Want some guidelines for how you can definitely get under the skin of your workers? Here are some simple things known to irritate the heck out of them, time after time...

If you want engaged, co-operative, motivated and productive staff on your team, this is a not-exhaustive list of things you can constructively do to mess it up.

Here are just ten things you can do to really p**s off your people and almost guarantee failure in your workplace!

Good luck (see the end for an alternative!)

1. Fail to Communicate Necessary Information

   Your people will feel vulnerable when they are not told things about their role, the business and other more general infornation. If they are customer facing they will just hate to be seen unable to meet their customer needs because they are short on what they need to know.

2. Build No Relationships

   Guaranteed to develop resentment and a negative attitude, your own inability to get to know them and show an interest in them as real people is a real winner in turning them off you - and feeling pretty bad about your workplace too.

3. Ignore Their Needs

   By avoiding finding out what is important to them, or what they need to do a great job, you truly get their backs up. They won't do their best for you, because, frankly, you let them down and are mealy-mouthed about supporting them. They cannot do their best without the best conditions to work in and resources.

4. Get Their Payroll Wrong

   Firstly, make sure yu pay them badly - below the industry norm. Then to put the icing on the cake, regualrly and consistently screw up the payroll process. Works so well towards your quest.

5. Have Favourites

   It might seem like the easy way out,by favouring some of your people, you feel liked. But what about the rest? No more certain a way to divide your people is when you treat some of them well and others worse.

6. Be Consistently Inconsistent

   Working for a boss needs some clarity about what their expectations are. By chopping and changing, your people can't get a grip on reality - there are no established goals for them to aim at - so they certainly will get frustrated. And the frustration breeds a whole lot of discontent - you're doing well!

7. Have Special Rules for Yourself

   Sure you are the boss. Yet if you 'pull rank' on your people with your own behaviours, you can only expect that they will model what they see in you - and when you then jump on them, it leaves them confused - and with that they are demotivated too.

8. Show No Interest in Their Development

   Monkeys - you get them if you pay peanuts. We've already touched on getting their pay right. Yet your people want safe challenge. If you want automatons who show no involvement in the work, you will not only get that, but bored, disinterested and unempowered workers. A recipe for underperformance.

9. Criticise (especially in Public)

   No one likes criticism. And everyone hates it in front of their peers. In fact all 'criticism' is awful, yet so many bosses use it as a sort of power-play, where they can show off their position. Humiliating people will actively encourage them to move elsewhere - or stay and be miserable. Perfect!

10. Have no Empathy

    Earlier I suggested it winds people up the wrong way when you show no real interest in them. Want to go a step better? Show no empathy to them when they are having a tough time. At work or at home. You will make a huge difference to them by ignoring their troubles - and it won't be a good difference at all.

Just ten - hey, there could have been way more - but get these ten right and you will be well on your way to sabotaging the success of whatever business, organisation or even just a team you lead and manage. It isn't as hard to achieve as it might seem!

Yet, if you take these as a check-list of areas you might want to develop your skills and your short-to medium-term focus, then maybe, just maybe, some good will come of this catalogue of horrors!!

Martin Haworth is a Business and Management Coach. He works worldwide, mainly by phone, with small business owners, managers and corporate leaders. He has hundreds of hints, tips and ideas at his website, http://www.coaching-businesses-to-success.com.

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