A bad manager can make the workplace a horrible place to be.
Most of us have worked in jobs where we feel like our boss is absolutely terrible. Many people will, at one time or another in their working lives, get a boss that they think is bad. If you belong to upper management, it is vital to learn how the managers you supervise actually do their jobs. If you notice a manager not performing well, it is your duty to fix the situation.
Employee Relations
The major warning signal for bad bosses is the way they treat their employees. Employees are the backbone of any organization, and a good boss needs to treat them with respect. A bad manager will reprimand an employee in front of a group of his or her peers instead of in private. This makes the offending employee feel bad and sends a bad message to the rest of the staff. Also, a bad boss will not stand behind his or her employees when they fail, and will throw them under the bus to the higher-ups in the company. They confuse numbers of hours worked with actual performance and often don't reward employees who are working efficiently, thinking that something must be wrong with their work because it was done quickly.
Culture
The environment the manager creates in her department is also indicative of what type of manager she is. If she consistently delegates work to her employees instead of managing their workloads, she can cause imbalances in the lives of her employees. This also allows the manager to distance herself from employees should something go wrong. Also, a manager who only answers "yes" and "no" to questions without giving reasons is causing open communication to stop in her department. This can lead to confusion, as people are performing tasks without understanding the reasoning behind them. The culture of the department can further be destabilized if the manager creates an environment where errors made by employees are unacceptable. This becomes a culture of fear instead of one of problem solving.
Other Issues
A bad boss will often be unable to separate his personal life from his work life, thinking if he marries himself to the position; it will be looked upon with favor from ownership. This type of manager has nothing to add to the table, so he makes it look like he is busy. Managers such as this only know manage crises instead of working ahead to prevent the crisis from ever occurring. Finally, a bad manager will act differently in front of his bosses and his coworkers, trying to impress the former while being unable to relate to the latter.
