"You Are a Bad Boss!"

You are the problem.

You are a bad boss.

You shout at people who depend on this job.

You call it leadership. It is not leadership. It is intimidation.

You interrupt, you belittle, you humiliate in meetings.

You do it in front of others because you want control.

When someone dares to stand up for the others

Your red face yells "Just who do you think you are?"

and calls it "mutiny" like it's a pirate ship.

Then you fire them for "bad performance and failed expectations."

You threaten to cut pay you are not allowed to cut.

You know it is illegal. You say it anyway.

You rely on fear because you have no respect to offer.

People don't quit because they love their jobs.

They love serving others in this non-profit.

It is a non-profit organization, you see?

Your management style should not even exist here.

But you speak softly to your superiors.

You agree with everything they say.

They are not here, they only see your reports

And think you are an inspiring leader.

You perform loyalty and compliance upward while

Exercising disregard and cruelty downward.

That is not management. That is cowardice.

People leave meetings with you feeling smaller.

They doubt their work, their judgment, their worth.

All of that while they do excellent work serving others.

You cause them damage that cannot be repaired.

This organization exists to serve others.

You use it to serve yourself.

This is not acceptable.

You need to stop.

Better yet, resign.

Author's Note: In the late 1990s, I worked for an international non-profit with an abusive narcissistic regional boss who inspired this poem. No reports of his bad behavior to the higher-ups helped because he "produced good results." Watching him and many others later climb the non-profit ladder, I came up with "the bad boss upward mobility hypothesis": bad bosses get promoted to higher levels because their current boss thinks the higher-ups will have more authority, power and wisdom to deal with them appropriately. But because the bad bosses get good performance reports from their current bosses trying to get rid of them and because they "produce good results," the higher-ups tolerate them and promote them even higher up. This particular boss went all the way to the VP position in the non-profit headquarters and quietly retired from there, never really facing the consequences of his abusive behavior.