The 5 Worst Kinds of Managers

If there’s one phrase about manager impact that I’ve learned and will never forget, it’s that “people don’t leave companies, they leave managers.” Even if people don’t leave, CEB research finds that having a bad manager drives down employee performance for up to five years. Whoa. Sounds like an easy way NOT to grow business is to manage poorly. Recently, Time wrote an article about “The 5 Absolute Worst Kinds of Bosses.” Here’s the list:

The crooked politician: This is the politically savvy boss who is believed to have gained his or her position oftentimes through some form of “cheating.”
The bully: The manager that has figured out who they need and how to influence those people, to get ahead. The bully manager craves power.
The micromanager: Self-explanatory here. This manager can’t let go; he or she needs to have control and ends up getting involved in too much day-to-day work.
The workaholic: The manager that doesn’t believe in any real type of “work-life” balance. This person often will send late night emails and expect (sometimes demand) immediate responses, because everything is “urgent.”
The BFF: A manager that has no boundaries and is “diva-like.” This manager often uses direct reports as his or her sounding board and uses the team’s time and resources.

Now, just because these are the five worst types of bosses, it doesn’t mean that everyone falls into one of these categories. I’ve been lucky enough not to have had any of these types of managers over the years, but they certainly exist, and we all have heard the stories from those that have had to live with it. Either way, the critical aspect is that even bad managers can change. How can we break poor or bad leadership habits?

What we know is that in today’s ever-changing and highly variable sales environment, good leadership is more critical than ever before.  What do sales managers (and sales organizations) need to be doing to avoid falling into these five kinds of bosses?

As we’ve studied sales manager effectiveness, we’ve identified the differentiated competencies of manager effectiveness in the world of increasing sales complexity. At the core, they do three things above all else:

Coach: Yep, they coach. But they do it in the right way by diagnosing root causes, tailoring development, and creating an ongoing dialogue.
Innovate: Investigate deal-level challenges and use that to ideate creative or novel approaches.  They also share deal-level insights with other managers.
Facilitate Judgment: Promote business ownership at the rep-level and empower the team.  Additionally, they facilitate a network of collective team support.

For each of these areas we go deep-and-wide, digging into what each of these differentiated skills look like and how organizations are helping managers build these skills. In fact, we are also running member workshops where senior sales leaders and heads of sales training can join us as we spend a day discussing how to address these and avoid managers becoming one of those five worst bosses.

CEB Sales members, register for one of our upcoming workshops on Developing Managers for the Insight Selling Era and our upcoming webinar on Driving Manager Effectiveness in the Insight Selling Era. In addition, review the Insight Selling Manager Competency Grid that provides levels of proficiency and examples of ineffective behaviors for these competencies.