Headed Snake, Screaming Mimi (Namie & Namie, 2003); Angry Screamer, Saccharine Snake, Space Case, Invalidator, Cold Shoulder (Felder, 1993); and Casanova, Explosive, Gangster, Spineless Sensation, Turncoat, Backstabber, Accuser, and Zombie (Di Genio, 2002). Even the authors of one of the earliest serious research efforts into intolerable bosses (their term), Michael Lombardo and Morgan McCall (1984), couldn’t resist the seemingly irresistible lure of the lurid label, referring to these bosses as Snakes in the Grass, Attilas, Heel Grinders, Egotists, Dodgers, Business Incompetents, Detail Drones, and Slobs.
I was struck by this sensationalistic and frankly unprofessional approach to abrasive bosses. If I were to peruse the section devoted to child abuse in that same bookstore, would I find books titled Evil Parents and Their Prey or Psychoparent-Busting Strategies, complete with categories classifying parents as Baby Bashers, Kiddy Kickers, or Toxic Tot-Tormentors? The answer is no, because in today’s society, child, spouse, and elder abuse are treated as serious issues deserving of serious attention. Demonizing people who inflict pain on others is understandable but irresponsible, and more important, it’s unhelpful. I continually struggle to understand why we don’t we take employee abuse as seriously as we do these other types of harm. We have a choice: we can view abrasive bosses as evil demons who cannot change (thereby keeping our distance), or we can seek to understand the phenomenon through serious research. I decided to pursue the latter option and devoted my doctoral work to developing a deeper understanding of the abrasive bosses that filled my coaching practice.
Disappointed and disgusted by most of what I’d discovered in my bookstore ramblings, I embarked on a review of the scholarly literature on abuse in the workplace, also termed workplace bullying. I had high hopes of learning about abrasive bosses but found that the research focused almost exclusively on the impact of workplace abuse on employees. I found numerous studies that explored the types of this abuse and its effects on employees, but I couldn’t find any systematic studies conducted with the abrasive bosses themselves. Finally, I came upon an article that explained this gap, a gap termed the black hole of workplace abuse by researchers Rayner and Cooper (2003):
Gathering data about black holes is difficult because we cannot see them. The gravity pull of the black hole is so strong that light, even at its great speed, cannot escape. We know black holes exist only because of celestial bodies around them, which, for example, change course or behave ‘oddly’, sometimes being ‘eaten’ by the crushing effect of the gravity pulls from the black hole. . . . For those who study negative behavior at work, ‘the bully’ is the parallel of black holes—almost invisible to us. We gain all our data regarding bullies from other people and events that happen around them. . . . Finding and studying the bully is like trying to study black holes—we are often chasing scattered debris of complex data and shadows of the past [p. 47].
Reading this, I was struck by a BFO—a blinding flash of the obvious. There was a reason that I couldn’t find any studies of abrasive bosses: there weren’t any. Researchers hadn’t figured out a way to find them—companies certainly would be reluctant to admit that they had such individuals in their employ, and attempts to recruit participants through advertising wouldn’t work either because most abrasive bosses don’t see themselves as abrasive. Stumbling upon this black hole, I realized that researchers hadn’t interviewed abrasive bosses. They hadn’t been able to talk with them and learn why they kicked their coworkers. And then I had another blinding flash: I’d been talking to abrasive bosses for years—this boss whisperer had been getting data straight from the horses’ mouths. My conversations weren’t limited to those who’d been trampled by abrasive bosses—I’d spent thousands of hours talking with the tramplers as well. I realized I had collected valuable data over the years, data that became the foundation of my research on why abrasive bosses behave as they do and what can be done to help them change. I’m writing this book to share the insights I’ve developed from my research to help you tame the abrasive boss you manage, are managed by, or work with. But these insights aren’t based only on research—they’re also based on my observations of what does and doesn’t work when intervening with these individuals. Over the years I’ve observed managers, subordinates, and peers
