Do difficult bosses make their employees better?

Coddling your staff won’t make them better so don’t allow “good enough” to be good enough, Profit columnist Deborah Aarts argues.

The move toward more comfortable workplaces has, in too many cases, mutated into environments in which bad ideas aren’t dismissed and poor behaviour isn’t punished, lest someone’s feelings get hurt.

“Factor in other trends—a fear that employees will balk at criticism and defect; a post-recession tendency to promote people who aren’t trained to handle tough situations; a general shift to a more litigious environment all around—and you get a situation in which many managers aren’t pushing their staff to do significantly better work because, frankly, it’s just easier to uphold the status quo,” she writes.

Aarts says it takes real finesse to push people effectively, and there’s a fine line between prodding and bullying.

To read the whole story, visit Profit’s website.

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