Truth 26. Nobody cares if you don’t mean to be mean

Everyone has a story about at least one mean boss. Oddly, though, there isn’t a commensurate number of people who have stories about being bully bosses themselves. You know the type. You see them on the evening news magazine shows: the folks who brandish guns at work; who discriminate against a race, gender, or religion in their promotion practices and then brag about it; bosses who hang their employees “in effigy” for the rest of the department to ridicule. The brutality of that kind of behavior is just so plain to see—unmistakable and inarguable.

But the most common behaviors that beat down the human spirit aren’t so easy to catch and stop the first time. What is truly unacceptable? The first ...

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