Each crazy boss mixes his or her own strange brew of odd behavior. He is a beautiful rainbow shading lightly from one hue of neurotic excess to the next. The crazy boss can have five faces: the vicious bully, the sniveling paranoid, the self-obsessed narcissist, the alternating fascist/wimp “bureaucrazy” and the chronic disaster hunter. Very often bullies have wimps just above them. One has only to contemplate the role of John Sununu in the original Bush White House. Publicly tender-minded folks like George Bush don’t necessarily want to be the ones to go slamming over people with bulldozers. Sununu’s function was to kick butt and take names. Ronald Reagan is another example of the wimp. If you think of Harry Truman’s adage “The buck stops here,” Reagan’s version would be: ‘The buck? I never even saw the buck. Let me know when it comes into the room."
What I refer to as “American Management Disease” is suffered by a majority of all bosses in the United States between the ages of 26 and 82 and by 98 percent of those who make more than $134,000 per year. I could be off by a couple of dollars, but I don’t think so. Crazy bosses have a long and noble tradition. Consider Pharaoh giving Moses that terrible performance review. Everybody has stories about someone who was really nice before he became a boss and then turned into a raving, anxiety-laden paranoid wimp. While not at all useful in private life, these deficiencies are often uniquely suited to a successful business career.
The crazy boss isn’t one lone wacko in an otherwise sane environment. With what was essentially the destruction of corporate America in the ’80s and cutbacks of the ’90s, we’ve created the kind of high-anxiety workplace that rewards and needs its crazy bosses. Most of us, when placed under extreme pressure, fall back on solutions that worked for us when we were little kids. Like, if the way that you dealt with being nervous about school was to beat up the weakest kid in the class, then the way you deal with tremendous pressure on the job is to beat up on the weakest guy at the office. And hey, in the short term, it works pretty well.
The greatest power you have is your sanity. The saner you are, the crazier your boss will appear. And when the fruits of that craziness come to pass, you’ll be less guilty by association. One way you preserve your sanity is to eliminate your emotional dependence on the boss. We tend to demand the kind of parental support that this person is simply not worthy or capable of delivering. And, remember that crazy bosses eventually self-destruct. They are in pain. And this pain, this emptiness, eventually leads them to drink too much and to work too much. They eventually melt down, blow up, become thoroughly dysfunctional and go away.
