The Bad Boss

The Bad Boss

This was a rather difficult topic to write on, given the fact that no one wants to throw their old boss or employer under the bus. The main reason for that is because no matter where you worked you were getting paid, so everyone should be happy about that. Each boss is different and has their own way of dealing with problems and different situations going on in that industry. Some bosses are nice, some bosses are mean, and some are both depending on the day. One of the main problems we had when coming up with our bad boss situation was the lack of experience in the work force. The majority of the group has not had a job so there was no way they could have had a bad boss. Even though most of us haven’t had a job we were able to throw together a few examples and choose the one we thought fit the best.

The first option we had was a boss that treated someone differently just based on where they were from and their race. The second option we had was a boss that has horrible communication with his employees, yells and screams when things don’t go as expected, and the lack of planning throughout the work week. As you can see both of these are pretty good options of bad bosses. We ended up choosing option number 2 because there is multiple ways he is a bad boss compared to just the single way for option 1.

This is a pretty successful landscaping company, however the boss could use some work. The first of his problems is his horrible communication with his employees. There has been multiple times where the foreman had the day off and he tells me what is on the agenda for the day, but when doing so he doesn’t list all the supplies needed or sends us with the wrong plants or flowers needed on the install and when you call him about it he just says “substitute it in no

one will know the difference.” Another example would be him telling the foreman “yes, just take a half pallet of sod everything is ready it should only take you a half hour” for a sod repair that needs 4 pallets of sod, nothing is ready, and it takes about 3 hours. These are just a few of the stories I have of his bad communication with employees.

As for his second major problem as a boss, anger issues. I totally understand having a conversation with an employee that screwed something up or did something wrong but there is no need for excessive yelling. I have been there and seen him yelling over and over. It would be getting late in the day and he would be at the job wanting to get it done so we could leave and he would get frustrated when something wouldn’t go his way. Whenever he got like this you learned to just stay out of his way and just keep working or he was going to yell more. If you ask me this is not the way to talk to your employees. This is going to be a huge issue when one of the workers need to talk to the boss but are afraid to talk to him due to being afraid that they are going to get yelled at.

The last issue that I had encountered while working here was the terrible organization of jobs and planning throughout the work week. Obviously landscaping isn’t going to have a set work schedule daily due to some jobs taking longer than others, but there were days we worked until 4pm and other days were we worked until 11pm. This is not a very organized schedule because there is no way to plan anything throughout the week. Another problem was having no idea what we were doing the next day. This could have saved so much time if we could have got all the machines and supplies ready the previous night so we wouldn’t have to screw around with it in the morning. The last thing that really irked me was not knowing if we had to work on Saturdays until Friday afternoon, so basically we couldn’t really plan anything for any weekend

unless we requested that day off. These are just a few of the reasons, out of the many why this is a bad boss.