That new job you took last year had been going great. The pay was good and so were the benefits. You had even started to think about making this place a career.
And then The Creature came into your life.
At first he seemed normal enough. He said the right things. Reached out to other people in the department – for a week or two anyway. There were genuine indications he was human. But then things began to change and The Creature – your nickname for your new supervisor – began to crawl out of the primordial slime and into the light of day.
And your workplace began to morph into the swamp.
While his predecessor seemed to genuinely care about people and to treat them like professionals, this guy is clearly focused on only three things – himself, his agenda, and his next promotion.
The impact has been dramatic. You’ve found your energy and your patience begin to wane. Morale is slipping.
How could this have happened? This has been a pretty nice place to work – could one jerk really make that much of a difference?
Yes – and it happens everyday and more than a few times in every career.
Get used to it. There is no mold your home office uses to build the perfect manager or supervisor. At some point in your career you are going to draw the short straw.
Now it’s your turn to be partnered with a Bad Boss. How you deal with him is going to go a long way in determining a lot more than your happiness in your current job. It could very well dictate how successful you are in your career.
Here are a couple of points of perspective you will want to consider:
- Perceptions vary when the subject of Bad Bosses comes up. What you need and what your colleague needs won’t be the same. Get used to that simple fact.
- The tendency to label someone whose style, approach, or character differs from yours’ as a “Bad Boss” is pretty high. The roadways of every career are littered with the bodies of “wash-outs” who blamed their problems on the person they reported to.
- It takes a lot of energy to invest time looking only at your boss and not yourself. Just saying.
- Very few bosses get up each day and think, “How can I screw somebody’s life up today?” The reality is that all of us are consumed with doing what we believe is important; sometimes less so with considering what might be important to others. The message for each of us as followers is equally simple – even bosses may not know what they don’t know.
- Know what they call the absolute worst boss in your company today? They call him or her boss. There are great leaders and there are horrific leaders. Get used to it.
You now have choices to make. Though you might have considered it, you can’t kill them and still continue your career. That leaves you with three options and three options only:
- Resign
- Transfer
- Learn to live with them
If you choose the latter, here are Three Survival Tips that can make a big difference:
- First – ask yourself if you have a clear and relatively unbiased vision of what a great boss should be. A great many are very good at saying what’s wrong with their supervisor and far more ambiguous in articulating the other extreme. Emotions color every rainbow – including yours.
- Second – are you prepared to challenge your own level of objectivity? We all have biases – has your opinion been shaped by events that don’t allow you to enjoy an accurate picture?
- Third – have you ever sat down and had a discussion with The Creature and talked about:
- Mutual expectations – what he expects from you and what you expect from him?
- An agreement on what “great” looks like from both sides?
- How you can best work together?
If you’re looking for the textbook example of how to survive a Bad Boss – forget it. It doesn’t exist. But you can learn from even the worst. Over the course of a career you’ll see more bad bosses.
The people who win their career do so because their level of resilience is greater than the norm. They manage to recognize adversity is never permanent – it just occasionally seems that way.
It’s what you do with the challenge that is most important.
