Welcome back to work and happy day-after-Memorial Day to those of us who received Monday as a paid holiday! I hope you celebrated properly.
Speaking of paid holidays, there are currently eleven federal holidays established by law in the United States. In addition, many people who get Thanksgiving Day off – always a Thursday – also get the next day off as well to make it a four-day weekend.
For the benefit of those of us who work, of those 11 federal holidays, five are always on a Monday:
- Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Third Monday in January)
- Washington’s Birthday (Third Monday in February)
- Memorial Day (Last Monday in May)
- Labor Day (First Monday in September)
- Columbus Day (Second Monday in October)
The practice of putting federal holidays on a Monday rather than a specific date – for example, July 4, Nov. 11, and Dec. 25 – started in 1968 when the U.S. Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Bill. This bill moved several federal holidays to Mondays so that employees had a few long weekends spread throughout the year.
Of course, you need to have a job that allows you to take the holiday off to get the benefit of that long weekend. Many retailers use some of those holidays – Washington’s Birthday (more commonly known as Presidents’ Day), Memorial Day and Labor Day – as excuses to hold big sales to drive customers to shop on those days and weekends. Which means they need employees to work.
Luckily, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 90% of us workers do get Memorial Day as a paid holiday, so it’s just an unfortunate few who miss out.
But, even if we are part of the fortunate many who did get the day off and a long weekend, there are some of you who wish for an even longer holiday so you didn’t have to go back to the workaday grind. And why is that? Because you have horrible bosses.
According to a February 2023 survey of over 5,000 U.S. workers conducted by the Pew Research Center, 38% of us are only somewhat, not too, or not at all satisfied with our relationship with our manager or supervisor. For more than a third of the workforce in this country, their boss is not all peaches and cream.
In addition, 66% of us feel similarly unsatisfied with how much we are paid. 50% with the amount of feedback we receive. 49% with their day-to-day tasks at work. 66% with opportunities for promotion. And all of this dissatisfaction is primarily or mostly a function of our boss.
And this is not just an issue here in the U.S. According to Gallup, Inc., the preeminent public opinion research firm in the world, nearly 80% of employees worldwide are not engaged or are actively disengaged at work. They define employee engagement as “the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace.”
And guess where the majority of the “blame” falls for non-engaged employees? You guessed it. 70% of the variance in employee engagement is determined solely by managers.
Now, bad bosses are not a new phenomenon.
Way back in 1894, a young Methodist minister, Rev. William H. Carwardine, wrote what was described as a, “searing exposé of the dictatorial and penny-pinching regime of multimillionaire George M. Pullman.” This was published during the Pullman strike of 1894, which was a publicly odd strike because outward appearances were that Pullman employees should have been happy – they inhabited the well-appointed company town of Pullman, Illinois. A lesson for others throughout history that even the best-appearing companies can harbor deep employee dissatisfaction within.
Continuing to the present day, bad bosses have even been the topic of a number of films in our popular culture. “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Office Space,” “9 To 5,” “Working Girl”, and “The Proposal” all highlight ways that we hope we never get treated as employees. Heck, there’s even the clearly-identified films “Horrible Bosses” and “Horrible Bosses 2.” Can’t imagine what they’re about, can you?
My favorite movie depiction of bad bosses isn’t even about bosses, but with the change of one word of dialogue would have been an apt description for just about every bad boss out there. Keanu Reeves’ character in the 1989 movie “Parenthood” had this line: “You know, Mrs. Buckman, you need a license to buy a dog, or drive a car. Hell, you need a license to catch a fish. But they’ll let any butt-reaming asshole be a father.” Replace “father” with “manager”, and you’ve encapsulated the feelings of tens of millions of employees.
So, on one hand we have a business system that provides no formally recognized symbol that a person can handle leadership, i.e.: a license. And then, unsurprisingly, these bosses, managers and leaders live up to that standard of not being able to handle leadership.
Then we exacerbate that in larger organizations who conduct national searches for leadership positions. Really? These companies don’t have a single person in their own pipeline to fill the most important leadership jobs in their companies? Is there a better indictment of their own training and promotion abilities than that? Who would want to work there?
What’s even more incredible is that these national searches sometimes result in people who had no or limited previous experience with the business they are being hired to run, or better yet never even used the industry as a customer, yet somehow get hired as top executives. When they wouldn’t have fit the requirements made of entry-level employees at the company.
What’s an employee to do? Is it any wonder that a good number of those of us being led out in the workforce are unsatisfied with our leaders?
I wish I had some answers. The shelves of bookstores around the country and on the internet are awash in business tomes. All claiming a magical elixir.
Certainly as workers we want a boss with personal integrity, interpersonal skills and leadership abilities. We want someone who listens and is approachable. Who has empathy and a bit of emotional intelligence. Who is fair and makes decisions that benefit everyone. Who takes responsibility, provides autonomy and trusts their employees to do their jobs. Who encourages innovation and input. Who leads by example. And maybe, who is even a little inspirational.
As Burt Lancaster’s character says in “Field of Dreams,” “That’s my wish. And is there enough magic out there in the moonlight to make this dream come true?”
And, more importantly, how do we find them?
Again, I wish I knew.
What I do know is that I agree with Gallup in that good leadership is a top-down approach. A version of trickle-down economics as it were. Or more colloquially, stuff flows downhill. Both good and bad. If the top executive in an organization is not a good boss, it makes it extremely difficult for anyone else to be one. Employee satisfaction is a boss’s primary responsibility.
So, on this day-after-Memorial Day, if you are one of those people who are excited about going back to work, who got a paid holiday, and have a boss and co-workers you are satisfied working with, count yourself blessed or lucky. And maybe write a management book!
