At one of my past jobs I worked for someone I consider a truly toxic person. He would go out of his way to make people feel bad, embarrassed, insecure, and he would often talk about doing this intentionally. “I like to put people off-balance and see how they react,” he would say.

Once I’d made a mistake in a document we had to send out. I’d emailed him the document to review and instead of emailing me back to let me know about the mistake, he forwarded the document to our client, with the mistake in it, saying that I’d’ authored it and if they had any comments, to get back to us. When the client responded, they pointed out the mistake and my boss came into my office to tell me that he knew it was in there, but he didn’t correct it because he wanted to me to learn from the embarrassment of my mistake. (I don’t cry at the office, as a rule, but I came close that day.) Read the rest of this entry »