Bad Supervisor Quotes

What was behind this smug presumption that what pleased you was bad or at least unimportant in comparison to other things? … Little children were trained not to do “just what they liked’ but … but what? … Of course! What others liked. And which others? Parents, teachers, supervisors, policemen, judges, officials, kings, dictators. All authorities. When you are trained to despise “just what you like” then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others — a good slave. When you learn not to do “just what you like” then the System loves you.

Empowering people to effect change • Communicate a sensible vision to employees: If employees have a shared sense of purpose, it will be easier to initiate actions to achieve that purpose. • Make structures compatible with the vision: Unaligned structures block needed action. • Provide the training employees need: Without the right skills and attitudes, people feel disempowered. • Align information and personnel systems to the vision: Unaligned systems also block needed action. • Confront supervisors who undercut needed change: Nothing disempowers people the way a bad boss can.

LEE RAN THROUGH HIS LIST of required personality traits: flaky, check; Indiana Jones wannabe, check; annoying to his new supervisor, check twice. Not bad for his first hour in the office. His cover story was in place, and Janice and Erica had accepted him at face value.

A simple way to start is to sit down with your child, or, if you’re an adult, sit down with your spouse or some other adult (it’s best to do this with another person, as the interaction makes for more creative, spontaneous, playful, and thorough answers), and respond to the following questions. Have the person asking the questions write down your answers, because this is an important document to save: What three or four things are you best at doing? What three or four things do you like doing the most? What three or four activities or achievements have brought you the most praise in your life? What are your three or four most cherished goals? What three or four things would you most like to get better at? What do others praise you for but you take for granted? What, if anything, is easy for you but hard for others? What do you spend a lot of time doing that you are really bad at? What could your teacher or supervisor do so that your time could be spent more productively? If you weren’t afraid of getting in trouble, what would you tell your teacher or supervisor that he or she doesn’t understand about you?

Like her friends, Biana was assigned a bodyguard when the Black Swan increased their security. But while most of the other bodyguard-protectee relationships have grown into unique friendships, it’s doubtful that Biana’s goblin bodyguard (Woltzer) feels any affection for her, the reason being that Biana has a bad habit of using her ability as a Vanisher to ditch poor Woltzer whenever she wants to do something he wouldn’t approve of—which also gets him in trouble with his supervisor (Sandor). To be fair, this has also meant that Woltzer has suffered far fewer injuries than the goblins guarding Biana’s friends—but that’s likely not why Biana sneaks away, so she probably doesn’t deserve credit for

One day, UD officers met to review events at their respective posts. A bewildered new officer arrived. “Hey, you’ll never believe it, but I passed the First Lady, and she told me to go to hell!” A second young officer responded, “You think that’s bad? I passed her on the West Colonnade, and all I said was ‘Good morning, First Lady.’ She told me, ‘Go f—yourself.’” “Are you serious?” “‘Go f—yourself’!” He imitated her, pointing a finger. We were stunned but not all of us were surprised. Our sergeant challenged him, but another officer soon corroborated his story. Our sergeant was speechless. We assured the rookie that this wasn’t the job’s normal atmosphere—at least, not under the previous administration. The sergeant fumed and called the watch commander, who pushed things up the Secret Service chain of command, who said they’d forward it to Chief of Staff Leon Panetta. The Service circulated a memo reminding everyone to report any “unusual” First Family interaction to their supervisors.

A man surrounded by genetic damage cannot help but mimic it with his own behavior,” Zoe says. “Matthew, David wants to set up a meeting with your supervisor to discuss one of the serum developments. Last time Alan completely forgot about it, so I was wondering if you could escort him.” “Sure,” Matthew says without looking away from his computer. “I’ll get him to give me a time.” “Lovely. Well, I have to go--I hope that answered your question, Tris.” She smiles at me and slips out the door. I sit hunched, with my elbows on my knees. Marcus was Divergent--genetically pure, just like me. But I don’t accept that he was a bad person because he was surrounded by genetically damaged people. So was I. So was Uriah. So was my mother. But none of us lashed out at our loved ones. “Her argument has a few holes in it, doesn’t it,” says Matthew. He’s watching me from behind his desk, tapping his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Yeah,” I say. “Some of the people here want to blame genetic damage for everything,” he says. “It’s easier for them to accept than the truth, which is that they can’t know everything about people and why they act the way they do.” “Everyone has to blame something for the way the world is,” I say. “For my father it was the Erudite.” “I probably shouldn’t tell you that the Erudite were always my favorite, then,” Matthew says, smiling a little. “Really?” I straighten. “Why?” “I don’t know, I guess I agree with them. That if everyone would just keep learning about the world around them, they would have far fewer problems.” “I’ve been wary of them my whole life,” I say, resting my chin on my hand. “My father hated the Erudite, so I learned to hate them too, and everything they did with their time. Only now I’m thinking he was wrong. Or just…biased.” “About the Erudite or about learning?” I shrug. “Both. So many of the Erudite helped me when I didn’t ask them to.” Will, Fernando, Cara--all Erudite, all some of the best people I’ve known, however briefly. “They were so focused on making the world a better place.” I shake my head. “What Jeanine did has nothing to do with a thirst for knowledge leading to a thirst for power, like my father told me, and everything to do with her being terrified of how big the world is and how powerless that made her. Maybe it was the Dauntless who had it right.” “There’s an old phrase,” Matthew says. “Knowledge is power. Power to do evil, like Jeanine…or power to do good, like what we’re doing. Power itself is not evil. So knowledge itself is not evil.

Expecting less from your boss can lead to being pleasantly surprised instead of horribly disappointed. Once you stop seeing him or her as an all-knowing supervisor who should be mentoring and supporting you without criticism, you can accept them better for who they are — as fallible, human and petty as everyone else, prone to bad judgment and hamstrung by the limitations of their education, experience and ego.

I decided to make the seafood chowder I first ate twenty years ago in the English Market in Cork, Ireland---or at least my own version of that smoky, tomato-based soup with cod, scallops, clams, and shrimp; sometimes (in Ireland), it had periwinkles (sea snails) and enough smoked haddock to give it a wonderful campfire tang. Of course, I had to skip the periwinkles and for the smokiness I made do with frozen finnan haddie. I'd worked on the recipe over the years, cranking the flavors so that when I finally went back to the English Market a couple of years ago, their chowder was so bland and watery that Jack didn't believe it was the same soup I made at home. It was possible that the Irish cook was having a bad day, or someone was trying to stretch the last bit of a used-up batch, or they'd made the recipe from memory for so long, it had ceased being itself---a chef at a good restaurant here in Los Angeles once told me that vigilance is the key to consistency, and that if she or a trusted supervisor didn't keep an eye on the plates as they came out of the kitchen, a dish could become unrecognizable within hours.

bad press. And there is really no way Noose can force the county to pay more than a thousand bucks. If the supervisors dig in, and they will, we’re screwed.” She nodded as if she understood, took another sip, and eventually said, “Lovely.

There was a tree in the plaza. It wasn’t very big and the leaves were yellow and the light it got through the excitingly dramatic smoked glass was the wrong sort of light. And it was on more drugs than an Olympic athlete, and loudspeakers were nested in the branches. But it was a tree, and if you half-closed your eyes and looked at it over the artificial waterfall, you could almost believe that you were looking at a sick tree through a fog of tears. Jaime Hernez liked to have his lunch under it. The maintenance supervisor would shout at him if he found out, but Jaime had grown up on a farm and it had been quite a good farm and he had liked trees and he didn’t want to have to come into the city, but what could you do? It wasn’t a bad job and the money was the kind of money his father hadn’t dreamed of. His grandfather hadn’t dreamed of any money at all. He hadn’t even known what money was until he was fifteen. But there were times you needed trees, and the shame of it, Jaime thought, was that his children were growing up thinking of trees as firewood, and his grandchildren would think of trees as history. But what could you do? Where there were trees now there were big farms, where there were small farms now there were plazas, and where there were plazas there were still plazas, and that’s how it went.

All bosses can be more effective when they work with, rather than against, the peer culture. Bosses who are known as fair and consistent will get more support from the peer culture when they do their dirty work. Research on punishment shows that coworkers often believe that offenders are let off too easily by bosses – especially when they have violated the rules consistently, shown little remorse, and a fair process was used to convict and punish the wrongdoer. In the best workplaces, bosses and their charges agree on what is right and wrong, and peers – not the boss – dish out punishment. Research on employee theft shows that ridicule, ostracism, and nasty gossip by peers is 250 percent more effective for deterring stealing than formal punishment by supervisors.

There is an old saying: “Do right by people and they’ll do right by you.” I don’t hear that expression much anymore, especially in a difficult economy that makes it easy for bad supervisors to tell employees, “You should feel lucky to have a job.” I’m certain that hearing that from my supervisor would fire me up, but probably just not in the way he or she intended.

trial. That’s bad for business in the PD’s office. The supervisors are paid for disposing of

They said that no French-Catholic women had been deported to concentration camps in Germany during the occupation. There were some French girls who belonged to Nazi groups, who volunteered to go to Germany during the occupation as supervisors in concentration camps and factories. They smiled bitterly and asserted that my brother, with the best intentions, had probably eased the way for a French collaborator, in service to Germany, to escape scot-free. I felt very awkward and disappointed about how people use other people; about how good and evil can interchange; how good intentions can be used by shrewd people to cover up bad acts or even crimes. I was wondering what to tell my brother when I would eventually see him, talk to him, on my arrival in the States. I never told him about my friends' intimations.

My message to the police is this: Treat me badly and I will place a 911 call requesting an independent supervisor to attend to take my complaint about you!

One day Felix came to me and complained that somebody had whipped him very badly. He took off his shirt and I saw the skin covered with wheals. I asked him who had done this and he replied that it had been the supervisor at a local mission. I drove with Felix to make a complaint to the missionary, who interrogated his supervisor. The supervisor admitted that he had whipped Felix, but said that this was because Felix had gone round the mission station biting his enemies.

Second, you can be intensely excited about your work and ideas. In your excitement you may seem to others to take big risks. To you the risks are not great because the outcome is clear. But you’re not infallible, and others may take particular pleasure in your failures, even if they’re rare. Furthermore, those not understanding this intensity will say you work all the time and probably resent it—you make them look bad. But for you, work is play. Not to work would be work. If this is you, you may have to keep your long hours a secret, known only to your supervisor. Or

People should be getting bad services or product because you chose to be in the wrong field or you chose to hate your job, supervisor, manager , boss, employment or what you do.

People should note be getting bad services or product because you chose to be in the wrong field or you chose to hate your job, supervisor, manager , boss, employment or what you do.

First, lucky people notice and act on chance opportunities in their life, creating strong social networks and holding themselves open to new experiences: I was lucky; I went to a grad school that was very open to risk taking and very open to freedom. That was at McGill back in the 1960s. I think they almost had a culture of risk taking, and my supervisor used to tell me, “Just have a go. It doesn’t matter if they reject it.” (Michael Corballis, Psychology, University of Auckland) Second, they trust their intuition: I’m a big fan of following serendipitous encounters: you leave no stone unturned and follow all kinds of paths even if you don’t really expect much there. Some of them of course don’t pan out well, but occasionally, you really get rewarded. (Ann Blair, History, Harvard University) Third, they persevere in the face of criticism and rejection: When I first started getting published in medicine, I was accused of being fluffy, Mickey Mouse. All kinds of awful criticisms were made of my work and my writing—“This isn’t medical,” “You can’t publish this kind of thing as medical research.” The more I received that criticism, the more absolutely determined I became to overcome it. (Gillie Bolton, freelance writer in literature and medicine, United Kingdom) And fourth, they transform bad luck into good by seeing the positive side of unlucky events: I absolutely subscribe to the notion that any feedback is a blessing. I don’t actually care how negative the feedback is; I just keep thinking, “Gosh, this could only strengthen my paper for the next place I’m going to send it to.” (Shanthi Ameratunga, Population Health, University of Auckland)

After Chandavarkar shortlisted a few candidates in 1997, Kiran came in for the final interview. All five shortlisted students already had job offers in hand. The interview lasted forty-five minutes, of which Kiran spoke for forty. She spoke about why she wanted to enter pharmaceuticals and how she wanted the company to grow. That ‘campus-placement experience’ was different for Shreehas Tambe. ‘My offer was from Lupin; I don’t think D.B. Gupta [founder and chairman of Lupin] gave a damn about who was joining the company. A general manager had come from Tarapur and we were all very happy because the salary was nice,’ says Tambe, a hefty man with a sense of humour. On hearing Kiran out, he was impressed that the ‘chairperson’ of the company was explaining to a fresher what the vision was. At twenty-three, the idea of working in a pub city wasn’t bad even though leaving Mumbai was not in his scheme of things. ‘I thought it’d be fun to check out the city for two to three years and then come back to Mumbai,’ he remembers thinking. Kiran said she had spoken to his placement manager; she knew his salary and would match it. She insisted that he say yes to the offer right then. Tambe was anxious. He had not submitted his master’s thesis and his supervisor, J.B. Joshi, generally decided where his students would go, which often was Reliance Industries. Surprisingly, after some intimidating remarks like ‘how could you attend the campus interview without asking me’, Joshi encouraged him to join Biocon. He did not conceal his cautionary advice though: ‘Come back after two years, finish your Ph.D and then we’ll see.

Painting the numbers on a watch face was not easy. The 2, 3, 6, and 8 were particularly difficult. You had to have paint mixed to the right viscosity, a steady hand capable of precise movement, and good eyesight. One woman did about 250 dials per day, sitting at a specially built desk with a lamp over the work surface, wearing a blue smock with a Peter Pan collar. The brush was very fine and stiff, having only three or four hairs, but it would quickly foul up and have to be re-formed. All sorts of methods were tried for putting a point on the brush. Just rubbing it on a sponge didn’t really work. You needed the fine feedback from twirling the thing on your lips. Some factory supervisors insisted on it, showing new hires how it is done, and some factories officially discouraged it while looking the other way. Everybody did it, sticking the brush in the mouth twice during the completion of one watch dial. The radium-infused paint was thinned with glycerin and sugar or with amyl-acetate (pear oil), so it didn’t even taste bad.

Many supervisors will tell you what they want are people with energy, initiative, and imagination, but in reality, they feel threatened by people who have different views from theirs, and thus discourage or diminish those who carry bad news or make mistakes. Those who expect to harness the power and muscle of stallions must be self-confident, open-minded, intellectually honest, and also humble.

IS IT YOU, OR IS IT ME? For the last six months, Ricky has avoided discussing a potential problem with his wife, Elena, because he’s worried that he may be at fault. His first wife had cheated on him for a full year before he figured out what was going on. That had rocked him to the core. Not only was he devastated by her infidelity; he reeled at his own inability to spot the early-warning signs of something as serious as adultery. Ricky was slow to enter another long-term relationship: once bitten, twice shy. That explains why he dated Elena, a friend from church, for four years before convincing himself that his first marriage was a fluke and that Elena was unlike his first wife. Then he took the plunge. After three years of marriage to Elena, Ricky fell into a running debate, constantly bickering—with himself. He began to see signs that maybe something bad, even hideous, was going on behind his back, but he wasn’t sure if Elena was acting inappropriately or if he was being unnecessarily suspicious. Thus, Ricky remained silent. Clearly, Elena had changed. She appeared to be more secretive about her e-mail, quickly exiting from it when he entered their home office. She took more phone calls out of the room than ever before. As Elena successfully explained those behaviors (it was job related and thus uninteresting), a third issue drove Ricky’s internal debate to new heights. Elena had begun working a great deal more overtime. This had happened off and on throughout their relationship. But what made extended hours more troubling lately was that her new supervisor was an ex-boyfriend, and some of the late-night work was with him.