Here’s a managerial role no one really wants to get assigned to—Designated Punching Bag.

You know what I’m talking about: It’s the person on the management team that seems to be the one who always gets handed all the bad stuff, the really horrible assignments, or, is the bearer of bad news. This often means this person is also the one who is forced to take a disproportionate share of verbal abuse—from clients, vendors, the staff and sometimes even from other executives up to and including the CEO.

The Designated Punching Bag is a time-honored tradition in many companies, and I was reminded of that fact while reading a Washington Post story on Neel Kashkari, the head of the Treasury Department’s bailout operations and the Designated Punching Bag for every member of Congress unhappy with the bailout program.

“For the past six months,” the Post story said, “Kashkari has been a face of the government’s financial rescue and a sponge for congressional anger over the program. Although he scrambled to get the rescue’s operations running, often sleeping in his office and working seven days a week, during hearings lawmakers questioned his competence. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, D-Maryland, once called him ‘a chump.’ ”

The Post recounts the first time Kashkari was called to testify before a congressional oversight committee and how he coped with getting raked over the coals repeatedly for four hours by the committee’s chairman, Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, D-Ohio. Kashkari’s answer was to place “an index card on the table in front of him with the words: ‘The louder he yells at me, the calmer I will be.’ ”

As the Post story indicates, it’s not always bad to be a Designated Punching Bag. Sometimes, an organization needs someone to be the lightning rod for criticism.

Organizations will frequently designate someone with good diplomatic skills to work with angry and hard-to-deal-with clients, or with prickly vendors, or with all manner of difficult people that you just can’t ignore or get rid of. This is a role that a lot of labor mediators frequently play when a union and management are squabbling over a new contract.

But sometimes, managers become involuntary punching bags for their bosses. This can be a role they eventually accept as part of their portfolio, or, it can simply deteriorate into an abusive, one-way relationship. I’ve served in both capacities, although not by choice.

In the first case, I was the editor of a moderately sized newspaper and worked for a publisher who was fairly new to her job. She was desperate for the paper to improve and frequently got frustrated with the pace of change. When that happened, she would sometimes come into my office yelling and would proceed to ball up the newspaper and then throw it at my head before stomping off.

I know this sounds bad, but the silver lining to it was that my publisher would come back about an hour after her temper tantrum and would apologize for being out of line and reacting the way she did. Although I hated her reacting the way she did, I always respected my boss for being adult enough to come back and offer up a sincere act of contrition. To this day, I admire her for the willingness to apologize and admit her mistake.

That’s one way to be a punching bag. Another way, as I found out, is to deal with a superior who is just flat-out abusive and mean.  I dealt with a guy like that at another newspaper where I was called on the carpet just about every day by a glowering thug who had no discernable skills except his ability to bust a union. He was threatened by me because I was popular with the staff and, frankly, could manage rings around him.

It took me about nine months to get away from this talentless bully, but I still get chills when I think about all the time I spent as his Designated Punching Bag. It was probably the worst time in my professional life, and it’s why I feel as strongly as I do about the damage that abusive managers can do to their workforce.

No one deserves to be a Designated Punching Bag, and it speaks to the incivility in our modern society that people still are forced into this role. My guess is that Neel Kashkari will be happy to get away from the Treasury Department’s bailout operations and back into a position where he gets treated with a little less abuse and a bit more respect.

There’s “no question” his job was a trial, Kashkari said of his time at the Treasury Department. “But … I also learned about myself, how to bring a team together and to get the team to perform under unbelievably trying circumstance,” he said. That’s the tough part for all managers, and the trick is to do it without being mean or abusive and hopefully, without the need for a Designated Punching Bag.

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