The Ultimate Guide On How To Be A Toxic Boss  

Are you struggling to be the ultimate toxic boss?  If yes, by following our ultimate guide, you could be one of the most toxic bosses of the town. Your colleagues and reportees would talk only about you during their business and non business hours.  Your team members would have nightmares of you and they would soon start looking out for role change and eventually job change. Your team’s attrition will reach new heights. Every day, at least one team member would take a Sick Day off.  Below is our step-by-step guide Part 1 for your grand transition to a toxic boss.

Form a gang of likeminded toxic mentalities:

You would need a gang of supporters and aides who would consistently help you incorporate a toxic and stressful work culture in your organisation. This gang is very crucial to your success. In case of any escalations against you, the gang members may prove very beneficial for your defense. This gang can comprise of your toxic peers, managers, your tenured reportees, vendors, stakeholders etc.

Investigate on the personal lives of your team members:

This step is important because to create a toxic work environment, you need to know what is exactly going on in the personal lives of your reportees. For instance, higher work pressure can be built for a working mother with small kids. If any of your team members is the single bread earner in his/her household, you can accordingly raise the bar of work pressure and stress for that particular employee. You can appoint one from your toxic gang members to do the investigation by being friendly to the target team member.

Schedule unnecessary meetings and conference calls:

Toxic workplaces are filled with unproductive meetings and conference calls. The outcome of most of the meetings is next to nil. Yet, to be a toxic boss, you or your gang need to organise and block long meeting hours for your reportees. The odder the meeting time (for instance, sharp breakfast or lunch time, login and logout time), the more frustrated would be the participants. This is also a way to annoy and put undue work pressure on women team members who are working from home and juggling to balance work and life.

Initiate never ending chain of confusing emails:

You need to take advantage of organisational email communication by initiating super confusing and unnecessary mail chains. For these emails to appear as genuine work, you can also ask your toxic gang to be the originator of unnecessary tasks and email requests for your team members. Subordinates of toxic bosses, sometimes, would not even know the cause/origin of bombardment of emails in their Outlook. To be a toxic boss, you need to effectively master this step.

Take micro-management to a psychotic level:

This step could be little difficult if you are of “mind your business” character in your professional and personal life. With some practice and effort, you can take micro-management to the highest level of psychosis. Every morning, the moment your target team members log in, you can bombard them with office communicator pings asking them the status of their pending tasks. You need to do this multiple times in a day. You also call them at least 3 times a day to remind them that you are the boss and they need to prioritise their tasks based on your knowledge and not theirs. You also need to interfere in their business in such a way that ultimately even the necessary work also doesn’t get done.

Demand working 24/7, 365 days:

You also need to ensure that your team members have no personal lives. You got to downplay the concept called “Work-life-balance”. Your job is to ensure that you keep pushing them for those “urgent deliverables”. You have to start pressurising your team to put in all their waking hours for work. Tasks have to overflow to their weekends. Your reportees should be scared to take their time off days fearing that they might lose their jobs.

Turn Feedback sessions Into Torture Sessions:

Now, that you have successfully messed up with the work and mental peace of your team members, you need to start your series of feedback sessions. These one-on-ones have to be very critical in nature where you highlight all the shortcomings of your team members. This is the climax where your stressed-out team members either start skip level escalations to complain about you or update their job profile to begin new job search.

If you are able to execute the above steps, there is no roadblock to your becoming the ultimate toxic boss. Now you can keep your job safe and still maintain the coveted crown of the most toxic boss.