Of all the reasons for leaving a job, its the “Boss” whose most likely to blame.  “Is this you?”

"The secret to managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided." -- Casey Stengel, manager, New York Yankees.  

According to the recent SEEK 2003 survey, getting along with the boss or knowing that the boss likes them can be more important to an employee than pay or benefits when it comes to job satisfaction. Over 50% of workers hate their boss.

Although great salaries and perks sweeten the job, other research over the last few years has also shown that what workers want most in a job is a feeling that their ideas and abilities are valued and their contributions are rewarded.

When Gallup surveyed over 1,000,000 employees they found that the biggest single reason people left their jobs was because of their boss.  "People leave managers not companies."  Gallup also found poorly managed workgroups are an average of 50% less productive and 44% less profitable than well managed groups. 

So are they leaving because of you?  Take a look at some of this behaviour and see if you recognise any.  

You don’t trust your staff. In fact if they ring in sick you have been known to drive round to the house and checked on them on the pretext of making sure they are all right.  You’ve phoned with some excuse of an important piece of information/file you can’t find.  You’ve made a note of the reason their sick and asked for confirmation of this when they come back to work. You keep an eagle eye on everything: e-mail, pencils and photocopies.

" I'm sorry if I ever gave you the impression your input would have any effect on my decision for the outcome of this project!" 

You don’t recognise their work or ideas and will quite happily take the credit or at least don’t correct your boss when he compliments you.

You believe in being decisive, in fact you’ll stick to your decision despite well argued opinions to the opposite and you never learn from your mistakes.   Changing your mind is a sign of weakness. 

"I didn't say it was your fault. I said I was going to blame it on you."

You don’t give clear instructions, set goals or directions and don’t offer staff the satisfaction of responsibility.

In your opinion, your job is to mold good employees into the job descriptions that best suit your company’s needs,  You wont invest in training and make it difficult for them to get other jobs or to do theirs well.

You reward long hours and hard work over enthusiasm and innovation. After your employees put in 80-hour weeks for two months to meet a critical deadline, you reward them with pizza and movie passes.  Work comes first, personal matters should be left at home and you begrudge employees their private lives.

You believe employees hate sitting through meetings to hear about what's going on in the company. You don’t believe employees need to know about the business vision, mission or goals, how it’s tracking financially or what’s going on in operations. You like to close your door, have lots of long meetings behind it.

You only remember the names of your seniors and patronise all other staff by calling them “love" or "mate."

You see performance reviews as an opportunity to get things off your chest, negative feedback because you know that’s the only way your employees will improve.  You never promote staff if you can help it and can be relied upon to forget about a promised raise or bonus, moving the goal posts because “the company didn’t do as well as expected.”

When you organise a night out on the town for your team hosted by yourself no one shows up.  You’ve made it, you are officially a “BAD BOSS.”