Characteristics of a Manager with TERRIBLE People Skills!

Like the cover of a song, we can recognize an instrumental, beat, or chord progression. Most of us cannot articulate the beat in words but we can hear it and we feel it. When we feel toxic behavior we all recognize it, but we can’t always put into words what is happening.

A manager with ‘terrible’ people skills is a ‘terrible’ manager. There is a relationship between managers and colleagues that is very similar to other romantic or platonic relationships in our lives. Managers are people, and just as some people do, our managers might have toxic ideas of how relationships should go.

Why Do Some Managers Have or Develop Terrible People Skills?

Poor Conceptualization of People! Managers with a bad understanding of people might impose, project, and attach all their personal negative thoughts, and negative qualities to certain people and use it to justify all biased, verbally abusive, and condescending behavior. The thing is some managers can choose who they attach this poor understanding to, so not everyone gets the same version of a bad manager.

Anxiety About the Future or Life Path! Managers with relatively achievable personal or financial goals that they can not see a clear path towards, or they are nervous about the undertaking and execution of the objectives that lead to the goal might focus on toxic relationship interactions with their colleagues and use that as a distraction to take their mind off the goal they set for themselves. Anxiety about life and insecurity about the future can lead to deceptive and abusive behavior from managers because they no longer have to focus on their own path.

Past Feelings of Being Undermined and Poor Sense of Self! Managers who feel like they have been undermined in the past, whether they believe that the behavior was right or wrong, might attempt to undermine others in the future. These managers will use their real-life emotional distress as an excuse to be a worse version of themselves. Their idea of being a manager will involve interfering in their colleagues' work or maybe even their colleagues' lives. They will look for opportunities to give harsh feedback and condescending putdowns disguised as helpful criticism or offers to help. Some horrible managers will balance this with a deliberate kind gesture.

Flags of a Manager with Terrible People Skills

To understand all the reasons why a manager could have terrible people skills, would require a social scientist to break down human behavior. Let‘s not look at why some managers have bad people skills and more on the behaviors you can expect from a horrible manager.

A lot of the behaviors listed below, when put under the lens of sarcasm, is the prompt for casual banter between people. With a shift in nuance, these become a path toward abusive behavior from a manager or a colleague.

• Assigning blame to situations that don’t require blame.

• Telling small irrelevant lies. This may start out as a stimulus for a joke but eventually will evolve into an attempt to manipulate situations.

• Making shady jokes, disparaging comments, condescending or undermining remarks about a colleague's life goals, experiences, appearance, and behavior.

• Small fights about what could be nothing. Deliberately removing nuance and context from a conversation or situation, or injecting a false nuance or context into a conversation or situation. This also includes purposefully misunderstanding or refusing to look at things with context so they can insist on being correct.

• Implying inexperience or lack of insight into life, and placing themselves as the one you should come to, if you want to reach your full potential. The truth is most of us are discovering life as we go. If someone implies they have insight into life, there is a chance they are grooming you to be undermined by them.

• Pointing out normal behavior as abnormal or weird, exaggerating character flaws, and denying healthy levels of guilty pleasures or hobbies.

• Implying that if you value the job, the company, position you would act in a way that benefits them and accept future abusive behavior. This could also include using the things you do value as leverage, claiming that if you truly value those things, you would act a certain way that benefits them.

Approach with Nuance, Context, and Balance

As I said earlier, the flags of a manager with terrible people skills can be a prompt for banter between friends. The flags can be honest mistakes or even honest and correct actions.

Look for the intent to cause harm, and look for the harm being caused. See how the manager reacts knowing they caused harm and how they behave after they know they may have caused harm.

People are not simple and 2 dimensional. No one is, so we must look at people with nuance, context, and balance. Just like art and media, people do not exist without content.