Dealing With Your Bad Boss

Work relationships can be very complex. Unspoken rules prevail. Many employees suffer from naivety and bad career advice. I want to cut to the chase because social media, professional platforms like LinkedIn, popular publications, so-called self-help books, and even expensive seminars by reputable coaches are full of wrong and even deadly advice for aspiring professionals. It took me 40 years to debunk them.

Photo by Aiony Haust on Unsplash

Let's take the advice of being assertive and escalating unfair situations to your second line or third line managers as an example. This advice stinks like a sore thumb.

Assertiveness is a good thing at work and in life. However, when it conflicts with unspoken rules in the workplace, it can be detrimental to one's career development and progress.

When unfair behaviour is observed in the workplace, going above your boss is recommended by some career advisors as a bold and assertive move. It sounds great and feels palatable, but it is a deadly move most of the time.

Apart from exceptional situations, complaining about your boss to their manager can hardly produce any good results. From my involvement and interactions, escalations to a higher level always created a lose-lose-lose outcome.

It creates an unfavourable position for your managers because they get threatened and their primal resources put into a dangerous situation. Their bosses have an awkward situation because their essential resources are deemed performing poorly. As an assertive employee, you become the worse loser because you gained an enemy and a person who gets suspicious of your motives.

Your boss becomes an enemy because they are forced to defend themselves. Their secrets are revealed. Your boss's boss got more unnecessary information about you, possibly all allegations from your performance and motives. And you made your position worse than it was before.

This vital situation in the workplace causes many dramatic problems. Let's take Heather's experience. Heather was a professional designer with the utmost client focus. She noticed an unfair situation created by her boss. After being a hundred per cent sure her boss made an unfair case in her team, she decided to complain to her second-line manager and escalate to the HR (Human Resources) department.

Heather was so sure that her manager would be penalized. She was naive and had a blind spot, like many other innocent employees in the workplace. Guess who lost the case! Yes, as you correctly guess, the biggest loser, in this case, was Heather.

You may think Heather did the best thing ethically, but she ironically committed a political workplace and corporate crime. Ethics and politics frequently clash in the corporate world.

Through my resources, I investigated this situation as it was a topic close to my heart. I found out that Heather's boss was only implementing an unspoken business rule mandated by three levels up executives. Heather was also breaching the organisation's unspoken and undocumented rule by complaining and escalating the situation to the second line manager.

Naturally, the second line manager even listened to her and praised her for taking noble action. But the unspoken rules created a negative HR file for Heather. After a while, things got harder and harder for Heather. She was in the spotlight, and even minor mistakes she made were exaggerated and recorded in the HR file.

Photo by Fa Barboza on Unsplash

Business people cannot survive and thrive without taking risks and making mistakes. But when your mistakes are examined under the spotlight, it can put you into the position of a lousy performer, as happened to Heather. Despite her noble intentions and hard work, Heather's motivation, creativity and performance diminished. Needless to say, she had to give up her fantastic design position just because of a single mistake of escalating her manager to higher levels for a tricky situation.

Another deadly sin in the workplace is talking behind your boss. I call it a deadly sin because modern places have no such concept of true confidentiality.

Spoken words, confidential emails, and private Slack chats in the workplaces are never safe. They never stay discrete. Confidentiality in modern workplaces is an illusion.

And worst of all, your confidential words sometimes can be manipulated and even sound intoxicated. You make a comment about your boss to your team members, perhaps with good intention. But your boss may receive your comment in a totally edited and manipulated format, such as reflecting your bad intention.

Talking behind your boss will most likely sabotage your career.

How do I know that escalating your boss and talking behind them can be so detrimental?

I know because I made this deadly mistake and sabotaged opportunities to invest in skill-building, preparation and hard work. I also witnessed many colleagues who experienced similar situations and outcomes. In addition, I read hundreds of case studies and study results from eminent academics and executive advisors.

Rhetoric on fair speech and freedom of information are false premises. They serve as sugar-coated poison.

Understanding the unspoken rules and staying in the reality zone can be a better approach in dealing with a bad boss. We need to approach any career advice with well-thought caveats.

Throughout the four decades of my career in the corporate world, I never come across a manager genuinely dedicated to customer success above and beyond their personal gains. Yes, they always showed interest in client success, but their real motive was to get the next higher level potential management role or an executive position in the organization.

Understanding the motives and capabilities of your manager is the most important insight for your plans.

If you even need to communicate to your second line manager, the approach could be to organize a feedback session agreed by your manager and second-line manager. Rather than complaining about the situations, asking them open-ended questions during the meeting can give you more than what you need to know.

I’ve tried it many times, and it worked for me. I also noticed that it worked for many technology executives I coached at the start of their careers.

Unless you gain 360-degree feedback, you never know what your manager is trying to do. You never know whether your manager is after another lucrative job, or they truly care about the client. Probably your career aspirations are not even on their agenda.

By cutting the chase, I provided you with my honest observations based on my long-term experience and tenure in large business organizations.

These points may look like pessimistic views, but I hardly met any altruistic or angelic types of first-line or second-line managers. Some depicted good traits from the outset, but their true motives showed up clearly when circumstances changed.

Thank you for reading my hard-learned lessons from the corporate world.

Follow me to see more articles like this.

...

Follow