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How a Boss Feeds the Circle of Yelling

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CareerDiva

Welcome to CareerDiva, a blog maintained by Eve Tahmincioglu, journalist, author, and columnist.

As a career and workplace expert, Eve is also the author of From the Sandbox to the Corner Office: Lessons Learned on the Journey to the Top, and the Your Career columnist for MSNBC.com.

Eve further writes Your Biz, a small business and entrepreneurship blog for MSNBC.com.

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My husband and I are the bosses of our kids. That’s how we see it.

We run the household and the little tikes do what we say. They eat what we make for them. They fix their beds. They follow orders.

We’ve stressed this to our kids from a very young age.

When my daughter Circe was about 2 years old, she kept asking me over and over why she couldn’t do something. Over and over and over again. You know, that kid thing kids do. They keep asking in different ways until you reach your breaking point.

So I yelled, “Circe, this is not a democracy. This is a dictatorship.”

To that, she asked, “A potato chip?”

OK, so she didn’t know what the heck I was talking about. But the yelling seemed to be a bit cathartic for me.

Sometimes children and employees push us to the brink, and we blow up like Mount Vesuvius.

But the other night I realized that my yelling is not lost on Circe. I yelled at both my kids about creating a mess in the kitchen right before we were supposed to have dinner. Well, later in the night I heard Circe yelling at her brother Cheiron because he took one of her toys. I told her not to ever yell like that, but I realized I probably started the yelling circle.

Coincidentally, the next morning my intern Katherine Guiney told me about this funny clip from the show “How I Met Your Mother”, where one of the characters talks about this very thing, a chain of yelling or screaming that starts with a boss.

Here’s the clip.

There might be something to the circle/chain of yelling.