1. Involve yourself in every decision.
Don’t let any decision be made without weighing in, no matter how small, and no matter how long it will be before you have time to review the matter. You’re not too good for the small stuff, you are a man/woman of the people!
2. Make everyone run on your schedule.
Be 20 minutes late to every meeting, leave early, and then get angry when a minor decision is made without your input. Insist on being the final decision maker for every aspect of every project, but then don’t make decisions in a timely manner. Wait until it’s the eleventh hour and make everyone scramble to get the work done.
3. Correct small mistakes to demonstrate that you’re smart.
Review and approve letters. Then change your mind over inane word choice once they are printed. Randomly ‘correct’ already correct grammar or spelling on documents given to you to sign in pen, ensuring that even once you understand it’s correct, your staff has to reprint it. The button needs to be blue, not red.
4. Refuse to give any feedback.
Don’t give any feedback, either positive or negative, ever. But do overreact when people fail to correctly intuit what you want. Remember, giving proper feedback just makes employees happier and more productive, so you don’t want to do that.
5. Spend time on less important things so that you can ignore more important things.
Insist on doing tasks someone else could do while unmade decisions pile up on your desk to the point of nearly halting anything getting done.
6. Refuse to let people do their jobs, then punish them for it.
For example, “Hire me to be your legislative director, then forbid me from calling certain legislators’ offices directly, and then give me low marks on my evaluation for not developing those relationships.”
7. Don’t learn new skills or improve existing ones.
You’re the supervisor, why should you learn stuff when you have people to do stuff for you. Fail to learn even the most elementary technology like email attachments; make your young staff do that in addition to their work.
8. Treat people as if they’re idiots.
Manage your employees with 10+ years’ experience with the same scrutiny you would apply to your interns. And then tell them that their interns are much more open to feedback.
9. Never communicate about anything unless it’s trivial.
Focus your communication on small, insignificant things. Don’t tell anyone about challenges such as delays in payroll, changes in the budget, elimination of departments, or an awesome new staff/consultant you just hired!
10. Be inconsistent and unpredictable.
Keep people on their toes by being totally inconsistent in terms of communication (both style and content), expectations, feedback, and long-term vision for the organization. Everyone loves a good game of workplace Russian roulette! Change the expectations every time you meet with your employees. Berate them for not meeting the new expectations you just told them about and for instead wasting all their time trying to meet the expectations you set last month. Then constantly ask your employees to validate you.
11. Evaluate your employees on goals they have never seen before during a performance review.
Bonus points if some of those goals are actually physically impossible to achieve.
12. Belittle your team over things both significant and insignificant.
When a soft draft deadline is missed, raise it at a staff meeting by throwing your hands up and shouting about how everyone’s incompetence will ensure the closure of the organization. Keep telling everyone in staff forums how the whole organization and its success is based on what you downloaded from your head 15 years previously. Keep saying loudly how you’re the only one with any ideas and it’s clear that no one else can think.
13. Don’t set clear priorities.
Always imply that latest idea is top priority but don’t ever reschedule existing deadlines. Base your priorities on whoever spoke to you most recently, or whatever your horoscope is for the day.
14. Passive-aggressively remind people of the power your hold over them.
Make “jokes” often about firing people, then laugh it off. It’ll remind your team that you have a great sense of humor.
15. Physically invade people’s spaces.
Hug all your employees every day, and get really close to them when talking. If they have told you they don’t want to hug their boss at work, hug them anyway. If you’re standing up talking to them and they take a step backward to get some personal space, definitely take a step forward. Hover over their shoulders as they’re working.
16. Delegate autonomy, but don’t really mean it.
“I want you to make the decision. I don’t want to be involved. You’re experienced and you are driving this project. [Later:] You made the wrong decision. Here’s what I really wanted you to do. Now go and change everything.
17. Play favorites with team members, and make it obvious.
Gave Christmas gifts to favorite employees, but not everyone was a favorite. Keep them wrapped and with tags in your office so everyone can see them. Only the chosen few get to go to conferences.
18. Criticize people in front of their coworkers.
Don’t pull them aside and give feedback. Public humiliation allows everyone gets to learn. When applicable, use reply-all to unleash your fury on a team member.
19. Send subtle messages to your employees that this is not a good fit for them.
Leave job posting announcements on desks of employees with notes saying, ‘You should look into this.’ Talk loudly in open spaces about “hiring errors” that happened before your time.
20. Don’t learn anything about your employees’ leadership and working styles.
Why would you assume that people have diversity of perspectives and ways of working. You’re the boss. Make sure people adapt to working with you, not vice versa.
21. Become defensive at the slightest constructive feedback.
Ask for feedback in meetings and then bully and belittle everyone who opens their mouth. Then when people don’t contribute to meetings, act passive aggressive about it ‘I guess no one has anything to add and we’ll just have to go with my plan.’ Solicit feedback on said plan in emails and other meetings until someone finally says something rash and then give them a written warning for insubordination. There will be no performance issues.
22. Multi-task while interacting with others.
For example, you can get a lot more done if you don’t pay attention to people during meetings. Always browsed your smart phone during every staff meeting, presentations/discussions of issues, and always take phone calls.
23. Take credit for your employee’s ideas and work.
Ask others for ideas on a project, then pitch those ideas as your own, then make others carry out the grunt work of their project idea while getting all the credit for having ‘thought’ of it. Delegate blame, appropriate success.
24. Be paranoid that your employees are out to get you.
If they’re not with you, they’re against you. Forbid the entire office from speaking to certain employees because you ‘don’t want them to be distracted.’ Important: don’t tell the employee that no one is allowed to speak with them and wait for them to go crazy from the paranoia.