Ever have One of Those Bosses? One who micromanages you to death, or throws you under the entire Partridge Family transport when things go wrong? The kind whose conflicting messages and demands leave you with your stomach in knots, unable to sleep?
And did you ever think, “No job is worth this”?
A CNN story out today confirms what many of us have known all along: A bad job (and the story makes it clear that a bad boss is a big part of a bad job) is worse for employees’ mental and emotional health than unemployment.
Yes, really.
Compared to suffering under the whims of a badly misguided, unskilled boss, we’re actually under less health-destroying, psyche-sucking, gut-wrenching stress when we don’t know where the next paycheck is coming from.
If that’s not an argument for investing in leadership training, I don’t know what is.
I lived that scenario once, and only once. My partner and I needed my paycheck desperately. We were fresh out of graduate school, with student loans about to kick in, obliged to pay rent two-and-a-half times more than we’d ever had to pay since we’d moved to the big city for his further higher education. I took the first job I could lay my hands on, through a placement agency. It was a job in the recruitment industry, and during the interview, it sounded like it would be interesting and challenging.
Oh, how different things were on the ground, starting with my first day. The president and founder of the company, who’d made all sorts of promises of training me in Marketing and Communications, shifted gears entirely. I was put onto the phones and asked to “source” candidates. (This is a euphemism for lying to people.) It got worse every day. I couldn’t do anything right. If my boss asked me to do X, he’d come back in two hours only to ask why I wasn’t working on Y.
By the end of the second week I couldn’t get to sleep at night. By the end of the third I was crying for the entire hour-long commute home. By the Monday of the fourth week, my partner looked at my swollen eyes and snot-clogged face when I walked in the door at 6:00 pm and declared, “That’s it. You’re quitting. No job is worth this.”
Leadership training might have helped that boss get over his need to tightly control every jot and title of every employee’s activities. It might have helped him to ask the right questions, or even just to sit down and listen. I wasn’t the only one who was unhappy, and there was more turnover in that company (just during my three weeks) than in a French pastry shop.
I’m glad my partner prioritized my rapidly deteriorating mental health over the paycheck that was keeping the roof over my head and reassured me that I’d find something else soon. As it was, he used contacts at his university to help me get a temporary gig that tided me over until my next job, we kept the rent paid, and I no longer needed to wear waterproof mascara.
Whew.