Terrible Bosses

Terrible bosses. We’ve all had them. Managers who seem to take their daily playbook from The 7 Bad Habits of Highly In-Effective Leaders.  And if we’re really honest with ourselves—as every leader should be—each of us has our own bad habits.

A year ago, with the release of GLSnext, the newest leadership app from the Willow Creek Association, our team at OX supported the launch with a comedic promo featuring a “squad goals” style slow-motion ending. The audience loved it so much that we saw people bootlegging the video on their phones.

Over the next year, as the GLSnext app developed, so did the characters we had introduced in the launch video. We wanted the rest of the series not to just describe the app itself but depict everyday leadership situations where the app is useful. Oh…and we wanted it to be even FUNNIER.

We brainstormed a dozen bad habits bosses have.

• The Helicopter Boss. The one who hovers over your shoulder while you try to work.

• The Selfie-Leader. The one who makes everything about their own ego boost.

• The Easy Way. A boss who takes the easy way out of a tough HR conversation.

• The Hard Way. The manager who insists on making everything more difficult than it needs to be.

• The Un-Intentional Diminisher. The boss who shuts down team input without even realizing it.

Press pause for a moment.  Our team created these situations out of a sense of lighthearted fun. But over the months while we were producing them, we started to realize that we actually had some of these traits ourselves! And we hadn’t even realized it! What at first had been a fun exercise to blow off steam about someone else had developed into a self-diagnostic tool. Oops. Several of our colleagues at the Willow Creek Association have shared the same thing.

And you know what? Recognizing your weaknesses isn’t such a bad thing.

Because GLSnext is one of the best digital resources I know of to unleash the full potential of a team and sharpen the leadership skills of . . . well . . . everyone.

For fun, you can watch the GLSnext 2.0 promo video here.