A BOSS, TOO BOSSY!

A boss in true sense should be a leader who one looks up to for guidance and support, however in today’s competitive corporate life, a boss is a person who can take your side come what may, in some scenarios we at livepeppy.com have even heard of dominating bosses.

Based on today’s corporate life, let’s take an insight on the kinds of bosses that you may encounter.

1. Boss With Limited Knowledge: There are some people who grow up the corporate ladder due to their luck and actually don’t know anything about the product or the team that they are handling. They as bosses also feel that they really don’t need to know their product / process, hence they have very limited knowledge and constantly depend on their below lineage to handle certain product / process escalations. This creates a lot of stress on the below lineage as they at times are forced to do their work and also their immediate bosses work.
2. Meeting Process Benchmarks:  Reviewing and revising benchmarks is a norm that every company goes through, however before making it very stringent or unbelievable targets as a boss one must consider that these targets / benchmarks are set for humans and a percentage of human factor levy should be considered while setting these targets. In the process to achieve these targets, one goes through extreme stress and extended office hours. This leads to no family time or even time for one self.
3. Highly Educated Boss: Boss with very high qualification, however may not have much experience on people management by which one head a whole vertical. These are the kind of bosses who feel numbers is the only way to look at achieving or reason for not achieving department targets. They are the ones who are not receptive to listening or trying to understand, however would at times become vengeful if questioned about their work that is delegated, these are the bosses who create work pressure and eventually leading to stress on employees. These bosses have a high attrition rate in their team.
4. Highly Experienced Boss: On the other hand, there are bosses who comes with loads of experience however may not posses very high education qualification, they are the ones who look at logic and believe in two way conversation, cause at times one of the best solutions to enhance ones process may be got from the lowest designation of the corporate hierarchy, for these bosses designation is only what they have earned for working and proving themselves over the years. They are approachable and are employee centric. They know how to delegate with creating minimal unwanted pressure. These bosses have less attrition and constant performance.
5. Rude & Sarcastic Bosses: Some bosses like to display that they are the boss, whether one likes it or not. The saying “Boss is always right” fits these kind of people well, as they come across as slave drivers and feel they own their team employees giving them the right to talk in the most indecent way, personally in a meeting room or in front of the whole team. Ridiculing ones team mate or colleague will never help a boss or leader to succeed as he is instilling this to all the other team mates that if their performance is not at par, they would be ridiculed as well. This creates low self esteem for that employee and as a result of which bad work place stress, the only way to deal with it is to take it up as a team to the highest authority in ones organisation.
6. Employee Rights: As a part of the induction in most of the companies, they educate their new joiners about the company norms and bodies that are created to ensure that the employee can escalate or voice in case of any unfair behavior by their colleagues / bosses, however this is only in the books, as employees one is ok going through the forced stress created in the name of targets to be met or not achieved.  Even though these bodies are created, in an organisation of 1000+ employees there is not even one such incident recorded in a year, unbelievable to be true, is this not alarming for the Human Resource Team to check, most of them know however are forced not to take action, the HR team should not wait for a specific complaint letter to take action, their random observations or cross department Skip levels should be enough to ensure their leaders at every level primarily know how to respect their employees.
7. Indian Laws For Employees: Our Judiciary has quite a few laws that can be used by an employee against his boss for harassing him / her, being partial, creating work place extremely stressful or even for displaying inappropriate behavior and using foul language.
8.  Ideal Boss: a very rare breed to find who in true sense is a leader and is employee centric. He who knows his employees pluses and minuses yet shares feedback in a professional way. He is a mentor that each employee would like to have and respect as a Boss. For such bosses their team members can put in more than 100 percent of their efforts to close a task, having the timeline pressure however also feeling the positive support from ones leader (boss).

Office stress could be trying to meet targets, working over the weekend or when on a vacation, ensuring that you are available to answer the phone post office hours in case your boss calls, are various reasons of why we have so many young deaths or young people in their earlier thirty’s with lifetime health conditions. One needs to first be a human being with ethics  to life then be a boss to make this corporate world a better place and also for a company to be at the top position as it values its employees, is a thought we leave you with to ponder!