The Boss's Day Charade: Why It's a Corporate Sham and That Absurd New Survey

Get ready. Sometime this week, an email with a subject line like "Let's Celebrate Our Amazing Leaders!" is going to land in your inbox, and you’ll feel that familiar pang of corporate-mandated dread. It’s National Boss’s Day, the annual ritual where we’re all supposed to pretend our relationship with the person who signs off on our paychecks is something pure and special, untainted by power dynamics or the fear of a looming layoff.

And this year, the PR machine is working overtime. A new survey from GroupTogether just dropped a bombshell: a whopping 75.9% of employees like their boss.

Seventy-five percent. Let that sink in.

This number is being paraded around like proof that the modern workplace is a utopia of mutual respect and mentorship. Ali Linz, the co-founder of the company that ran the survey, says in Boss’s Day Bombshell: 75% of Employees Actually LIKE Their Boss – New Survey Shatters Stereotypes that it "proves the clichéd stereotype of people hating their boss is outdated." I'm sure it does, Ali. I’m also sure that if you ask a hostage if they "like" the person holding the key, you're going to get a very polite, very positive answer.

The 75% Illusion

Let’s be real. "Like" is the most lukewarm, non-committal word in the English language. It’s what you say when you don’t want to cause trouble. The top reasons cited for this "liking" were that the boss "creates a great team culture" (translation: doesn't scream at us) and is a "nice person" (translation: remembers my name). This ain't exactly a ringing endorsement for visionary leadership. It’s the bare minimum.

This whole song and dance ignores the fundamental tension of the workplace, a tightrope walk psychologist Paul White calls the "damned if you do and damned if you don't" problem. Chip in for a gift and you’re a suck-up. Don't, and you’re not a team player. Send the heartfelt email, and you risk sounding ingratiating. Stay silent, and you seem ungrateful. It’s a social minefield designed by HR departments to generate engagement points.

And what about the 47% of workers who, according to HR Dive, feel pressured to not be fully honest in engagement surveys? How many of them are part of that magical 75%? It’s a nice story. No, "nice" isn't the word—it's a convenient, marketable fiction that helps sell the products that are really in charge.

Because your boss isn’t the real boss anymore.

The Real Boss is an Algorithm

This entire holiday feels less like a genuine celebration of people and more like a pop-up ad for the booming Human Capital Management (HCM) industry. That market is set to hit nearly $58 billion by 2029, and it’s fueled by one thing: the corporate obsession with quantifying, managing, and optimizing human relationships.

Your boss is under pressure, too. Gallup says 70% of a team's engagement depends on the manager, and other reports show manager engagement is at a 10-year low. They’re burned out, undertrained, and squeezed from both sides. So what’s the solution? Offcourse, more software. Companies like Workday (WDAY), ADP, and Paychex are having a field day, with stock prices reflecting a corporate world desperate to find a technological fix for a human problem.

We're in an era where Workday’s AI can screen you, hire you, and track your performance. IBM famously automated its HR department down from 800 people to just 60. The "boss" is increasingly becoming a dashboard, an AI agent that optimizes workflows and flags dissent. The human manager is just the interface for the algorithm. It’s all about making sure the machine keeps humming, and if a cheap card helps grease the gears, then...

I read this heartwarming story from a guy named Mike Tussey, a retired broadcaster and cop, in his piece remember yours? Time to celebrate them on National Bosses Day. He talked about meeting his old chief for lunch 20 years later, reminiscing about the bond they forged. It sounded like something from a different century. Today, you don't take your boss to lunch; you contribute to a digital thank-you board with a pre-approved GIF, and the system logs your participation as a positive engagement metric. That bond he described is being systematically replaced by a subscription service.

So, What's the Real Truth?

Look, maybe you genuinely like your boss. Maybe they're one of the good ones who shields you from the corporate nonsense. But don’t mistake the holiday for what it is: a beautifully packaged piece of corporate propaganda. It's a distraction. While we’re busy signing a group card, U.S. employee engagement is hitting rock bottom, managers are burning out, and AI is quietly rewriting the rules of our careers.

The truth behind the 75% statistic isn't that we all suddenly love our jobs. It's that the system has gotten incredibly good at making us say we do. So go ahead, send the Slack message. Buy the coffee. Just know that the real boss—the sprawling, data-hungry, software-driven machine—is the one that’s really being celebrated. And it doesn't care if you like it or not.