Danger signs If the corporate psychopath sounds like someone you know, grab and pen and try this quick quiz, including the kinds of questions used in Paul Babiak and Robert Hare's Business Scan 360. Answer Yes or No to the following questions: 1. Does the boss or workmate in question come across as smooth, polished and charming? 2. Do they turn most conversations around to a discussion about them? 3. Do they discredit or put others down in order to build up their own image and reputation? 4. Can they lie with a straight face to their co-workers, customers, or business associates? 5. Do they consider people they've outsmarted or manipulated to be stupid? 6. Are they opportunistic, ruthless, hating to lose and playing to win? 7. Do they come across as cold and calculating? 8. Do they sometimes act in an unethical or dishonest manner? 9. Have they created a power network in the organization, then used it for personal gain? 10. Do they show no regret for making decisions that negatively affect the company, shareholders or employees? If you scored at least 6 out of 10, there's a good chance you've already met what is known as an industrial or "corporate psychopath." Source: Paul Babiak, PhD, and Robert D. Hare, PhD. Copyright 2005 Multi-Health Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Everyone will have to let me know how many of their bosses sound like that!

Aye, that'll be my last manager, Colin. I can answer yes on his behalf to 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Question 2 I suspect is also yes, but I never reached a level in his little world to hear him do it. 10 is a definite, when I consider how he's tried to get people fired who weren't even on his team, purely on the basis of jealousy, and how he's manipulated a past redundancy/re-hire situation to get the person he wanted (easily led and manipulated and wouldn't argue with him) rather than the person better at the job who would have blown the whistle on what was going on in his team and with his product. So that's 9.5 out of 10 for him. I'm very glad to have got away from him 16 months ago. I'd have trouble answering yes to even one of those questions for the lovely manager I have now. Unfortunately, he's moved over temporarily to another area of the company but he's left his team leader to do his job, and since he's mentored the team leader on how to do it, he's doing it in a very similar way. It's the way things ought to work, really.

I will admit, my store manager isn't best described as a corporate physcho by me but some of the answers to questions 1, 2, 3, and 10 are yes though. I will send the quiz to my supervisor and see what he thinks and report back.

I could answer yes to most of our management team.... hmm maybe thats where i am going wrong I need to be a psycho to understand their logic!

Do psychos have logic?

They have twisted logic

That must be painful.

Post deleted by author, who can't seem to kick out of the maudlin mood and get some work done.

Could the pain be why they're Psycho?

I know that I have been told that I am very psychotic person and yet I only feel pain in my head when I have to work with idiots!!!!

I would never insult idiots by calling about 90% of staff and the majority of customers idiots and I wish I could go physco with them.

Originally posted by Firebird Could the pain be why they're Psycho?

I think they feel pain, if they start to actually think.

Or think outside the box that society wants you to live in. They even came around asking today if we wanted to sign a petition to ban public smoking. I told them that I think it's the owners right to deceide if there is and the publics right to deceide if they patrionize the place. Thats the way I think it should be!!!

How can you ban smoking outside buildings when they are vechicles polluting the air?

They never seem to understand that. It's like their heads are caught so far up their ass that they can't even think straight.

Would they be so fun to talk about if they were not complete idiots?

True I just feel that if you give someone an inch of control then they will feel like they own more! Not on my top list of agendas to do... give some of my freedom of choice up!

I dont care less, Im certified myself. I have three shrinks now. a work one, an AS one and a regular. (who loves my chutney I gave him)

I must live in a different world. My bosses are kind and caring.

It's the luck of the draw. My current manager, and his trainee manager who's running things while he's been seconded away, are both lovely managers. I've had other managers who've been perfectly fine too. But I've spent the last 21 years employed, and naturally that covers quite a few different managers, since the IT world goes for promotion by job move just as much as promotion as reward for an existing job. My first manager was the MD of the company, who believed in only ever pointing out the negatives and ignoring the positives. Which was a bit depressing but predictable, so not really all that bad. Although the criticism was never good for anyone's confidence, but perhaps that was his plan since it meant people didn't leave very often as they didn't feel up to looking for other jobs. Then I became, effectively, my own manager for a while - I had become very trusted so clearly he could see some positives in me after all. Can't say I enjoyed my own managership, but that is largely because I was so horribly overworked and overstressed. And the main client contact was a horribly bigoted south african scotsman who really, really didn't like dealing with a woman. So, I was given a manager (Ian) to handle client contact and so on while I carried on doing the same stuff with less of the overwork and stress. That manager was an ex-salesman who wanted to go into project management, and he generally left me to get on with things and stayed out of the team's business. I didn't mind until it turned out he'd agreed a new deadline for some work and not bothered telling anyone except the customers - he'd agreed it when the original delivery date was 8 weeks away and I only found out when the new delivery date was 2 weeks away. At that point I realised just how far out of the real world he was, when he also hadn't noticed that all the timesheets he'd been signing off showed people coming into work 7 days every week, so there was no way we could ever have worked enough extra hours to bring the project forward 2 weeks even if he'd told us at the time he agreed the new date. So, he got shunted onto another project (where, when it started to overrun, he told the clients that one after another member of staff was off sick with broken legs - couldn't even be bothered to make up a different ailment), and I got another manager. This one was ambitious and hungry for the MD's attention and didn't actually want a team leader since he wanted to do that job himself. So that got a bit frustrating for me, because I wasn't the one he wanted to communicate with. I'd find everything out from other team members. He'd decided to do some work unpaid for the clients as he wanted to make a huge technological leap in the product we were working on. Unfortunately, the technology wasn't mature enough for it to succeed and it never got accepted. He was very much an R&D man and moved on to that afterwards, where he did some interesting stuff, but I was glad not to have to work for him any longer. When he moved on I'd had enough of development so I moved into analysis and then technical analysis, where I had several very nice managers. I think I had 6 separate managers during my analysis time, all of whom were really good people who cared primarily about the work rather than covering their own backsides or advancing their own careers. Then the company got bought. New managers were brought in, lots of people got made redundant, and I got moved from analysis back into development. I took over a set of support projects from someone who wanted the redundancy, and was effectively my own manager for several months. Then I moved to the lovely Colin, mentioned in my previous post. As much as I dislike Colin, and I now realise I was uncharitable to him in giving him a score of 9.5, he was still not as bad as Ian. Having spent a few months complaining loudly that I was going to have to make an official complaint about Colin as he was having a bad effect on my health, I got moved to my current team. Where both the team environment and the manager(s) are lovely.

My bosses? Energetic, demanding, unpredicatable (in a predicatable way), and the ones who will choose how I spend my old age. Good thing my coworker is on my side.

Originally posted by Elvin Ruler I must live in a different world. My bosses are kind and caring.

Can I come and work there then? PPPPPLLLLLEEEEEAAAASSSSSEEEE?

Originally posted by meridianday It's the luck of the draw. My current manager, and his trainee manager who's running things while he's been seconded away, are both lovely managers. I've had other managers who've been perfectly fine too. But I've spent the last 21 years employed, and naturally that covers quite a few different managers, since the IT world goes for promotion by job move just as much as promotion as reward for an existing job. My first manager was the MD of the company, who believed in only ever pointing out the negatives and ignoring the positives. Which was a bit depressing but predictable, so not really all that bad. Although the criticism was never good for anyone's confidence, but perhaps that was his plan since it meant people didn't leave very often as they didn't feel up to looking for other jobs. Then I became, effectively, my own manager for a while - I had become very trusted so clearly he could see some positives in me after all. Can't say I enjoyed my own managership, but that is largely because I was so horribly overworked and overstressed. And the main client contact was a horribly bigoted south african scotsman who really, really didn't like dealing with a woman. So, I was given a manager (Ian) to handle client contact and so on while I carried on doing the same stuff with less of the overwork and stress. That manager was an ex-salesman who wanted to go into project management, and he generally left me to get on with things and stayed out of the team's business. I didn't mind until it turned out he'd agreed a new deadline for some work and not bothered telling anyone except the customers - he'd agreed it when the original delivery date was 8 weeks away and I only found out when the new delivery date was 2 weeks away. At that point I realised just how far out of the real world he was, when he also hadn't noticed that all the timesheets he'd been signing off showed people coming into work 7 days every week, so there was no way we could ever have worked enough extra hours to bring the project forward 2 weeks even if he'd told us at the time he agreed the new date. So, he got shunted onto another project (where, when it started to overrun, he told the clients that one after another member of staff was off sick with broken legs - couldn't even be bothered to make up a different ailment), and I got another manager. This one was ambitious and hungry for the MD's attention and didn't actually want a team leader since he wanted to do that job himself. So that got a bit frustrating for me, because I wasn't the one he wanted to communicate with. I'd find everything out from other team members. He'd decided to do some work unpaid for the clients as he wanted to make a huge technological leap in the product we were working on. Unfortunately, the technology wasn't mature enough for it to succeed and it never got accepted. He was very much an R&D man and moved on to that afterwards, where he did some interesting stuff, but I was glad not to have to work for him any longer. When he moved on I'd had enough of development so I moved into analysis and then technical analysis, where I had several very nice managers. I think I had 6 separate managers during my analysis time, all of whom were really good people who cared primarily about the work rather than covering their own backsides or advancing their own careers. Then the company got bought. New managers were brought in, lots of people got made redundant, and I got moved from analysis back into development. I took over a set of support projects from someone who wanted the redundancy, and was effectively my own manager for several months. Then I moved to the lovely Colin, mentioned in my previous post. As much as I dislike Colin, and I now realise I was uncharitable to him in giving him a score of 9.5, he was still not as bad as Ian. Having spent a few months complaining loudly that I was going to have to make an official complaint about Colin as he was having a bad effect on my health, I got moved to my current team. Where both the team environment and the manager(s) are lovely.

What can I say but blimey.

I had until recently two managers. One with the people management skills of a corpse. The other who made disorganisation an art. As you move further up the chain You have the managers that have no idea about the job they make so many decisions on and wont listen to the staff who do the job day in and day out. I hope to meet a nice boss soon.

The Peter Principle? Promotion to incompetence? That happens a lot. Then you can't get rid of them because they can't move any further up and they will fight to avoid going back down, and the chances of losing them sideways are generally remote because of all the other "Peters" in the same position.

My wonderful place of employment takes people who are fired from there once (because of failing a drug test). Hires them again about 6months down the line and within another 6 months makes them a shift supervisor. I'm not sure if that says a lot of bad things about the rest of us or what... I do know there are a lot of people there who do more then the recently permoted but they just might not kiss up enough..... Makes me want to go screaming from the place..

Sounds like the schools around here. Kid's got a borderline problem, a bit of help now might bring him to the normal range. But, nope, all the funding goes to kids who have definite problems. So, you're supposed to wait till he's fallen a full two years behind before getting help, when you need lots and lots of it and the results might not be as good?

seems about the way things are going nowadays. right down the drain sometimes

Alas thats true Would be nice to just do a condor and away from it all for a bit.

My store could be pretty damm good, but alas, Homebase has given us the shitty staff to work with and the preivous and now store managers were given to us because Homebase doesn't want them and want to kick them out. All I ask iis "WHY US?"

For the same reason we get them I guess. Move them up or sideways anywhere they can upset as many as possible and where when sacked they cant say we mistreatened them. (problem people where I work get promoted or a sideways move for career development)

There has been a idea for streamlined management at Homebase stores some years ago, which still doesn't make sense to me, but that didn't quite worked out. There's another one called 300 - 1 (no idea why) where all the assistant store managers and departmental managers who are on Grade D (top wage grade) got a choice. Reaplly for an assistant store/departmental manager job or take redundancy. I hav been told that they will do this to the supervisors who are either on Grade D or Grade C and then it will filter down to us Grade B full timers and part timers (that's me). One department manager was given a job to look after the inventory, which would have been paid £1000 less than he's on now, which would have meant that all the supervisors would get paid more than he would. He will leave (don't blame him) and go straight into a less stressful job and better paid job by driving around delivering Galor Gas bottles. I get paid only 5 p more than te miminal wage people and I am no better off as I was unemployed. The problem/question for me is this. Can I afford to take the redundancy or not?

probably not given unemployment money. What part of the Uk are you? I know of some vacancies London way if you are not too far

Unfortuantly I live in the Black Country, so travel is out and also I can't move down there because I can't afford it.