Your Nightmare Boss Could Be Making You Sick

According to a survey of more than 4,500 doctors, nurses and other hospital personnel, 71 percent tied disruptive behavior, such as abusive, condescending or insulting personal conduct, to medical errors, and 27 percent tied such behavior to patient deaths.

Oh—cool.

From those 17 industries, Porath noted the following rude behaviors:

These are the rude behaviors by bosses most often cited in a recent survey, in descending order of frequency.

• Interrupts people

• Is judgmental of those who are different

• Pays little attention to or shows little interest in others’ opinions

• Takes the best and leaves the worst tasks for others

• Fails to pass along necessary information

• Neglects saying please or thank you

• Talks down to people

• Takes too much credit for things

• Swears

• Puts others down

And of course, while bosses clearly have a unique opportunity to ruin your actual physical health, mental wellbeing and future job prospects, we should never underestimate the power of the shitty coworker to do the exact same thing. It’s been a failure of many workplaces to operate under the perception that one or two toxic people are a manageable or an inevitable presence—when, in fact, one shitshow can poison the entire ecosystem all by its shitty self.

These were the rude behaviors employees copped to in Porath’s study:

• Hibernates into e-gadgets

• Uses jargon even when it excludes others

• Ignores invitations

• Is judgmental of those who are different

• Grabs easy tasks while leaving difficult ones for others

• Does not listen

• Emails/texts during meetings

• Pays little attention to others

• Takes others’ contributions for granted

• Belittles others nonverbally

• Neglects saying please or thank you

Either way it all adds up. (There’s an accompanying quiz with Porath’s piece you can take to see how toxic your work environment is.) Other measurable costs of being treated badly include a reduction in the ability to brainstorm new ideas (in one study, 39 percent fewer ideas), which is, ironically, the very thing you were hired to show up and do. To say nothing of the fact that, after being mocked or screamed at or otherwise injured enough by a tyrannical boss, most people just stop contributing ideas altogether to stay out of the line of fire.

I had a boss like this once—not terribly mean to me, his assistant, but abrasive and temperamental with his other employees. They were all so used to him lashing out under pressure that they learned to work around it, and even developed admirable coping skills, like secret tallies on the white board for every time he passed gas in the vicinity, which was a lot, even for a windbag. Once he noticed the tally and asked what it was, and they told him, “Oh that’s for every time we order fast food for lunch.”

Humor is a good salve, always, but it won’t solve everything. Eventually you’ll have to leave that job and keep trying until you find one more merciful, one better suited to your temperament, one more careful to cull bad seeds on the front end out of respect for the team. Workplaces like that are real, and when you find one, you’ll actually experience that gratitude you were supposed to be feeling all along at those shitty jobs. I can tell you right now—it is marvelous.

Porath insists that increasing incivility is a modern problem, likely the result of the distractions from technological overload. One exec she interviewed instituted a new no-technology policy during company meetings and found that, once people had to engage with each other again, the meetings eventually became drastically more productive and even fun.

As for dickish bosses themselves, Porath found that in many cases, they’re not being malicious as much as they are being oblivious, like the surgeon cited in her piece who simply didn’t know he was such a jackanapes until told. (I still think that most unhappy workers are working not for needfully stressed surgeons in high-pressure environments, but rather, needlessly dickish office execs and shift supervisors who simply have decided to wield their power in a bad way.)

And since, as Porath notes, we tend to define ourselves through the way others treat us—and since workplace dicks are not incredibly likely to change—the smartest thing we can do to immunize ourselves against increasing rudeness is to actually work on becoming Teflon. Not being rude, but becoming stronger—and not for the benefit of work, for the benefit of ourselves. That’s the underlying lesson, and in some ways, a mirror of the original problem: if no one else is putting you first, you’ve got to, every time.

Illustration by Tara Jacoby