“Power doesn’t always go to those who know best what to do with it, and for those who aren’t sure how to confidently project authority and competence when they become the bosses, being mean can feel like an easy and familiar shorthand,” writes RTraister
Photo: Marcus Peabody/Getty What makes a boss truly terrible — and how should you deal with it? Cut columnist Rebecca Traister addresses our culture’s tendency to romanticize power, and what that means for those who abuse it, as part of a weeklong series about what makes a bad boss, and why we’re so tortured by them.
Not just your own specifically shitty boss, though sure: that person too. But more broadly, what about the archetypical figure, the stapler-throwing brute or witheringly mean harridan? How do we actually feel about power now, and those who wield it severely? The past few years have seen a thorough fisking of a lot about workplace culture that was permitted to pass for a very long time, especially around gender bias. Weinstein is gone; Michael Bloomberg, poised to run for president, is greeted with coverage of his long history of ill-treatment of female employees, while his would-be rival for the nomination, Elizabeth Warren, takes the stage each day to “9 to 5,” the Dabney Coleman–defeating working-women’s anthem.
Back when I worked for a series of savage supervisors, I used to wonder, while complaining with my colleagues over beer, how many of us would one day become bossmen and women ourselves. Who among us would become the kind of people who take credit for the work of the next generation of peons who’d in turn go out and curse our names over weak beer at dive bars … until they too became bosses?
But power doesn’t always go to those who know best what to do with it, and for those who aren’t sure how to confidently project authority and competence when they become the bosses, being mean can feel like an easy and familiar shorthand. Part of that gets us back to the way we romanticize the bosses, even the bad ones: We picture them as people who on some level, we want to be, which means considering them in the fields that are understood as high-paying and aspirational. Trump’s turn on The Apprentice showcased him as brittle and shallow, but somehow those qualities — in a guy whose role in the show was expressed by regularly telling people they were fired — read to viewers as muscularity and capability.
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