Having a boss who lets you do as you please may sound ideal, especially if you are being bullied and micromanaged by your current boss. However, a 2015 survey of 1,000 working adults showed that 8 of the top 9 complaints about leaders concerned behaviors that were absent; employees were most concerned about what their bosses didn’t do. Clearly, from the employee’s perspective, absentee leadership is a significant problem, and it is even more troublesome than other, more overt forms of bad leadership.

We Hate What Our Bosses Don’t Do. Wait, What?

Research shows that being ignored by one’s boss is more alienating than being treated poorly. The impact of absentee leadership on job satisfaction outlasts the impact of both constructive and overtly destructive forms of leadership. Constructive leadership immediately improves job satisfaction, but the effects dwindle quickly. Destructive leadership immediately degrades job satisfaction, but the effects dissipate after about six months.

Destruction’s Lasting Power In Leadership

The popular media is full of examples of bad leaders in government, academia, and business with these characteristics. However, there is something arguably worse than an incompetent boss. It’s the manager that is not overtly misbehaving, nor is a ranting, narcissistic sociopath. Rather, they are a leader in title only — their role is leadership, but they provide none. That is an example of absentee leadership. Absentee leadership rarely comes up in today’s leadership or business literature, but research shows that it is the most common form of incompetent leadership.

Absentee Leadership

If absentee leadership is so destructive, why don’t we read more about it in the business literature?Organizations don’t confront absentee leaders because they have other managers whose behavior is more overtly destructive. Because absentee leaders don’t actively make trouble, their negative impact on organizations can be difficult to detect, and when it is detected, it often is considered a low-priority problem.

Is Absentee Leadership Really So Destructive?

Researchers have studied managerial derailment — or the dark side of leadership — for many years. The key derailment characteristics of bad managers are well documented and fall into three broad behavioral categories:<ul><li>“moving away behaviors,” which create distance from others through hyper-emotionality, diminished communication, and skepticism that erodes trust;</li><li>“moving against behaviors,” which overpower and manipulate people while aggrandizing the self;</li><li>“moving toward behaviors,” which include being ingratiating, overly conforming, and reluctant to take chances or stand up for one’s team. </li></ul>

Managerial Derailment

Absentee leaders are people in leadership roles who are psychologically absent from them. They were promoted into management, and enjoy the privileges and rewards of a leadership role, but avoid meaningful involvement with their teams. Absentee leadership resembles the concept of rent-seeking in economics — taking value out of an organization without putting value in. As such, they represent a special case of laissez-faire leadership, but one that is distinguished by its destructiveness.

Rent Seeking

Both effective and destructive leaders are easy to spot once they are on the job. They also produce predictable organizational outcomes: Constructive leadership creates high engagement and productivity, while destructive leadership kills engagement and productivity. Absentee leaders, however, are usually and mostly invisible, because they specialize in flying under the radar by not doing anything that attracts attention. Nonetheless, the adhesiveness of their negative impact may be slowly harming the company.

Absentee Leaders: Silent And Invisible Killers

The war for leadership talent is real, and organizations with the best leaders will win. Reviewing your organization’s management positions for absentee leaders and doing something about them can improve your talent management arsenal. It’s likely that your competitors are overlooking this issue or choosing not to do anything about it. Doing nothing about absentee leaders is easy. Just ask any absentee leader.

Are You Doing Nothing About Those Who Are Doing Nothing?

In contrast, the impact of absentee leadership takes longer to appear, but it degrades subordinates’ job satisfaction for at least two years. It also is related to a number of other negative outcomes for employees, like role ambiguity, health complaints, and increased bullying from team members. Absentee leadership creates employee stress, which can lead to poor employee health outcomes and talent drain, which then impact an organization’s bottom line.

Absence’s Lasting Power In Leadership

People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They’re so thirsty for it they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there’s no water, they’ll drink the sand.

Thus, absentee leaders are often silent organization killers. Left unchecked, absentee leaders clog an organization’s succession arteries, blocking potentially more effective people from moving into important roles while adding little to productivity. Absentee leaders rarely engage in unforgivable bouts of bad behavior, and are rarely the subject of ethics investigations resulting from employee hotline calls. As a result, their negative effect on organizations accumulates over time, largely unchecked.

Absentee Leaders: Silent Organization Killers

The popular media is full of examples of bad leaders. But the most common kind of incompetent leader actually isn’t the ranting, narcissistic sociopath that might immediately come to mind.

Absence’s Lasting Power In Leadership

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