Earlier this year I worked in the content management department for a major re-insurer in the Midwest. Our IT boss -- we'll call her Sue -- was, to put it mildly, tough to work for.

Sue's management style was all about her, and she was obsessed with proving to senior managers that she was the right person for the job. She could certainly sell an idea. She'd tell businesspeople in the company that we could do all of these projects to make their life easier. They'd buy into it, then couldn't deliver because she was still trying to deliver something to another department that was three months behind schedule. The senior managers for some puzzling reason didn't step in. For instance, she frequently went directly to the CIO for support to get things done that others wouldn't sign off on, and the CIO would back her up.

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It was obvious that her loyalty lay in looking good to everyone else in the company but those who worked for her. She constantly stretched her department too thin, demanded that we kill ourselves to deliver these projects, and then the projects were buggy and didn't work as expected because the deadlines were more important to Sue than the quality. She had the attitude that she was right and everyone else was wrong and wouldn't listen to suggestions. Some of us jumped through the necessary hoops to voice our concerns about her, but since she had the top brass in her pocket, to our knowledge nothing was done.

One disastrous incident that stands out in my memory was an upgrade to our document management software to a newer version. Everyone in the company (about 600 people) relied on this software at some point in their daily lives, so it was a major undertaking. We did the upgrade over Valentine's Day weekend, which happened to be a three-day weekend.

The upgrade was off to a bad start in a couple of ways. First, Sue gave us about a week's notice and told us to all be ready to work every day Valentine's weekend if need be. Most of us on the team were married, except one person who was in a pretty new relationship, so doing such a major project on a weekend when most of us had made plans left a bad taste in our mouths.