During my twenty years as a consultant focusing on leadership issues, I have, of course, met many bosses who are skilled in the art of leadership. Some have a natural inclination for it, others have learned it the hard way. Their staff admire and love them and would put up with quite a lot for their sake. These are the stars that others want to follow.

There are other models that seek to explain behavior, but I use this one as a starting point because it is pedagogically simple to grasp. It is frustrating to only be at the receiving end of a problem, without being able to make decisions and influence how the job should be done in the first place. And it’s even more frustrating when nobody listens to your proposals and ideas. Sometimes my boss has listened politely, nodded, and said I hear what you’re saying. This is often followed by a but … You know what that means, right? What they actually mean is: I hear that you are saying words but I couldn’t care less about your idea. Your boss has already decided. So why did they even ask you? This section isn’t designed for the reader who is already a competent boss and actually knows what they’re doing. But if you are a boss and you think there’s still a lot you can learn about how to best manage your employees, you might find this section valuable. The second part of the book is Surrounded by Lazy Employees. Because there are some workers who aren’t exactly in the running for employee of the month. Everybody has different strengths and weaknesses. Read on to find out how you can you help your staff discover their potential and find their genuine driving forces. Full Book Name: Surrounded by Bad Bosses (And Lazy Employees): How to Stop Struggling, Start Succeeding, and Deal with Idiots at Work

Nor do I think that a boss should be able to blame ignorance of the parameters of their job or of what it means to be boss. Anybody can work out that it entails more than just sitting at your desk. How much of your day should be used on leadership? (reserve this, and rest of the time you can continue being a specialist if you are unable to let go)

It used to be that the boss’s responsibilities were simple: to lead and say who should do what. If you managed that, then you were doing your job. A good friend of mine often quotes his own father when it comes to leadership: Never become the boss, because you’ll end up doing everything yourself. Of course, much as we love to blame our bosses, sometimes management isn’t the problem at all. For every bad boss there is also a lazy employee, so Erikson also looks at the issue from a completely different perspective—employees themselves—and explores why some colleagues frequently underachieve, and what you can do to change this if you're the boss. This book is divided into two parts. The first, Surrounded by Bad Bosses, describes how hard it is to do your job when you have a bad boss. Here we will look at examples of poor leadership and what you, as an employee, can actually do about it. Unfortunately I thought that the book fell short of this expectation, while Eriksen does a wonderful job in catering the narrative to a purely workplace context, I thought it was horrendously repetitive (and very unlike his self-assessment of being a Red, I thought). There were elements that I did like, such as the splitting up between the boss perspective and the staff perspective, and the relationship between colour and drive. The latter with concrete examples of how people of different colours, but the same drive, achieve their objectives in a different way. By identifying your boss’s behavior profile you’ll be better able to interact with them no matter what the situation. Erikson offers example stories and concrete steps to help you thrive in any work situation.If you have a friend who is a bastard, you can always just walk away. If your boss makes unreasonable demands on you, it immediately becomes more complicated, and the value of having a working dialogue to help those situations is so much greater. That’s what I’ll be giving you in this book.

Let’s get straight to the point: the world is full of bad bosses. Team leaders, group leaders, departmental managers, unit managers, deputy managing directors, managing directors, and the bosses of managing directors. Sometimes the boss is a chairman of the board in a Fortune 500 company, and sometimes the same chairman is at the head of a local sports team. At every level, in all types of organizations, there are bosses who have ended up in the wrong place and cause problems for themselves, who cause problems for their staff, who are incompetent, and who are naïve. There are bosses who are far too nice, and there are ones that are just plain mean. Some can’t manage to learn the names of their staff, and some just sneak away from their own responsibility. Some of them are so incompetent that the company would have been better off without them. There can be differences in behavior between the sexes, but I do not deal with the gender perspective in this book.

The reasons that many bosses are ineffective, do, of course, vary, but there are nevertheless certain patterns. And it’s a good idea to learn to recognize these patterns. And the bosses who function brilliantly in their roles—what do they understand that others don’t? Is there actually a secret? He is a highly sought-after public speaker with 120 keynotes yearly on topics such as human behaviours, self-awareness, , narcissism, and leadership. I’ve never been able to keep quiet. As a young man I thought authority figures were a pain. This sometimes led me down troublesome paths. Now and then, even in later life, I’ve questioned certain structures and routines. Systems are often totally illogical; one might hear that’s simply how it is. Or that’s how we do things here. My favorite is we’ve always done it like that, as if that was a genuine argument.

Obviously, there are exceptions. I’ve also had bosses who have been good listeners and been open to the thoughts and ideas of members of their staff. Some of them have even had the decency to admit whose idea it was in the first place. A few years ago, I wrote a book called Surrounded by Idiots. It’s about differences in communication styles, and why certain people can be so difficult to understand. I introduced William Moulton Marston’s DISC system which, over time and with further development by others, evolved into a simple model based on four colors: Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue. The point was to show how you can better understand people who don’t function or communicate like you do. Of course, the model doesn’t answer all the questions when it comes to how we function day to day, but it does give us a good starting point for discussions and ways to institute change. A person is rarely just one color, but most often has elements of two or even three. Or your boss does actually listen, and says: do what you want, but it’ll be your responsibility if it all goes wrong.Everything that I talk about is connected to personal insight and awareness. Problems arise when personal insight is limited. But I have also met an endless number of bosses who have been practically useless. Some of them haven’t grasped what the job requires. Some of them would like to learn, while others aren’t even interested in that. Which—in my opinion—makes them even less suitable. Some of them are just superfluous. They’re in the way. The organization doesn’t really need them.