Humility is for the undeserving; revel in your success.
Status is important; negotiate, or take, that corner office, you earned it.
Hang and place your awards and certificates prominently. That marathon certificate will be sure to impress, and it’ll look good next to your degreesonline.com graduation certificate.
Ensure every member of your team knows how well-qualified you are and how lucky they are to have you as their leader.
Ignore any dissent among the ranks, they’ll get over it. A few naysayers are irrelevant.
Don’t go to all the hassle of learning your team’s names or anything about them in advance, you’ll get to know them over time. The important thing is for them to know your name.
Your Number One Priority Is to Ensure the Team Makes You Look Good
Employees are there to be used; the secret is to treat them well, get them on your side, and use them to further your career.
Be nice to your team—bring them coffee and cookies. That way they’ll be easier to manipulate.
Ensure your subordinates work late and are visible when you know your superiors or other department heads are working late; it’s all a matter of one-upmanship.
Never let a team member present anything; it’s your project, your glory. Interrupt them if necessary.
Information Is Power: Keep Your Team on a Need-to-Know Basis
People work best if you treat them like mushrooms—keep them in the dark.
Team members should be kept on a need-to-know basis: the less they know the better.
Knowledge is true power. Keep as much of it to yourself as possible and when necessary dole it out like candy to starving children. It’ll make you look good and make them both happy and dependent.
Don’t trust anyone with more details than is absolutely necessary. After all, you are the manager, you don’t need their help.
Team members are far too needy; keep them on a tight leash so they become dependent on you.
Ignore Feedback from Your Team—You Know Best
If team members knew anything worthwhile, they’d be the boss. Unilaterally making all key decisions is good management.
There’s no value in team feedback; it just muddies the water.
Team members are more motivated when they have a strong dictatorial manager who doesn’t need to rely on their feedback.
Keep Control—Don’t Empower Your Team
Empower your team—then it’s their fault when everything goes wrong.
Don’t empower people. They’ll make mistakes and it will cost the company money and you’ll have to put everything back in order. Best to keep total control, it’s safer that way.
Empowering people is dangerous; people might do the job better than you. Best to keep all decision-making to yourself.
Empowering people is too difficult; Paula’s too soft and Brad’s too hard ass. They’d treat customers differently. Avoid it—you’d have to create policy and boundaries and stuff, and that’s too much like hard work.
Customers are always trying to take advantage of your business. If you empower your employees, they’ll give away the farm. Better to deal with any tough situation yourself, even if it takes you away from more important work.
Ensure your team knows that you not only have the power to empower them, but also the power to take it back. You are a supreme being within your company.
Don’t Try to Find a Solution—Find Someone to Blame!
It’s always someone else’s fault; you can’t get decent people anymore.
You don’t have time to train people or treat them like children—they need to grow up and do the damn job.
Why give employees perks? You pay them, don’t you?
People shouldn’t make mistakes, period. If they do, just fire them and hire better workers.
Your job would be great if it weren’t for idiot workers, customers, and all the other stuff that gets in the way of you doing your job properly.
If anything goes wrong, blame it on the weakest link in your team. Protect yourself at all costs.
Play Favorites—Reward the People You Like
It’s only natural to have favorites among your staff; the other losers will understand.
Take your best workers and the ones you like out for drinks after work; it’ll motivate them to work even harder for you and inspire other employees to try to get into your good book. Win-win!
Give bonuses and promotions to those who work the longest hours regardless of their skill or experience. People with children or aging parents to look after wouldn’t be able to handle more responsibility anyway.
Competition for your good favor is good for team spirit. It keeps people on their toes.
Loyalty is always more important than skill or experience. That’s why hiring friends is such a good idea.
Make Examples of People—It’s a Good Warning to the Rest
A great way to motivate people is to shout at them in front of their colleagues; it will teach them to do better next time.
Berating team members makes them want to please you, so productivity and accuracy increases.
Threatening job security for underperforming team members is a strong motivational technique.
Making an example of an idiot on your team doesn’t demotivate the rest of the team, it just puts them on notice.
Treating people badly on occasion is just part of a manager’s job.
Being hard on people makes them better at their jobs; you’re really doing them a favor.
Shouting at people is a positive form of employee engagement.
How to Use Passive Aggressiveness to Make Your Team Feel Bad, Scared, and Mad—and Resent You
Manipulating employees is fine—it’s for their own good.
Limiting information is a valid management tool.
It’s a valid management technique to pit people against one another; it keeps them on their toes.
If someone ticks you off, just ignore them. The silent treatment will give them time to work out what they did wrong.
Praise is like giving treats to a dog; don’t hand out too much or they’ll come to expect it all the time. Withholding it makes people, like dogs, loyal to you.
Hand out praise and criticism in quick succession. You don’t want your team to get too comfortable.
Some people say micromanaging is too controlling but, at the end of the day, if you want something done correctly, do it yourself.
Any success the team has is your success. It’s YOUR team, so take the credit.
Devalue people’s contributions by pointing out that they don’t have the full picture and let them know, because you’re the boss, only you have all the facts.
You’re the Boss, You’re Entitled
You’re the boss; you are like a god to the people who work for you, so acting like one is okay.
You own these people—you can do whatever the heck you like; they are basically servants.
Your employees should be 100 percent dedicated to their jobs; work-life balance is for hippies.
Your expectations should be your employees’ reality.
Don’t Lead, Delegate, or Promote Teamwork—It’s Not Worth the Risk
Don’t believe that “teamwork makes the dream work” crap. There might not be an “I” in “team” but there is a “U” in “useless” and “underperform.”
You can do the job better and quicker yourself. Don’t waste your time training people.
Don’t let your team take risks. Risks are for companies who want to go bankrupt.
Make sure your team is afraid to fail. If they fail, scold them quickly and brutally. The more condescending you are, the better.
Don’t Hire Talented People; They May Outshine You!
Always hire people less skilled and knowledgeable than yourself; it makes you look better.
Never hire someone bright enough to someday take your job.
Ensure you are the most knowledgeable member of your team at all times.
If you have a rising star on your team, keep them well leashed and under control.
Don’t leave your team members alone for too long—you never know what they might get up to, especially the brighter ones; they need micromanaging to keep them in line.
Never let your team members present to clients or senior management. The limelight is your domain.
First rule of management: protect yourself from usurpers.
Always Believe the Worst about People; You’ll Usually Be Correct
Rely on your gut; if you think an employee is a flake, then get ready to fire them.
If an otherwise good employee starts turning up late or missing days, they are probably doing drugs, or they’re just plain lazy, so fire them.
If people can’t pull their weight, fire their sorry asses. You don’t need to ask why their performance is poor.
It’s a waste of time trying to find out what’s wrong with poor performing workers. Best to threaten to fire them—that’ll bring them to their senses. Then, fire them.
There’s No Need to Hire People Who Fit Your Organizational Culture
Only hire people you like. Work’s more pleasant that way.
Only hire people that think exactly like you; that way you’ll always agree with their decisions.
You can hire people that you don’t think will fit your organizational culture; they’ll be forced to fit in eventually. No harm, no foul.
If you hire someone and they don’t work out, you can always hire someone else. It’s not like it costs you much to hire the wrong person.
Work Is a Place for Work, Not Personal Issues
Employees should leave their personal baggage at home where it belongs.
Keep a professional distance between you and your staff; the minute you get involved in their lives, you’re screwed.
Employees’ personal shit shouldn’t affect their productivity; at work they should just focus on their job. How hard is that?
It’s not your job to babysit employees when they are going through challenging times in their personal lives.
Focus on your employees’ performance at work and hold them accountable no matter what’s happening in their personal lives. After all, what are they going to do, leave?
The Workplace Shouldn’t Be Fun
Customers don’t notice whether your business has a fun atmosphere; they only care about prices and getting what they order at a good price and on time.
Employees should be glad they have a job. Work isn’t supposed to be fun; that’s why it’s called WORK.
Fun in the workplace is overrated—when people have fun, productivity suffers.
