Bad relationships with bosses and their consequences, from toxic work environments to career limitations, top any list of reasons why employees leave their jobs, regardless of generation.

Traffic jams in the subwayPhoto: INQUAM Photos / Octav Ganea

In a year still reeling from the effects of the pandemic, when nearly half of employees are considering a job change, the quality of leaders and their relationships with subordinates is perhaps more important than ever. A few inept bosses and the drop in employee productivity they can create is an equation that can turn into a toxic bomb for the entire company at this time.

However, as always, simple things are actually complex: with four generations of employees in the workplace at the same time, each with their own list of things that motivate and annoy them, it’s harder than ever to define the perfect boss.

With the help of clinical psychologists specializing in organizational culture, teams and leadership, such as Dragos Iliescu and Lavinia Sanculescu-Popa, as well as human resources specialist Juliana Laurent, Panorama links the portrait of the ideal boss with an X-ray robot of the factors that motivate and annoy employees, depending on the generation in which they were born.

The need for this analysis arose in the summer before the pandemic, by the pool with a cocktail in one hand and the most incredible summer read in the other, reading How to Work for an Idiot in fits of laughter.

This book contains the famous humorous exposition of the American consultant John Hoover, “How to Survive and Thrive Without Killing Your Boss.” There was a time when worrying that the new coronavirus would change the world, including the dynamics of work relationships, was really not on anyone’s list of fears (less than Bill Gates). However, no doubt like the hero who lay in the sun, the minds of many workers then, as now, were preoccupied with how toxic the workplace can become due to the wrong bosses.

  • “Idiot bosses are those mutant hiccups on the ladder of organizational evolution who, like cockroaches, are immune to the calamities that destroy truly talented and creative people.” – John Hoover, How to Work for an Idiot

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