The Real Cost of Bad Bosses!

Have you ever thought about the true cost to your business of a bad boss? In my career I have worked for many different people, some were very good and others were appalling, simply treating me like I was another ‘cog’ in the company wheel. But what impact did this really have? Sure, I might not have gone the extra mile for those I didn’t respect, I may have occasionally been particularly difficult and taken more time to complete something than I needed to, but how did that affect the overall business, and did it really cost the business anything? In theory at least, a bad manager can ‘cost’ a business in many ways, for example a bad manager can cause their staff to: • Slow down or purposely make errors • Deliberately not discuss problems with their manager • Not go the ‘extra mile’ (e.g. go home on time despite a customer issue not being resolved) • Take days off sick unnecessarily • Take longer than necessary breaks But in reality what does this cost the business and can it even be measured? Some of their questions have been answered by three researchers (Edward Lazear, Kathlyn Shaw and Christopher Stanton) from Stanford University in the US. In their paper ‘The Value of Bosses’, Lazear, Shaw and Stanton conclude that replacing a manager who is the lower 10% of ‘boss quality’, with one who is in the upper 10% of boss quality increases a team’s total output by about the same amount as adding one worker to a team of 9 people. Wow! That’s the equivalent of increasing performance by 11%! So while my own experience of working for a bad boss has been that I haven’t been as focussed, flexible or as motivated this research shows how science can back up what we have all intuitively known – that bad bosses really do cost businesses!