We hear quite a bit about toxic bosses in our business. That’s a pretty broad description. Many of these toxic bosses have been talked about in our series before, but while their behaviors resulted in a toxic environment, they may not have intentionally tried to be toxic. Today’s boss however makes toxicity a priority. So let’s meet Toxic Ted!
One of my last bosses in the Navy is the inspiration for Toxic Ted. He was the Executive Officer (XO) at my last duty station. The XO is the equivalent to the COO in corporate America. The XO was a former Navy pilot who went to dental school and became a dentist. When he arrived at my command, he was replacing a very toxic individual who really made the command one the most dysfunctional one I’d ever been stationed at. We hoped for an improvement but sadly, this XO was worse. The climate became very fear-based and that impacted most everyone who served there. But one incident in 1997 really hammered home Toxic Ted’s reputation.
Our command’s senior enlisted advisor, Senior Chief Pat Wright was replaced and he was sent to manage the clinic at the Submarine Base, where I was working at with the evil Capt. Davies (see the post on Gabby Gotcha to read about him). Shortly after, I was transferred to the HQ to run the I.T. shop. About that time we were preparing for an inspection by the I.G. Now these happened every couple of years and the preparation for them was stressful and took about two months. When the I.G. came in to inspect the Subbase, one of the inspectors addressed Pat:
“How are you doing today Senior Chief?”
Pat: “I’ll be a whole lot better when you all leave.”
Of course HQ found out about that right away and Pat was fired from that job and immediately sent back to HQ to work as a special assistant to the XO. His job was to retype five huge binders of military directives into MS-Word (they had been typed by a typewriter previously). The XO asked me to find a PC for Pat which I did, but due to the small size of the hard drive, I could only install a basic version of Word that didn’t have a spell check.
About a week later, I was in the XO’s office fixing his computer when he called Pat in.
“Senior Chief, how is the project coming along?”
“Not very good sir. My PC doesn’t have enough room for spell check.”
The XO reached behind his desk and pulled out a huge paper dictionary, about the size of those big phone books we used to get.
“Here’s your *&%$ spell check Senior Chief. Now get busy!”
Although Pat and I laughed about this later, I could clearly see how it hurt him. Pat retired soon after and eventually ran a very successful tea shop in Bremerton, WA.
This was typical behavior for the XO. The morale was low and I saw quite a few good people end up with blemishes on their records. It hammered home my decision to leave the Navy at the 15-year mark. When I did my exit interview with the XO in 1998, it was a last opportunity for him to take a dig at me.
“What are you going to do now that you’re leaving the Navy Petty Officer Munro?”
“I’m going to start my own business and help companies develop better managers”
“No you’re not. You’ll end up fixing computers just like you do now.”
I didn’t say anything, but inside I was fuming. I hung onto that last meeting for several years and it inspired me to push on with my dream, which is the one I’m living today, 22 years later. Toxic Ted didn’t beat me, but he sure beat a lot of others.
Are you a Toxic Ted?
Here are three areas to examine.
- Examine your motives. Do you try to make people miserable? Are you intentionally trying to discourage motivation and performance? If so, what’s wrong with you??
- Examine your performance. Are you successful or are you getting results because people are terrified to defy you?
- Examine your impact. Are people giving you just the bare minimum results? Are people willing to leave your organization for less pay just to get away?
There is so much opportunity to positively impact people if you’re the boss. Why would you ever ruin that opportunity by intentionally trying to cause fear and loathing.
Now that you’ve seen five ways to fail as The Boss, we’ll look at the five bosses you’ll meet in Heaven!