Tired Of Upper Management Thinking They Have A Noose Around Employees’ Necks, This New Dad Quits In Style

A huge factor why people leave their job is their boss. In fact, a 2018 study found that nearly half of employees surveyed had quit because of a bad manager, and almost two-thirds believed their manager lacked proper managerial training.

A few days ago, Reddit user iBeJoshhh submitted a story to the platform's 'Anti Work' community that perfectly illustrates this problematic reality.

In it, the new dad explained how his toxic supervisor made his time at the company a living hell, and how her actions pushed him to seek employment elsewhere.

After Gallup studied tens of millions of American employees for its 'State of the American Workplace,' company CEO Jim Clifton said: "The single biggest decision you make in your job — bigger than all the rest — is who you name manager. When you name the wrong person manager, nothing fixes that bad decision. Not compensation, not benefits — nothing."

Leadership coach and trainer Marcel Schwantes thinks bosses must set aside their ego and improve in these three areas if they want to make a positive impression on their workers rather than a negative one:

Communication. "Any good leader knows the value of communication," Schwantes explained for Inc. "In the hybrid workforce model, the skill of effective communication has skyrocketed in value. According to the Predictive Index Report, it's the number one skill employees feel their manager lacks. Additionally, communication is the top skill employees value in their manager, second only to confidence."

Psychological safety. To illustrate this point, Schwantes highlighted research on the subject by Amy C. Edmondson of Harvard Business School, which indicates that when leaders foster a culture of safety — where employees are free to speak up, experiment, give feedback, and ask for help — it leads to better learning and performance outcomes. "When psychological safety is absent, fear is present," Schwantes stressed. "And fear is detrimental to achieving a team's full potential. We just can't be engaged or innovative when we are afraid."

Provide growth opportunities. "It's a known fact that employees with a career mindset want to work for managers that will help with their career progression. If managers don't give their employees space to learn, stretch, and grow, and if they don't provide opportunities for promotion, they can't expect their talent to remain at their company," the leadership coach said.

The bottom line is that no group can create a more immediate and positive impact on employees than their managers. So when companies hire someone who lacks relationship-building skills and empathy, and instead of setting up their workers for success are more concerned with their own ambitions, the whole organization will suffer.

What's even worse, it's not like you can just make your managers better by sending them to do a course. American companies spend enormous amounts of money on employee training and education—$160 billion in the United States and close to $356 billion globally in 2015 alone—and are not getting a good return on their investment.

"For the most part, the learning doesn’t lead to better organizational performance, because people soon revert to their old ways of doing things," researchers Michael Beer, Magnus Finnström, and Derek Schrader wrote in Harvard Business Review.

As the team has found in their studies and teaching and in the advising they've done at dozens of companies, as a change strategy, training rarely works. "One manufacturer, for instance, suffered multiple fatalities at its operating plants despite a $20 million investment in a state-of-the-art center for safety training. Participants in corporate education programs often tell us that the context in which they work makes it difficult for them to put what they're taught into practice," the researchers highlighted.

A poor return on investment isn't the only bad outcome of failed training. As it was in this case, employees below the top become cynical, because even though corporate leaders may fool themselves into believing that they are implementing real change, others in the organization know better. So pests like iBeJoshhh's boss must be gotten rid of for everyone's sake.