We have all had one at some point in our working life. You know him, that boss/supervisor who made your life so miserable that you wanted to commit unspeakable acts. A recent movie ‘Horrible Bosses’ show just how far an employee will push the envelope when under the thumb of a bad boss. It was not pretty. Perhaps your own experience is the stuff of which Freddie Kruger-like horror flicks are made. Worse yet, you still can’t wake up, because there is always a sequel in your own badly made versions.

Many managers were promoted on the basis of their technical competence and usually not much account is taken of their communications skills. The company is proud of their individual achievement and rewards them by promoting them to lead a team or a new department. Then there are those ‘young ‘uns’, you know them, those with the newly minted MBAs who think they are God’s gift to their industry. They have come to ‘rescue’ the rest of us with their great business solutions. Step aside Bill Gates and Donald Trump. Father help us. Some of them do not have a clue and will never put pride aside and ‘take telling’ from the office ‘dinosaurs’, those who have been around and experienced a little more. Sadly, we, the team members become the unfortunate disciples. We become trapped in this never ending tragic-comedy of errors – minor cast members who are never given our roles, never mind a script so that we might learn to play the part. We trip over each other, exit stage left, instead of right because the director does not have a clue.

You remember one of your first jobs you where your supervisor was always missing in action and so he was never ever around to give you instructions. The only ‘supervision’ you ever received from the ‘Invisible Boss’ was the direction to the lunch room and how to turn on and off your office computer. This is definitely crucial information that no employee can do without, but I ask you, can it mean the difference between profit and loss for the company? The invisible boss syndrome is usually a condition of the newly promoted manager who is not quite sure of his own new role. Afraid of being demoted back among the rest of us sheep, he would rather hide, or play possum, rather than make a decision.

He may also genuinely not be able to give you proper instructions because (if you are a new member of his team) no one bothered to explain to him about your role in any great detail, so he is just as much in the dark as are you. Then there is the possibility, as far-fetched as it may sound, that this boss does not know how to articulate instructions. Always with his nose to the grindstone, he was never the one to interact much with his colleagues, so don’t expect him to become like Saul on the Damascus Road now that he has been promoted. Also, please do not expect him to get up and start pontificating like a Martin Luther King if he is not made of that stuff.

Believe it or not some of our managers need training in the area of communication. There is an art in giving instructions to each of your team members that they were never taught. The heart of it is knowing a little about the personalities of each of the team. The group of us, your team members, whom management has thrown together like so much flotsam and jetsam have come from varying educational and social backgrounds, we do not receive and process information at the same level. And if you really ask us to tell you the truth, we either do not want to be here, working well below our pay grade or we feel we can do a better job than you.

Not many managers think that they need to waste their time knowing their team and so take the wholesale approach to communicating with the members. Team-member Harry, just might be the one who responds better to the one-on-one approach because if you throw out general instructions to the group it might fly over his head. He will not be the one to come and tell you that he does not understand the instructions for fear that you might think him retarded. Team-member Susan might just be the one who really does not want to be a member of the team and just waits to sabotage every effort but if you drew her into the communication circle you would be surprised how much she could contribute. I guarantee that if more managers did a little more deep-sea diving into the personalities of the key members of your team they might find that they might find a diamond-and-gold-filled trunk and not just the sand they expect.

Yvonne Grinam-Nicholson, (MBA, ABC) is a Business Communications Consultant with ROCommunications Jamaica, specialising in business communications and financial publications. She can be contacted at: yvonne@rocommunications.com. Visit her website at www.rocommunications.com and post your comments.