If a leader isn't in tune with the emotional state of his/her employees, he/she simply isn't in tune with an essential part of his/her company. Yet, I've spend time with more primitive leaders who've litteraly bragged about treating their employees unnessecarily harsh and inconsiderate. These kind of simple minded old school leaders will usually explain their behaviour with "running a business is only about making money" to which I can only reply "exactly!". To willingly be blind to the emotional state of the people you'r hired to lead is willingly being blind to people you've invested in i.e. dangerous and foolish.
Absolutely. Worse yet, when they are working in a large corporate structure or in a bureaucracy, bad bosses put the corporation at risk. Bad bosses yell at subordinates, engage in discrimination, ignore harassment situations occurring in their department, deny their employees access to benefits promised to them, etc. Then the employees sue the corporation for millions of dollars.
Furthermore, the modern high-tech environment has created a whole new breed of "bad bosses" within the corporate ranks or bureaucracies.
In the old days, before the high-tech boom, managers traditionally came up through the administrative ranks and were educated and groomed to be good administrators and managers. But now that everything has gone high-tech, the departments are staffed with specialized technicians and so the bosses have to come from the same departments and be specialized technicians themselves. The modern bosses are trained to be good technicians, but they have no administrative experience and often have little or no leadership experience.
So when technicians gain some seniority and look like they're destined for a leadership position, the corporation or bureaucracy has to send them to leadership classes and try to educate them practically from the ground up about basic people-handling skills, leadership skills, and administrative skills.
Like I said in my last post, I've encountered those guys in my own leadership courses, and it's really quite hilarious. Those guys (and gals too) are young, intense, hard-working over-achievers. They have highly technical post-grad degrees and they have no problem working 16 hours a day for months at a time on a crucial technical issue involving hundreds of millions of dollars, and they fully intend to excel and end up in high positions in the corporation or bureaucracy. But they have never yet had a single employee reporting directly to them (never had to promote or demote, give performance reports, etc.). And when they deal with the front office secretary, they tend to get pissed at her and yell at her when she can't do their work right away. And when the overworked secretary breaks down and starts sobbing, they have no clue what's wrong. And then the boss yells at them and tells them that they can't use the secretary anymore and have to do all their own copying and mailing.
Then one day, they're about to be put in charge of an overseas mission or be promoted to Deputy Division Chief and be responsible for lots of personnel. So suddenly they're sent to leadership courses where they're given hypothetical problems about how to address staff issues concerning touchy issues of ethics, emotions, and workloads. And they haven't a clue. They want to boil everything down to a simple rule or two and move people around like chess pieces. And when they sit down at a table with demoralized staff assistants complaining about work conditions, they freak out and start ordering everyone to quit bitching and just do their work.
To their credit, these intense, brilliant kids mean well. They fully intend to be excellent leaders, so they want to master the material. They attack the material with the same intensity that they attack everything else in life. If they aren't good public speakers, they sign up for Toastmasters. If they aren't good with people, they sign up for sensitivity training. They willingly study the materials and sign up for more leadership courses and after-hours discussion groups until they get it right. They're not slackers; it's just that it's new territory for them.
Sooner or later, they catch on. But it's funny to see them flailing about without a clue during those first leadership courses. A bunch of NT hi-tech whiz kids sit down together to hash out some hypothetical personnel problem as part of training, and they arrive at exactly the wrong answer. They get it completely backwards. Then some Feeler with a little bit of actual leadership experience at the next table stands up and gives the correct answer. And so they all stare at the Feeler dumbfounded, trying to follow the convoluted explanation about emotional entitlements and morale issues. It's a whole new world for them.
