Here’s How Most Employees Would Grade Their Boss

If you had to assign a letter grade to your boss, would you give them an A? The answer might say a lot about your overall job satisfaction, as well as how likely you are to stick around at your job.

Recently, on behalf of CareerBuilder, Harris Poll surveyed over 3,000 full-time, private-sector workers in a variety of industries across the U.S., asking them about the relationship they have with their boss. The findings might surprise you, especially if you’d give your boss a failing grade.

(Photo Credit: JD Hancock/Flickr)

1. A bad boss is enough to turn workers away from their jobs.

Among those surveyed, 38 percent admitted that they had left a job at one point or another because of their manager. That’s almost two out of every five employees. That’s important information for managers to have, because it emphasizes how important relationships are to worker satisfaction and success. If you want to keep your team productive and intact, invest in becoming in a better manager.

2. Some bosses abuse the power.

Twenty-one percent of workers said that their boss had asked them to do something that was unrelated to their job … and some of the requests got weird. How weird? Getting-a-dead-racoon-of-his-truck weird. Helping-to-cut-the-boss-out-of-her-pants weird. Asking-the-employee-NOT-to-help-his-ex-wife-move weird.

In these (or more mundane) instances, it can be difficult to say no. Just remember to these rules of saying no at work, and you should be OK.

3. Most workers think their boss deserves an A or a B.

When asked to grade their boss’s overall performance, the vast majority of workers (62 percent) would give them either an A or a B. Twenty-two percent (more than 1 in 5 workers) would give their boss a C, and 10 percent would assign them the grade of D. Only 6 percent of workers said they’d give their boss a failing grade of F for their overall performance in the position.

4. Bosses in the West are the best.

When the survey results were broken down by region, some interesting trends emerged. It seems that workers in the West feel the most positively about their bosses. In this region, 32 percent gave their boss an A, and 35 percent went with a B. In the West, 23 percent of workers admitted feeling that their boss didn’t deserve to be in a leadership role, whereas the figure was much higher, 33 percent or one in three workers, in the Northeast.

5. A little autonomy goes a long way.

Workers’ freedom to do their jobs autonomously has long been understood as a major contributing factor to their overall happiness. The results of this survey support that belief. In fact, it may very well be the reason why the bosses in the West received better grades from their workers than bosses in other regions. Thirty percent of workers in the West said that they interacted with their boss once a week or less; this was more than in any other region. However, despite this, workers in the West reported receiving feedback and guidance from their boss at a rate of 69 percent. That is a solid 10 percentage points higher than employees in the Northeast, who reported receiving feedback 59 percent of the time.

“People are more likely to be happy at work if motivation comes from within,” Maynard Brusman, a psychologist and executive coach at San Francisco-based Working Resources, told BusinessNewsDaily. “They will perform better, engage more, and be more committed if what they do comes from core of who they are.”

For more information, be sure to check out the PRNewswire release of the results of this survey.

Good news, bosses! Only 6 percent of workers said they'd give their boss an F.

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