There’s nothing like a bad manager to remind you how not to lead a team.

So, what would you do if your boss turned a quick daily check-in into a three-hour weekly meeting, and then told you not to speak unless your ideas applied to everyone in the room?

Would you keep trying to contribute? Or would you use her words as an excuse to stay quiet?

In the following story, one intern finds herself in this scenario and decides it’s best to stay quiet.

Here’s what happened.

Morning Meeting Compliance (plus a bonus)

My primary job during the daytime has been in the elder care field for a long time now. This story takes place while I was earning my M.S., and my company allowed me to intern elsewhere twice a week to learn a couple of new managerial positions.

Every morning at these buildings, we have what is called “stand-up”, a daily meeting where all the managers check in with each other.

The only boss who actually had us stand up for these kept them very quick (10-15 minutes). The rest let us sit, and typically ran them for 20-30 minutes.

At this place, the director wanted weekly meetings rather than daily.

But at my internship building, the director had a different vision.

She only wanted to meet once a week, but for the entire morning. She thought it was more efficient and would allow us to dive deeper into issues. So she insisted we stay in that (uncomfortably hot) room for three hours every Tuesday morning.

After 30 minutes, the meetings devolved into her ranting about her breakfast and her commute because we were out of topics.

Trying to do a good job, she brought a few topics to discuss.

As a good intern hoping to curry her favor, I showed up one day early with a couple of things I had planned out to discuss.

But I only got a couple of sentences in before she stopped me – “If your topic is only relevant for some of the people at the table, and not everyone, you shouldn’t be bringing it up here.”

Well, that rule isn’t true for anyone else here, and there goes both my topics for the day. But whatever – I shrugged and said okay.

By this point, she wasn’t sharing any of her ideas with the director.

For the next few weeks, whenever it came my turn to speak, I’d simply reply that what I needed to say wasn’t for everyone.

She wasn’t getting any of my good ideas, everything I had to share from my assistant manager position at my primary building.

When I wrote my final paper on what I learned from that position, I made sure it was all right with my teacher to write about how a bad manager can teach you what not to do.

And here comes the bonus.

The bonus is that this director had me do some of her work as part of my internship, where I filled out the forms and she reviewed them.

One day, she called me out for doing math wrong – she insisted that we shouldn’t be rounding up unless the number was at least .6 (huh?).

I tried to explain that it was at .5, but she mocked me and said she felt sorry for my math teachers.

The funny part was that the mistake only hurt her.

I mentioned this to another manager, who told me to just let it go, so I did.

But the thing is, the numbers she had me correct downward were our census percentages. We had 52 rooms occupied out of 55, so 94.54%. She had been reporting that as 94%.

And according to my primary building’s director, the cut-off for their position to earn bonuses was 95% residency.

Geez! That director sounds like something else.

Let’s see how the folks over at Reddit feel about what happened here.

Yes, that’s correct.

According to this comment, the director deserved to miss out.

Here’s a good point.

Now, this just sounds silly.

She did what anyone would do!

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.