16 Types of Toxic Bosses (opinion)

Although many outsiders might regard academic life as idyllic, the reality is that it can be rife with toxic characters.

Surveys show that most employees will encounter at least one toxic boss in their careers, and academia is no different. Institutions can change quickly when new administrators step in. Over a long career, the place you joined may evolve into a place you would never have chosen to be. The people who convinced you to join the institution have probably departed. In the academic workplace, with jobs scarce and tenure-track jobs even scarcer, finding a job at a different institution is often not a viable option to fix a toxic problem.

Toxic bosses are more than just jerks; they create and maintain a heightened level of social and organizational dysfunction that causes excessive stress among employees and needless strain when it comes to achieving institutional goals. Whatever the type, the result is a difficult work environment full of tension and uncertainty.

The three authors of this essay have a combined total of more than 120 years of faculty and administrative experiences across five different institutions. During that time, we have been bosses. We have served under “toxic bosses.” We have also functioned as academic program reviewers at other institutions where we have had to evaluate the damage created by a toxic force.

At least one of us has experienced each of the types of bosses discussed in this essay. We are omitting names, locations and dates to protect us from the guilty. However, this column is dedicated to all the people who qualified us to write it. Willingly or not, we learned many things from them.

Below, we describe an assortment of 16 prototypical toxic bosses and conclude with some strategies for working effectively with them if you have the misfortune of being stuck with their oversight. Check to see how many types you have encountered. You can have a toxic boss that fits in more than one type. If you would like to keep track of all the toxic bosses, we provide below a Toxic Boss Bingo card that summarizes all 16 types.

• The Clueless Boss. One of us once observed an applicant for a provost position say her motivation for applying was that she would have more time for scholarship, since she wouldn’t have to teach. Fortunately, that faulty motivation was rejected by the hiring authorities, but that episode underscores that people may not really know what they are getting into when they secure a higher-level appointment. Although some people can adapt and learn, others remain clueless, detached and ineffectual.

• The Dunning-Kruger Boss. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is the tendency for people to have a positive delusion of their own efficacy. They don’t know what they don’t know, but they also don’t hesitate to act on limited information with unjustified confidence. This distortion can also extend to erroneous impressions of how their units are faring, and cause them to be Panglossian in responding to crises.
• The Profoundly Insecure Boss. Instead of celebrating and supporting productive faculty, the insecure boss tends to cast high-achieving faculty as adversaries. Feedback from underlings generates hostility. Ironically, faculty regularly undergo performance feedback, which increasingly feels proctological, but administrators may not receive the same feedback pressures. The insecure boss can often avoid getting feedback that might strengthen their performance or encourage their move to some other post or place.

• The Underwater Boss. This supervisor is likely to have an unanswered email queue in the thousands. By failing to respond to faculty requests in a timely fashion, the digitally challenged boss ends up inspiring even more email traffic as faculty generate more messages to try to determine what happened to their original request for assistance, fueling perceptions of technological incompetence to boot.
• The Tunnel Vision Boss. Bosses with this style tend to suffer the cognitive distortion of confirmation bias. That is, they know what outcome they want and find reasons to implement that outcome, regardless of what the available information might tell them. They simply ignore or dismiss evidence it if doesn’t fit the desired goal. 
• The Weathervane Boss. This administrator agrees with everyone, even those with contradictory views. Unfortunately, important decisions may end up being based on the final person to have the administrator’s ear. Wanting to be well liked by everyone is a foolish goal when making hard and disappointing decisions is part of the job.

• The Favored Nation Boss. By action and words, this boss demonstrates favoritism toward specific individuals with regard to resource allocation and other decisions that may benefit from a more objective approach. Be suspicious if the home department of the new boss suddenly gets a budget plus-up, permission to renovate or even a new building plan.
• The Dutch Boy Boss. Like the proverbial boy who stuck his finger in the dyke to keep the floods at bay, the Dutch Boy Boss is reactive, responding to emerging crises rather than engaging in more systematic and proactive considerations of the needs of their constituents. There is no shortage of chaotic conditions that naturally transpire on campuses. The Dutch Boy simply exacerbates an already existing challenge with their feckless, short-term reactions.
• The Clean Sweep Boss. Some bosses embrace and exert their power at the expense of the hard work and procedures that were put in place before. Now that they have arrived, past policies and values may be forgotten and replaced with the newcomer’s new-and-improved ideas. A related dreaded strategy is replacing existing administrative reports with cronies, sometimes imported from other institutions. Dismissing high-functioning administrators, simply because you can, generates substantial turmoil for faculty who may wonder who is next on the chopping block.
• The All About Me Boss. These characters suck all the oxygen out of the room. As credit hogs, they claim responsibility for collective accomplishments. They never praise the contributions of others, either privately or publicly. They are less inclined to shoulder predictable obligations (open houses on the weekend, recruiting efforts) since they perceive their time to be more valuable, but may enthusiastically assign such duties to underlings as “developmentally appropriate.” Showing little respect for the convenience and obligations of others, they run meetings longer than scheduled (one hour becomes two). Subordinates exist to glorify the boss.
• The Machiavellian Boss. This boss is inclined to use flattery to their advantage and may appear charming, but focuses on their own goals and interests, exploiting others for their own gain. They have no qualms about deceiving others to achieve their goals. They often pit people against each other and rationalize bad decisions as being someone else’s fault. As a consequence, they sow internal strife and chaos to achieve their outcomes. 
• The Dark Triad Boss. Psychologists refer to the “dark triad” as a combination of Machiavellian, narcissistic and psychopathic traits. The charm associated with Machiavellianism fades in the dark triad boss in favor of an authoritarian problem-solving style. The absence of conscience, combined with manipulative strategies and bloated self-importance, is perhaps the most dangerous pattern an administrator can demonstrate as any means, no matter how unethical, can justify the dark triad boss’s end.
• The Corporate Lackey Boss. Although they may be in great standing with their own supervisors, the corporate lackey tends to focus on short-term goals dictated by a higher-up authority rather than learning how best to represent their constituents to more powerful decision-makers. They worry about checking off their boss’s orders without considering what the likely impact will be from those actions.
• The Ideologue Boss. Come hell or high water, the ideologue boss has rigid ideas about how faculty should function (e.g., “scholarship first, teaching second” or, instead, “service, service, service”). When confronted with different ideas, the ideologue often doubles down and becomes even more inflexible.
• The Reluctant Boss. Sometimes in higher education, faculty find themselves assuming a leadership position when that may not be a core strength. The prolific writer may well be a paper tiger. Their tentativeness prompts them to make decisions by consensus, resulting in protracted discussions and endless meetings. (Yes, good bosses do take others’ opinions into account, but they also can demonstrate a decisiveness that the reluctant boss is missing.)
• The Mercurial Boss. Most successful faculty recognize the importance of reading the room. For example, you don’t schedule a meeting with the boss if there are rumors that stresses are building for that administrator. However, the mercurial boss is hard to read. Their temper flares easily, just as they may heap praise on constituents out of the blue. Others avoid and withdraw from this type of boss so as not to poke the bear.

We suspect that you could easily classify challenges you have with your institution’s own administrators based on the prototypes we have offered, but what strategies can you adopt if you are stuck with one of these problematic overlords?

• Protect your boundaries. Pushing back can be an index of your own courage and character, but do so carefully. Craft clear guidelines for yourself about your availability and be consistent and transparent in determining what you will and will not do.
• Avoid public rants. Do not exorcise your demons by trashing administrators on social media. Raging against the machine during a faculty meeting may be satisfying in the moment, but it will haunt you and may cost you for years. And anonymous attacks can be dismissed as cowardly, even if the content might be on target. Be prudent with whom you share criticism since the connection between the administrator and your confidante may be more intimate than the connection between you and your confidante.
• Create a paper trail. It never hurts to create documentation when you suspect serious administrative performance issues. Take notes after each meeting. Save all relevant emails.
• Dodge and weave. One of our colleagues observed that the best thing you can accomplish in academic life is to avoid coming to the attention of a dean or provost. If someone’s style is clearly toxic, minimize opportunities for contact with that person to preserve your own state of mind (“I’d love to help with your initiative, but I have a deadline for my book that I must meet.”).
• Step up. If you have experienced damage from a feckless administrator, consider entering the fray. Look for opportunities that will allow you to have a broader institutional impact and remain true to the values that prompted a desire to see different conditions. Remain professional and transparent at all costs.
• Promote feedback parity. Use existing campus policy bodies to propose that administrators undergo some systematic review of performance, especially if a reappointment opportunity looms. Be sure the review includes 360-degree feedback from bosses, peer administrators and subordinates, and that people feel safe to give honest, candid feedback.
• Join forces. When an administrator hears a solo complaint followed by “… and everyone else thinks so, too,” the feedback is bound to be suspect. If you have a concern, verify to what degree others share your perspective before making grand claims about the righteousness of your grievance.
• Be careful about votes of no confidence. They’re tempting and dramatic, but unless you know you have the majority votes to make the motion, don’t pull this trigger.
• Opt out. When a toxic environment truly threatens your own mental health, it may be time to change your current working conditions. But be aware that, unless you are self-employed, bad boss behavior is likely to transpire in any institution or new professional direction.
• Cross your fingers. Given the short tenures of many administrators, it may be prudent to just wait out the challenge in the hopes that normal patterns of attrition will solve the problem.

Good luck!