30 Reasons Employees Hate Their Managers: What Your People May Be Thinking and What You Can Do About It

Chapter 10. My boss is a terrible manager

Fifty-three percent of employees say their boss doesn’t positively movtivate them.

It was the fifth year of my graduate studies and finding a good dissertation topic had become a major challenge. My criterion was something I called the “so-what-test.” I needed to be able to find a research topic that I felt passionate about because I believed it was important and worthwhile. But finding a topic that passed this test was proving to be difficult.

One day, one of my faculty advisors at the University of Maryland suggested that while I was in limbo with my dissertation I volunteer to help him with a new research project. The task was to find out why employee turnover was so high in the physical plant department ...