Everyone knows there are some really good managers out there in the business world. The problem is that everyone also knows that they’re incredibly rare. Most of us have to put up with complete incompetents running our departments and ruining our work lives. The vast majority of these inept individuals fit into the categories below – which one is your boss?

Petit Napoléon

Business strategy and tactics are this individual’s predominant skills – at least, that’s what he thinks. More concerned with enlarging his petty little empire to include as many staff, desks and cubes as possible than with actually doing any real work, he’ll plan ways of conquering other departments late into the night (and charge overtime for it). His workers are his foot soldiers, marching boldly toward his own personal Austerlitz… which, sooner or later, turns out to be rather closer to Waterloo than he imagined. Watch out for him building a fort out of spare filing cabinets and remember to buy him one of those bicorne hats for Christmas to stay in his good books.

Full Metal Desk-Jockey

Right off the bat, you know life at work will be insufferable with this one. Maybe they were actually in the military for a couple of weeks. Maybe they just watched one too many Oliver Stone films. Either way, their management skills consist of barking orders at their staff as if they were newly-drafted grunts arriving just in time for a second Vietnam War to break out. They’re unreasonable, demand complete subservience and never understand why everyone thinks they’re complete idiots.

Drama Queen

At the other extreme we find the far more emotional manager who lives forever in crisis. Everything is a catastrophe, stress levels are high and the person with seemingly the largest responsibility is the poor boss. Constantly suffering a bad hair day, they’ll nervously chew their way through the department’s entire stock of biros as they strive to handle the manifold tasks they have been assigned – all two or three of them. Be prepared to be delegated a dozen different tasks every day and never given enough time to finish any, as that would solve the problem.

The Duck

Slippery as an eel, responsibility slides off this boss like water off the proverbial bird’s back. They have a reason why nothing is ever done on time, why they’re never able to deal with their staff’s problems and why they are totally incompetent. Like water, it’s almost impossible to contain all the jobs they should be doing as tasks run randomly from their office, inundating everyone with work. They may seem calm and serene on the surface, but underneath they’re peddling like crazy to avoid having to actually do anything.

The Ostrich

Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s fine. It’s just a normal day and everybody’s happy. With their head in the sand, this boss can sit back and smile, confident of a job well done. The economy may be collapsing, redundancies may be rife and the company itself may be on the verge of bankruptcy, but the Ostrich remains unperturbed: if you can’t see the problem, it isn’t really there, is it?

The Blamethrower

When things go wrong, the Blamethrower is ready. Fully armed with a battery of excuses, he’ll come out fighting, throwing blame in all directions. If you’re lucky, he’ll start by aiming at another department, but when push comes to shove you may just find yourself in his line of fire. No one is safe from his weapons of mass reproach, be they man, woman or child. Merciless and cunning, he’ll remain above all suspicion as, one by one, other workers find themselves being reprimanded for their lack of ability. The only defense is to make sure you have everything documented and registered as evidence with the United Nations.

The Invisible Man

What manager? We have a manager? Usually citing a very busy schedule or a huge amount of work, this boss is never around. He’s always in a meeting or shut in his office taking incredibly important conference calls – presumably with his bookie or his mother. Sometimes, this can be a boon – you’re left to get on with things, after all – but if you ever have a problem that needs his involvement to sort out, you’ll probably have to hire Columbo to find him, MacGyver to figure out a way into his office and the A-Team to get him out alive.

Two-Face

What a lovely manager. He’s friendly, helpful and never tells you to do anything. He always asks politely, after enquiring about your partner’s health and how the kids are doing at school. Everybody loves him and wishes he was their boss. That is, until there’s a problem. Then, suddenly, that time he let you go home an hour early to look after your sick child turns into a reason for disciplinary action. The personal phone call you made at lunchtime with his permission becomes misuse of company resources. The quality of your work is questioned. Two-Face has turned on you and you’ll probably never know why.

The Bean Counter

These managers used to be accountants, librarians or purchase order clerks. Maybe they weren’t, but they were obsessive stamp collectors when they were kids or something. All that matters is that the figures tally neatly. Forget the people. People don’t matter. Key performance indicators matter. The numbers matter. If the numbers match, we must be doing a good job, right? Who cares that it takes six times as long to do anything? As long as all the boxes are ticked, records are kept and the Bean Counter can produce documents to prove that the work is done because the numbers say so, the world is a wonderful place!

Jabberwocky

“O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" Yes, your boss is a Jabberwocky. Jabber, jabber, jabber. That’s all they do and – just like the original Lewis Carroll poem - it’s nonsense, even though it sounds strangely like it should make sense. They’ll go on and on about strategic high-level management decisions in the current business ecosystem or timeous responses to leverage the resources in synergy with our new work paradigm. They’re trying so hard to push the right buttons, keep your concerns on their radar and incentivise organic growth in the company that they don’t seem to realize that they’re spouting crap. It’s all good.