The manager who makes every little problem a three-alarm fire can burn your business. Is it you?
Even now, she winces when she thinks of the way she used to manage her staff. The only woman partner at a small biotech research firm with a roster of blue-chip clients, she found the pressure to perform intense. Her direct reports were young, bright, ambitious, eager to please. But she never trusted them to execute on their own. Every project became a crisis, every meeting a fire drill. She would make assignments at night and on weekends. When she was out visiting clients, she kept the team jumping via e-mails - each one marked URGENT, including the one about the typo in the footnote of a routine report. "I drove everyone crazy, and I didn't even realize it half the time," she says.
Cruella - not her real name - is finally getting help. For six months she has been in family therapy to deal with her overbearing behavior at home and at work. "This is something I am going to work on - seriously," she says.
But it's too late to prevent damage to her small company: In the space of just months, six of her nine staffers quit to escape her reign of terror.
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