Spot the boss who drives you nuts in the office

Being the boss isn’t easy. We’ve all come across a bad manager – the irrational, rude or just down right incompetent. But, often it’s easier to be a bad boss than a good one.

With this in mind, the Centre for Workplace Leadership at the University of Melbourne created a fun campaign to get us thinking what a good boss actually looks likes.

These unsuspecting actors turned up to an audition and were asked to improvise a terrible boss. None of the scenes were scripted and the results are hilarious – watch out for the aggressive boss, the emotionally dependent boss, the “my way is the highway” boss, and the boss who blames you for stealing her yoghurt (you’d be surprised how often this happens!).

But what does it mean to be a good boss – well, as it turns out, that’s not so easy to improvise! So sit back and watch these three videos.

THE MOTIVATOR - Ever come up with a solution to a problem only to have your boss take all the credit…

IN THE ABS - How can you be the best accountant if you can’t throw a punch?!?

THE MULTI-TASKER - Think twice before glancing at your boss’s parking space.

You can’t improvise good leadership. But you can learn.

“We wanted to get people thinking about their own management style with these movies,” says Director of the Centre for Workplace Leadership, Peter Gahan.

“We knew bad bosses would be easy to portray but I don’t think any of us anticipated the absolutely wonderful response we would get to our request for a good boss!

“We’d like to think we know how to be a good boss and how to behave in every situation but we need to be constantly learning and adapting. We always have managers walking away from our leadership programs with a renewed respect for the ‘good boss’. It’s definitely something you have to work at.”

Bad Bosses was created by:

Writer and Director: John Pace. Editor: Johnnie Morris, Johnnie and Kate Films Producer: Kate Pappas, Johnnie and Kate Films. Content and Digital Producer: Lei-Lani Terrell