Boogeyman Leadership: How to Turn Your Followers into Listless Zombies
The book is about poor leaders and bosses and their tactics that mostly failed. I believe it is important to know what does not work, so a leader does not waste time on such approaches. I do not pretend to offer any solutions to these poor tactics. The book offers the bad tactics and illustrative stories to inform the reader cross these tactics off your list. The book is not meant to be a solemn academic book or a guide to great leadership success. The purpose is to just give examples of terrible leadership and management tactics that I and others have experienced in our careers. I urge the reader not to use them or support them. I have had careers in business, the military and academia. They all had some very bad leaders. I define boogeyman leadership as the use of poor and intimidating leadership tactics whose purpose is to terrify employees and instill distrust and fear. The result is a zombie-like listless state. Some of the tactics and stories are similar. I apologize in advance for this, but do not get frustrated with this redundancy. For this is even more revealing, because bad leaders often use the same tired tactics, even in different venues. There isn’t much creativity in awful tactics. I urge you to be ready for them! Once again I believe it is most important to know what not to do. Unfortunately, these failed strategies are becoming more, not less common. There are a lot of really sad stories out there about leadership and management follies. I would estimate that 80 to 90% of my bosses or leaders used some of these dreadful tactics. The book has sarcasm, humor and some hard to believe tactics used by many of the leaders or bosses that I and others have experienced. I am sure many of you can re-visualize leaders, that you have had, that have used the very same or similar devices. I have done my best not to duplicate some of their poor tactics. I apologize in advance again if I have some duplication. Quite frankly, this usually means that these failed tactics are even more common, destructive and hurtful. I do provide a short list of some good leadership principles for you to review and to consider using.