Let’s face it, nobody really likes their boss. (Except for me, of course. Love you! Ahem.) But while some bosses are despised simply because people hate being told what to do, there are some who truly deserve the scorn of their employees. These are the bosses everyone hates, the ones nobody wants to work for. They come in many different shapes and sizes, some come at you with perpetual scorn while others come at you with false smiles, but what the following all have in common is that they are nine of the worst types of bosses to work for.
9 The Hoverer
This dude refuses to trust anyone to do their job and spends all his time hovering over you, nitpicking every little decision you make. He thinks – no, he knows – that he can do your job better than you, and will hound you like a babysitter watching a hyperactive child. You’re an adult, you don’t need someone treating you like a child, but that’s what the Hoverer does. He’d be in heaven as a high school principal but instead you’re in hell because he doesn’t understand that at a certain point, you just have to trust people to get the job done.
8 The Motivational Speaker
This guy is mostly harmless – annoying as hell but not someone who’s gonna give you an ulcer either – at least until he goes full on Guru and starts treating the office like a retreat in the Himalayas. This is the dude who spends most of his time not worrying about, you know, the actual work, and all his time working on things like team-building, organizing stupid games and trust falls, making charts with gold stars and talking to everyone using nothing but buzzwords and nonsense phrases he just picked up from the 987th book he read on management techniques. He won’t really listen to a word you say and will address all your concerns and needs with meaningless platitudes. It’s incredibly off-putting and kind of dehumanizing and in the end you’ll just want to beat him to death with one of those foam rubber baseball bats he brings to the office to deal with aggression “in a healthy and proactive manner.”
7 The Hard-Ass
This one is pretty self-explanatory. Nobody likes to be yelled at all day long, or worry because they know that no matter how good a job they do they’ll just get a dismissive grunt or some other putdown about how they should somehow be doing even better. But that’s what this guy does. He’s so afraid that if he’s too easy on people they’ll slack off or make him look bad. And so he takes it to the extreme and motivates through fear, which makes everyone miserable. This is the dude who gives you an ulcer.
6 The Passive-Aggressive Fake Friend
Even though nobody likes working for the Hard Ass, this dude is somehow even worse. At least you know where you stand with the Hard Ass. The Passive Aggressive Fake Friend, however, will confuse you, tie your head up in knots and leave you a complete mess. One moment, he’ll be buying you drinks and telling you how much he likes you, and the next he’ll be selling you out to his own bosses or telling you that he’s not mad at you for not landing that account, he’s just disappointed. It’s like having your mother for a boss.
5 The Gossiper
The Gossiper is a variant of the Passive Aggressive Fake Friend and can instantly identified because this will be the dude who takes you out for drinks and spends all his time gossiping and shit-talking all of your coworkers. If he’s doing it to them, you better believe he’s doing it to you too. Even worse, he’s probably undermining you to his own bosses, selling you out just to make himself look better. You’ll think everything is going great and then one day you’ll end up talking to someone and being forced to defend yourself against things you never actually said or did. The Gossiper thrives by pitting everyone else against one another and then preying on the subsequent chaos and weakness.
4 The Suck-Up
The Suck-Up wants nothing more than to please the people above him. He’ll treat you like dirt because in his eyes you don’t matter and can’t do anything for him. And then he’ll take all your ideas and work and present them as his own. If you complain, he’ll just tell you that’s what being part of a team means. To him, you’re a peon, a peasant, and he doesn’t owe you anything, least of all his respect. In fact, he thinks you owe him, as if he’s doing you an enormous favor just by allowing you to exist in his wake while he ruthlessly climbs the corporate ladder one disingenuous piece of ass-kissery at a time.
3 The Bipolar Tyrant
This jerk will show up to work and tell you he wants something done one way and then by lunchtime he’ll be screaming at you to do it the other way even though you did exactly what he said to do earlier. By the end of the day, after you’ve changed everything around just to satisfy his earlier whim, he’ll wonder without a trace of self-awareness why it doesn’t look like it did earlier. Nothing is ever right in his eyes and you can never, ever win. The only thing you can do is just shut off the part of you that cares and just do what you’re told, no matter how ridiculous it might seem, and hope he burns out or messes up badly enough to get himself shit-canned by his bosses. And even then, you might risk getting caught up in his wake.
2 The Insecure Boss With Something to Prove
This chronically insecure loser manages to combine the worst aspects of just about every other type of boss on this list. He’ll hover over you because he doesn’t believe in you because how can he believe in somebody else if he doesn’t believe in himself? He’ll act like a hard ass because he’s afraid you don’t respect his authority. He’ll desperately pretend to be your friend so that you’ll say nice things about him and validate him. He’ll gossip about you and everyone else in order to earn social credibility. He’ll shamelessly suck-up to anyone who can help him, and he’ll constantly change his mind because he’s incapable of being resolute. He’s terrified and he will absolutely transfer that onto you at every opportunity and make your life a living hell.
1 The Incompetent Fool
This idiot is in way over his head and has no idea what he’s doing. Naturally, this will make him insecure and cause him to do all the things we just talked about that an insecure boss will do. But even worse than that, his own incompetence will cause everything you do to look bad. He’ll drag everyone who works for him down with him because he has no idea what he’s doing and everything he’ll tell you to do will likely backfire. So, in the end, his incompetence ends up looking like your incompetence. The best thing you can hope for with an incompetent boss is that somehow, someway, someone will notice that it’s all him and will let you off the hook. If not, chances are you’ll be standing next to him in the unemployment line, wondering what kind of job you can get in the prison after you beat him to death. Good times! And that’s why the Incompetent Fool is the worst type of boss there is.
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