I’ve been submitted for a position which if I get it means that I will be responsible for supervising the work of others. This will pretty much be the first time I’ve ever been in authority over others. So how do I grow pointy hair?
Be unavailable to your staff most of the time (at things like nail appointments and hair appointments that you get your assistant to book so everyone knows where you are), then give staff hell for not getting enough work done.
ETA: Also, get a large bonus for yourself and other management, then tell staff that because of tough economic times, there are no raises or bonuses for anyone else this year. Don’t worry, staff never find out about management bonuses.
Tell your staff their opinion is valued, let them give you their advice, then ignore it and do what you wanted in the first place. When it goes wrong, blame them. When it goes right, take the credit. Change your mind capriciously without telling anyone. Get angry when people can’t read your mind.
Be sure to throw people’s mail away.
Never listen to the salesmen or planners.
Show up late. Wear a golf shirt on friday and dissappear early.
Block access to the Straight Dope.
Practice this line while slurping your coffee:
“Mmmm. Yeah. I’m gonna need you to come into work Saturday.”
Note - this works best when delivered Friday Afternoon at 4:30.
Require Team building exercises. Mandatory fun isn’t.
Tell your staff they must make their own decisions. Criticize and correct every decision they make. Give no clear direction, but belittle people when they make the wrong decisions. Sigh heavily and ask if you have to do everything yourself when people start to realize that any initiative on their part will be smacked down. Do everything in your power to paralyze your staff from moving forward on their own. Criticize them for not taking initiative.
Hey, this is fun! And bringing up a lot of memories! 
Make sure they don’t know what you expect them to do. Then, yell at them when they don’t do something you wanted them to do (but didn’t tell them about).
Hold them responsible for things that they don’t have any control over. It’s especially good when you can blame them for mistakes you made.
Insist that they use your pet technology or programming language, even if something else might be better suited to the task at hand.
Get emotionally invested in everything that happens at your job. Fly off the handle at your employees whenever possible.
Belittle your people at every opportunity and in the most condescending and insulting manner possible. Ideally in front of as many people as possible.
Treat your entire unit as hopelessly incompetent morons at all times. Be dismissive of their ability to accomplish any task when asked by anyone above or below you. Likewise, since they are incompetent, sabotage any chance they have at internal transfers or promotions. They may be useless morons, but they’re YOUR useless morons. (Besides, if they transfer and prove competent, your boss may start to doubt your judgement of everyone else.)
All shit flows through you, none of it stops with you. Blame goes somewhere other than you, because it threatens your security. Blame your people to your bosses, blame your bosses (or ideally, some other department) to your people.
Don’t ever deal with one problem individual. Issue harsh collective punishment to your entire team for the slightest infraction by any one of them. That way you can be certain that peer pressure will deal with the slackers.
Remember, problems don’t exist if you don’t know about them, and people who complain are disloyal. So vigorously punish anyone who dares to bring any issues to you or complain about the slightest thing. Get rid of those people, and it will be smooth sailing.
Be right on top of discipline at every moment. Someone staring into space? Yell at them right now. That person is a lazy slacker and they could be doing something rather than sleeping on the job. Oh sure, they’ll CLAIM to be thinking about a work related issue. You know it’s not true.
Don’t waste your time giving people a hand, or any training, or instructions on how to do something. They’re professionals. They should be able to get themselves up to speed and figure out what they need to do without wasting your time. If they can’t, they should find another job.
Take all the credit and put all the blame on your employees.
Have an open door policy, but never be avaialbe to meet with those who work for you.
Listen to your employees ideas, have them present the bad ones to your manager and you present the good ones. Fail to mention the employees input on the good ideas.
Criticize the grammar, spelling, and general understandability of any document your employees produce; while continuing to make the same mistakes over and over again in documents you produce and sent out to the customers in your employees names.
Tell you employees how valuable they are, and then take every opportunity to put them in their place as worth less peons.
Ah, I have some good ones.
When someone is bent over doing a task, get behind them and make lewd gestures with the lower half of your body.
When faced with an employee with an on-the-job injury, who wants to seek medical attention, sneer and say, “Now, come on… does it really hurt that bad?”
Pick one employee and develop an inappropriate relationship with them, whether it be lovers, or a mother/daughter thing, or anything unsuitable in a work environment. Favor this employee and have them do no work, but only come in to keep you company.
Take away the full-time benefits and then tell your employees that 36-40 hours a week is considered part-time, so they lose the benefits, but you still expect them to work 40 hours a week. Cite the economy as the reason. Then buy yourself a $4 million home.
Assign your staff a random project on a whim. Require them to drop everything else to concentrate on it. Keep checking back with them on their progress, changing the requirements of the assignment and criticizing their work. When they come to you with the completed project, announce that it has been dropped.
Hit on all the hotties. Nothing a 20-something gal likes more than a good ol’ smack on the ass while being asked “How’s it hanging, sweet tits?”
Make somebody your confidant. Make snarky comments about the rest of the staff to your confidant. Make snarky comments about your confidant to the rest of the staff. Win-win!
Arrive late, leave early. This works best if you can dock pay for absenteeism. Less work for you, more corporate profits!
When taking somebody to task for not getting a task done on time, be sure to leave the SDMB open on your monitor. Take some time in the middle of the admonishment to check replies to your post, saying “wait a minute, I’ve got something I’m in the middle of…” They will appreciate the example.
This will only work if you’re a parent, but you might be able to swing it with a spouse or immediate family member - be on the phone with your children for hours every day, making sure that people can overhear your conversation full of things like, “Put Jayden on the phone. No, go get Jayden. Quit hitting him and put him on the phone.” etc. etc. Make it obvious that you do no work while talking with your kids for hours every day - as a bonus, try to make sure that a receptionist has to take every one of these calls and put them through to you. Come in late from doing something kid-related, and leave early for the same reasons multiple times every week. You’re the boss; your hours are whenever you want to work, right?
Give an explicit command, like “don’t waste time and money testing that software. I know it is good.” When it turns out not to be, mark down your report for not testing the code.
At open meetings tell all your reports you want to hear bad news and problems - and then deny there are any problems, and yell at people for being negative.
Never hire anyone smarter than you - more important the dumber you are. They’ll just make you look bad.
Say that your staff and their staff are important to you - and then forget their names and resist giving them raises even when there is money in the pool.
Never, ever recommend your reports for awards, especially if they went all out on a project.
If you know someone needs to stay until midnight to finish an important job, schedule a meeting at 8 am the next morning with them.
Never say anything positive about the work of your reports - it will just give them swelled heads.
You worked where I do now?
I think we’ve ALL worked there.
Also, keep in mind that, for an effective motivator, you can’t beat the threat to fire everyone at once and start over with a whole new crew. You have to keep those bitches in line.
Never talk directly to your reports. If they do something wrong, or are on the wrong track, talk sneeringly to others in the office about how you are “giving ‘him’ enough rope to hang ‘himself.’”
If you find out that a report has cancer, or is pregnant, or needs heart surgery, begin immediately to find fault with everything they do, so that you cna fire them just before the chemo starts/birth/surgery. List the money saved as an achievement on your next review.
When in trouble, develop a “problem employee.” Complain loudly and often about this person to your own boss and anyone else who will listen. The great thing is that it will get back to him/her, who will immediately develop an attitude problem. Head off your own dismissal by firing that person and promising they will see the difference in your results soon. . . Begin to complain about the effect this has had on morale, and how it’s affecting productivity. . .
:: tries to imagine Anaamika with pointy hair; fails ::
Praise in private; criticize in public.
Insist that paperwork and procedure is the most important part of the job, then criticize for lack of results.
Make some sort of team-building exercise mandatory. This is especially effective if applied to subordinates who are not extroverts. After all, extroversion is normal, and can be easily taught by example.
As part of the exercise, make the subordinates buy and read the latest fad team-building book.
Make it difficult for subordinates to obtain needed office supplies. Locking them up in the mailroom isn’t the challenge it once was; instead, place them in Stores and require subordinates to submit a standard inventory-withdrawl form with signatures and justifications attached. Bonus points if one of the required signatures is a Vice-President from another division.