How to demoralize an employee ?
Do you have sharp and experienced employees and you are afraid that they can outsmart? Do you feel they always raise challenging questions in town halls and put you in weird situation? Are you finding ways to frustrate and demoralize them so that they leave?
These tips will help those ‘boss leaders’.
1. Avoid one to one with them: As a manager, avoid one to one with them or give little time so that they do not get opportunity to vent their concerns or provide suggestions. Let those frustrations stay in them as they grow faster in the mind and when not let out. But do not turn down an offer to talk if they repeatedly ask as an important rule is to “always appear good”.
2. Ignore their accomplishments: They may have successfully delivered projects or upgraded their skills and obtained certifications. Just give a general appreciation and wherever possible appreciate their team preferably yourself as a leader but subtly.
If you want to loose an employee, judge her as per her current assignment and not her potentials — it is easy to prove current results than potential expectations.
3. Bonus and Salary hike: Give them minimum bonus and limited salary hike. You can easily take help of HR to find out various reasons and formulas to give justification. The benefits team will have a bible of terms to help you like, base and median pay, comp ratio, rationalization, market standards and many more. The best part is that the HR team will also give you ways to override all these for your favourite employee and this will add to frustration of the other employee who disturbs you.
4. Give them monotonous work: This is important if they are enthusiastic about work and new technologies. Give them monotonous projects or something which your friendly employees(for whom you overrode all those compensation and bonus jargons)are not interested in.
5. Start micromanaging: Ask this employee to provide regular status even if you know there is hardly any movement in the work in a short period. Ask him to provide written status as per the format and raise issues if the formatting is not correct. This will actually be helpful as you can understand and give status to senior leaders while the employee is busy in fixing various status reports.
Micromanage and make sure your employee has dotted the ‘i’s and crossed all ‘t’s and spends more time in providing status to multiple leaders and managers in different formats.
6. Steal the ideas: Everyone has great ideas but many of us hesitate to say. The real art is to understand and implement them. In discussions, if you hear a great idea, put it forward and customize it to mention as your own in front of your leaders.
7. Make sure you are clear but they are confused: This is an interesting one and it took lot of observation for me to get the trick. The pre-requisite is you should be a good and convincing speaker. When you address your employees make sure they like what you say and recognize you as a great leader but they should not understand their goals and objectives. They should appreciate you but should be confused as to what they should do and when will they get promoted. Ironically they will continue to trust and praise you without a clue of what is stored in their own career.
8. Praise privately and criticize in public: If you want to frustrate your employee, do not praise him in public, rather criticize and point to his mistakes in public. If he has done great job, praise him privately. This ensures that you have done your part of appreciation of the employee and will not go down in employee feedback rating.
9. Billable bums on seat: One of the golden rule to frustrate an employee is to make him feel that he is a just a number, a 100% allocation body who can be split into projects for profits. Don’t check his achievements, interests, certifications, calibre, potential — just fill in a vacant place and question him if he fails to perform
Note: This article is written intentionally as a satire to leave an impact on our work culture and ethics. It is not meant to depict negativity or harm anyone’s feelings. Sometimes we understand it better in a ‘teenage model’ — my teenager kid does opposite to what to do.
