Boss-zilla Impacts Mental Health
Dealing with boss-zilla is draining more and more people. And it doesn’t need to be like this. So much trauma created, needlessly.
Imagine this: You’re walking into an office, the smell of stale coffee hits your nose, your inbox is overflowing, and the familiar sound of your boss’s not-so-subtle “constructive criticism” echoes in your ears. Welcome to the quintessential toxic workplace.
According to a recent survey, these workplaces, along with their resident boss-zilla and the ever-present threat of layoffs, are not just stressful—they’re downright damaging to mental health.
The latest survey from Monster paints a less-than-rosy picture of our beloved office overlords. It seems 38% of us rate our bosses as “horrible!” We’re talking a Darth Vader level of villainy here. And another 16% give our bosses a “meh” rating of “2.” However, 17% rate their bosses as “excellent.” Looks like “Boss of the Year” mugs and cards aren’t flying off the shelves anytime soon.
The results go like this 54% say their boss sucks, 16% are neutral and 30% say they are content:
- 38% gave their boss a rock bottom “1 (horrible)”
- 16% handed out a “2” with a shrug
- Another 16% played it safe with a “3”
- 13% magnanimously handed out a “4”
- Just 17% were feeling a “5 (excellent)”
Now, Monster’s Career Advice Expert, Mary Ellen Slayter, says what we’ve heard for decades, your boss can make or break your career (and life). We’ve all been hearing this for years like a broken record, haven’t we? But despite this sage advice, it seems the boss-monster trend just won’t die. Maybe because we are not looking at the reality of the situation. Just reporting or starring in it.
But hey, let’s face it. Something is rotten in the state of office hierarchies. Isn’t it high time we retired the workplace boss-zilla for what it is: a relic of old, tired organizational models that were created in the last century?
So, What’s the Opportunity?
And here’s a curveball: Gallup crunched over a decade’s worth of data from two million workers across 30,000 organizations. They aimed to answer the age-old question: just how important are bosses, really?
The answer was not surprising as it was the same finding, over and over. Managers don’t just influence team results—they are responsible for a whopping 70% of the variance. Seventy. Percent. That’s like showing up for a pie-eating contest and eating three-fourths of all the pies by yourself.
In the healthy boss lottery, the conscious leader turned out to focus on the work at hand with humanity. None of the other factors, from how much you earn to how you perceive senior leadership, even came close.
But here’s the kicker: companies still can’t seem to get this. It’s like a never-ending game of Whack-a-Mole of boss-zilla, where the mole is a bad boss and the companies are. … well, not very wise at creating purposeful playgrounds of co-creation (aka, work).
So, here we are, stuck in the same old organizational models with the same old bosses. And the same “shocking” (yawn) results that substantially impact people’s wellbeing and health. Isn’t high time we dust off the cobwebs and shake things up? Our health depends on it.