Horrible Bosses didn’t age well…for many reasons. But, despite the obvious HR violations in the 2011 movie, some might need a refresher on how to not be a bad boss.
Mita Mallick, a workplace strategist, highlights the circumstances that can lead any manager to become a bad boss—and how to avoid them—in her book, The Devil Emails at Midnight: What Good Leaders Can Learn From Bad Bosses, set to publish on Sept. 30.
Mallick shared more with HR Brew about her forthcoming book.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What will HR leaders learn from your book?
One of the number one DMs I get is, “Here’s a horrible situation at work that I’m going through. How do I survive this situation? What do I do?” I, as I was crafting this book, thought to myself, “Well, what if we are the bad boss? What if we’re the person that’s contributing to the environment?” Our behaviors can swing from bad boss to good leader to bad boss.
I hope HR leaders look in the mirror and think [about] how are they acting and behaving, and then also, how can they coach other leaders, versus saying, “Let me coach the team on how to work around this person, try to survive this person, try to manage up to them.” What if we actually said, “No, we actually have to go to the person who’s behaving badly and work with them.”
Why is bad leadership a problem in today’s workplace?
Loyalty is dead in the workplace…There used to be this employee-employer contract, like, I will take care of you. You take care of me. You’re going to get a pension, and so people knew there was job security, and a lot of times, generations before us endured abuse because they were guaranteed a paycheck.
We know in this market that’s no longer guaranteed. I could lose my job tomorrow. You could lose your job tomorrow…What’s happening more and more is that people, especially with social media having changed our world over the last decade, people are voicing and people are saying, “I’m actually not going to stay. You can tell me to put up with this, but I’m going to craft an exit plan, and I’m going to leave.”
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Do you share any personal experiences with bad leadership in the book?
One of the bosses that I talk about in The Devil Emails at Midnight, I nicknamed her Medusa, I had never had anyone in my life, not my parents, not my brother, not my husband, not my friends, ever shout and scream at me. And, then I entered the workplace, and this woman would shout and scream at us. She would drop an excessive amount of F-bombs. She would publicly and privately humiliate us.
She had 12 people leave, and then she goes to manage another team, which I’m forced to join, and guess what happened? A year and a half later, those entire 12 people were gone. And, so the question is, employers and people who are in leadership power, aren’t actually thinking about the cost of replacing the employee, and they’ll do everything they can to protect this one person when it’s actually costing the company quite a lot.
How do you think AI will affect employee-manager relationships?
I hope that AI doesn’t breed a generation of lazy bosses…There are going to be things that are problematic with AI, and there are. But if AI is actually being implemented correctly in organizations, it’s the opportunity to do more work at scale. Take it off managers’ plates. So, then managers actually have time to do what they’re supposed to do, which is coach, and teach, and train, and lead.
The way I’m going to compete against AI agents is to be human, and to lean into a lot of the things, like dealing with conflict, teaching people how to go through mistakes, how to bounce back, resilience, a lot of these things we need. Some of the best leaders I worked for, they taught me these things on the job…People will argue, “Well, there’s no time during the day, and then I have meetings back to back, and that’s why I have to send emails at night”...Okay, if you actually scaled AI appropriately, and a lot of the things that can be automated are taken off your plate, you actually now have time to be with your teams.