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When you are first faced with a bad boss it will be a difficult and dangerous time until the issue becomes resolved by (a) you knuckle under, accept abuse, settle down to misery, resolve to keep your job at all costs and hope divine intervention will get rid of the brute, or (b) tackle the issue head on. For me the latter worked, not in the way I had hoped for but at least in a way that got rid of the problem.

In my last full time job I worked in the UK for an american corporation who had taken over the uk plant where I worked as a technical sales office manager. I loved the job and had great success in building sales. I enjoyed teaching new staff with whom I built up a new department and quadrupled sales in four years. Then it all changed, we had a new general manager appointed from the USA to make the overall business profitable, my part of ship was doing well but the rest of the operation was sick.

Our new GM was an oddball, originating from a Welsh mining town he started a vocational career as a fitter turner with British Steel. He then joined a US company as a sales rep and enhanced his career by grafting 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for twenty years which ensured he did well in the promotion stakes as a salesman. None of this qualified him as a manager and this became apparent when he was appointed to rescue the UK business. The appointment was clearly a make or break for him and he was not going to let anything stand in the way.

His strategegy to handle a new post as general manager was to bully and intimidate all subordinates all of the time. Never heard to praise he was very quick to chastise and impliment a zero tolerance policy for mistakes. He was a sexist and a bully and his lack of management skill was excruciatingly obvious right from the start. None of this bothered me to start, my dept was doing well so he left me alone, but then he started bullying the girls that worked for me. That was when I saw red and decided, one way or another this has to stop.

At this point I started to write everything down and keep a chronological file that could be used in evidence(plenty of witnesses for this if the need arose). I researched everything available on employment law and discrimination and looked up the industrial tribunal on the web. Believing that I had an overpowering case to defend my staff I set out my case in writing to our new GM and demanded an interview. I had the interview, and several more to follow, but his arrogance and total contempt for employment law in the UK prevailed.

Being totally resolved now, I mailed all my objections to the president of the US corp. He called me, together with his human resurces manager to talk the thing through. He made it clear that his preferred optio.n would be for me to retract and apoligise. I told him I would consider appointing a solicitor to fight my case and this changed attitudes completely.

Very soon after this I was awarded a redundancy package with a financial offer I could not refuse(especially as I was very near to retirement anyway)so I took the offer and left. The tragedy is that my staff continued to be bullied and eventually left the company, the business that I had developed and nurtured folded up, and the idiot responsible has moved back to the parent company in the states and resumed his erstwhile career as if he never had any part in disaster management .

For me the result was splendid and allowed me to retire early. I have guilty pangs for abandoning my staff, but, in the end it turned out better for them as well. Given the choice to knuckle under or fight for right I would choose the option to fight everytime

Learn more about this author, John Waters.
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