Nasty Boss

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Nasty Boss
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I teach high-achievers how to land new jobs they love.
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We’ve all heard the saying, “People don’t leave companies, they leave managers.” But, sometimes when you’re so used to how things are or when everyone else around you seems to have similar experiences, it can be hard to tell if you’re truly in a bad situation or if this is just the way things are done.
You may be ignoring the signs right in front of you.
First things first, you’re not crazy (or stupid) and you’re not being unreasonable. If you have a gut feeling that you have a bad boss, you’re most likely not wrong. But, to further validate your thoughts, here are 13 signs you’re dealing with a toxic, insecure or very frustrating manager.
1.    Your manager doesn’t let you do your job – It’s been months, maybe even years into your role, and you’ve barely done 30% of the things your manager hired you to do. When you try to do more, you get the run-around or your requests get put on the back-burner.
2.    Your ideas are constantly turned down – Your manager isn’t interested in making improvements or trying new things. Your boss would much rather maintain the status quo. They don’t value your opinion or care that processes may be outdated or ineffective. 
3.    Your manager never offers constructive feedback – You’re interested in learning and becoming better at what you do, but trying to get feedback from your manager is like pulling teeth.
4.    Your manager never notices or acknowledges your accomplishments – Everyone else sees you as a top performer in your office, but somehow your boss doesn’t. Worse, whenever you do get compliments from others, your manager may belittle the compliment or take credit for your ideas.
5.    Your manager only focuses on the numbers, not the people – They’re more focused on revenue goals than if you’re reaching your own career goals. Metrics are more important than the human doing the work. Requesting time off is always an issue and your manager would much rather prefer if your personal life was non-existent.
6.    You’re expected to be perfect, with zero room for error – You’re always afraid to make a mistake and fear getting in trouble if you do so. Even if expectations may be unclear, any type of failure gives your manager the impression that you’re incompetent, which isn’t true. 
7.    Your manager has to approve of every single thing you do – All of your projects, client correspondence, and work must be signed off by your manager before you can move forward. Everything has to go through your manager before you can continue your duties.
8.    You’re constantly left out – Your manager seems to always leave you out of important meetings that impact your ability to do your job well, yet still expects you to do your job well. When asked to be a part of bigger projects and initiatives, you’re constantly asked to sit on the bench.
9.    Your boss doesn’t take your job seriously – Your manager doesn’t think your role is valuable or doesn’t care about what you do. You feel like you’re constantly having to prove the significance of your work, even though you were hired to do what you’re currently doing.
10. Your manager is rude – Your manager constantly says things that leave you stunned. They make condescending or outright disrespectful remarks. Or, worse, they wait to email you passive-aggressive remarks, disguised as feedback, while seeming kind in-person. They diminish your value or make you feel small.
11. Your manager criticizes or talks negatively about other people in front of you – They always seem to find fault in other people’s work or behavior and never shy away from stating their concerns in front of you. They even look to you to chime in and agree with them.
12. You’re asked to do things outside of your moral character – While the requests may seem small, they make you uncomfortable and fall outside of your integrity. Maybe it’s lying on a report, or lying to clients and vendors. But, whatever it is, the feeling leaves a knot in your stomach.
13. You’re expected to figure things out on your own – Your manager never has time for questions. You rarely even see or speak to your manager, except when they need something. Whenever you do ask questions, your manager looks annoyed or frustrated.   
Depending on your specific situation, it might be helpful to take inventory and evaluate if there’s still room to learn and grow at your company despite your manager’s behavior. If there are other benefits to gain from staying at your company, then don’t let your boss cut your time short. People only have as much power over you as you permit them to have, and unless your manager is impacting your job security or career growth, then you may be able to overlook their nonsense.
On the other hand, if your manager is impeding your growth, peace of mind or job security, then it’s time to start your job search right away. There are so many other amazing companies, with amazing managers who love mentoring and supporting others. You don’t have to settle for anything less.
As a bonus, you may find that as you start your job search, your relationship with your manager will become the least of your worries. Your manager may even start to notice that you’re on the way out because of your new demeanor and may change their behavior because of it. Don’t let that stop you from leaving. The sooner you get serious about your job search, the sooner you can have a better manager who supports you, respects you and challenges you to become the best you can be in your career.
Adunola Adeshola coaches high-achievers on how to take their careers to the next level and secure the positions they've been chasing. Grab her free guide.

You're not alone: how to survive your horrible boss
Take a stand: studies show fighting back against a bully boss could be beneficial. Photograph: Tse Pui Lung/Alamy Stock Photo
Is your boss a ‘bit daft’? Evidence suggests you’re not alone
Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning
© 2022 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. (modern)
Working under a bully can do real damage to your mental health. But there are ways to protect yourself
I n hindsight, Zoe regrets not heeding the red flags she noticed when interviewing for the office job she held for a year. “The CEO joked around a little bit inappropriately,” she recalls, “Also, I heard him yelling in his office when I was waiting for my interview to begin.”
Soon after she was hired, Zoe (whose name has been changed to protect her professionally) realized her boss hadn’t just been having a bad day; he was a bully and a big-time yeller.
“I think he thought that respect could be gained by being the loudest one in the room, and he yelled because he wanted to assert his dominance,” she says. Not that it worked. “It made it seem like he didn’t have control and didn’t actually know what was going on,” she adds.
There are, according to Dr Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying Institute, 25 common habits that can qualify a boss as a bully. Of this list, most bad bosses mix several nasty traits to create their own particular flavor of intolerability. Zoe’s boss, for example, embodied a spicy blend of “exhibiting presumably uncontrollable mood swings”, “making verbal put-downs” and “yelling, screaming and throwing tantrums”.
Zoe hadn’t experienced anything like her boss’s temper before. She remained silent as he ranted, often about things that had practically nothing to do with her work, like how annoyed he was that the coffee machine was malfunctioning, or that her whole generation was lazy and selfish. When he finished, she returned to her desk and struggled to regain her calm and focus for the rest of the day.
It wasn’t long before the stress Zoe felt from being yelled at began to affect her personal life.
“It taxed my relationship with my boyfriend horribly,” she says. “He spent a year listening to me cry and scream and get out all of my negative emotions that should have been aimed at my boss, and unfortunately it burnt him out, and it burnt out the whole relationship.”
Zoe quickly realized she had more to lose. “I had lost energy for almost all the things that I loved doing,” she says. “I realized I was losing who I was because I was so unhappy.”
For those who have never had an abusive boss, Zoe’s story may sound shocking – but situations like hers are not uncommon: half of both the US and UK workforces report having left a job because of a boss who yelled at or otherwise tormented employees.
A 2017 study on abusive supervision found that people who have worked with a bullying boss report being more withdrawn and depressed, and that targets of abusive supervision report symptoms that bear “striking similarities to those diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder”.
Research has long supported a link between workplace abuse and negative consequences for employees – if your boss is antagonistic, you’re more likely to have anxiety and stress headaches, and lose sleep and your ability to concentrate. A new study from the International Journal of Environmental Research and public Health even found people coping with workplace abuse had a heightened risk of developing cardiovascular disease.
In some cases, workplace abuse can be contagious within an organization. For instance, in 2013, the Journal of Applied Psychology found American soldiers in Iraq were more likely to admit to hitting and kicking innocent civilians and were less likely to report misdeeds by others when their supervisors were also cruel to them.
According to the author and Ask a Manager blogger Alison Green, young or new employees can be especially impressionable: “If you have someone modeling how to manage while yelling, there is a high risk that [new managers] are going to pick that up as well,” she says. “People get their cues of what is and isn’t acceptable from their managers and treating someone badly simply because you have power over them is pretty abusive.”
It’s easy to understand how victims of a bully boss can incur personal costs and lose their confidence and productivity. Yet new research from Villanova University reveals that it’s not just workers who suffer when their boss is abusive – it may come as a relief to learn that bad managers themselves face consequences for being insufferable jerks.
“What we found is that the abusive boss is significantly hurt by their own behaviors,” says the lead researcher, Dr Manuela Priesemuth. “They actually lose their social worth, which is basically feeling valued and appreciated by other people. And because they miss this crucial component of self-worth, they’re also going to perform worse at their work.” Basically, if you treat people badly they’re not going to like you, and for social creatures like humans, being disliked is hurtful and disadvantageous.
Is that good news? Well … kind of. Priesemuth found “many managers realize the social costs of their behavior and stop – unless they have psychopathic tendencies”.
Psychopaths, Priesemuth explains, “don’t really care about social worth because they don’t really care about other people.” If your abusive boss belongs to the 15% of bad bosses who Priesemuth determined are psychopaths, that’s “very bad”, she says.
So let’s consider the worst-case scenario: what do you do if you are working with someone you suspect is pathologically callous, and, for whatever reason, you are unable or unwilling to simply quit?
“I would start by asking – am I safe having a gentle, backstage conversation with this person about their behavior?” says Robert Sutton, Stanford professor and author of 2017’s The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People who Treat You Like Dirt. “And if you don’t feel safe, then who in your network can you recruit to confront this person with you?”
If confrontation is not going to fly, Sutton suggests what he calls “mind tricks to save your soul”: essentially cognitive behavioral therapy tactics involving mentally reframing a threat to reduce its impact.
One such trick is just to see the existential absurdity of your torment in the context of the fleeting nature of time. “When something’s unpleasant, you remind yourself that this is just temporary, and that ‘when I look back at this, a year or two from now, it’ll just be nothing’,” says Sutton.
Yet if the idea of needing to dissociate from your dreary plight as a beleaguered office grub just to survive seems a little too soul-destroying to be a viable solution, studies suggest you can, in fact, fight fire with fire. Research from 2014 found that employees with hostile bosses are better off when they respond with passive aggression.
The study, conducted by Professor Bennett Tepper of Ohio State University, found that employees who responded passive-aggressively to their abhorrent bosses by ignoring them, feigning ignorance of the cause of their rage, or just giving a half-hearted effort were “less likely to see themselves as victims”.
When employees retaliate against bad bosses, they suffered less psychological distress and job dissatisfaction. What’s more, these employees didn’t feel like their reciprocal hostility negatively affected their careers – rather, Tepper posits they may in fact enjoy increased admiration from their colleagues, thereby becoming more committed to their workplace.
Handling an abusive boss, then, is not unlike dealing with a schoolyard bully: if you can’t walk away or remain unbothered by their antics, it may be best to fight back.


Susan Heathfield is an HR and management consultant with an MS degree. She has decades of experience writing about human resources.


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You're weary. You're frustrated. You're unhappy. You're demotivated. Your interaction with your boss leaves you cold. Your boss is a bully , intrusive, controlling, picky or petty. You are desperately wondering how you can professionally deal with a bad boss.


Your boss takes credit for your work, never provides positive feedback, and misses each meeting that was scheduled with you. Or your boss caves immediately under pressure and fails to support you in accomplishing your job. Your bad boss never recognizes your excellent performance nor that of any other employee, so the office is joyless and unhappy.

Your boss is a bad boss , bad to the bone. Dealing with less than an effective manager , or just plain bad managers and bad bosses is a challenge too many employees face. No matter the character of your bad boss , these ideas will help you deal with them.

Start your campaign by understanding that your boss may not know that he or she is a bad boss. Just as in situational leadership, the definition of bad depends on the employee's needs, the manager's skills, and the circumstances of the situation.


A hands-off manager may not realize that their failure to provide any direction or feedback makes them a bad boss. Your boss may think he or she is empowering the staff . A manager who provides too much direction and micromanages may feel insecure and uncertain about their own job. This boss may not realize their direction is insulting to a competent, secure, self-directed staff member.

Or, maybe the boss lacks training and is so overwhelmed with his or her job requirements that they can’t provide support for you. Perhaps your boss has been promoted too quickly , or the staff reporting responsibilities have expanded beyond his or her competence and reach. In these days of downsizing, responsibilities are often shared by fewer staff members than ever before which can affect their ability to do the job well.

This bad boss may not share your values. The youngest generations of workers expect that they can use their vacation time and take action to make work-life balance a priority. A flexible work schedule may make the job their dream job. But, not all bosses share these views. Some, for example, think that remote workers harm the culture and interfere with developing a culture of teamwork.


If your values are out of sync with those of your boss, and you don't think this imbalance will change, you do have a problem. Maybe it's time to change bosses. But, until then, these actions are recommended for you to preserve your relationship, such as it is.


A manager at a mid-sized manufacturing company wanted to improve his approach to working with his employees. He knew that he looked down his nose at them. He criticized and screamed at employees. He publicly humiliated any employee who made a mistake, as an example of his bad boss behavior.


One day he called to ask a question of his consultant. The question doomed the relationship to disappointment when he said, “I know that you don’t approve of me screaming at staff as a regular thing.” Agreed. “So, can you tell me, please, what are the circumstances under which it is okay for me to scream at them?”


This manager thought his behavior was perfectly acceptable. (The end of the story? He never did change and was eventually removed as manager.) Most managers that bully, intimidate, cruelly criticize, name-call, and treat you as if you are stupid likely know what they are doing. They may know they’re bad and even revel in their badness. 


They may feel their behavior has been condoned—and even encouraged—within their organization. They may have learned the behaviors from their former supervisor who was viewed as successful.

You don’t have to put up with demeaning behavior.

You deserve a good boss who helps your self-confidence and self-esteem grow. You deserve a good boss who helps you advance your career. You deserve civil, professional treatment at work.


Part of HuffPost Work/Life. ©2022 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved.
The 7 Personalities Of Bad Bosses Who Think They're Good Bosses
Be careful. Is your bad manager a rescuer, a people-pleaser or a numbers person?
Jan 13, 2021, 05:45 AM EST | Updated Mar 2, 2022
Hill Street Studios via Getty Images
3) The Great Manager Who Can’t Manage Up
Part of HuffPost Work/Life. ©2022 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved.
Work long enough, and you are bound to have a bad manager. Unfortunately, they do not operate in just one manner. They can be aggressive, neglectful, ingratiating or just plain inept. And not all of them were bad to begin with. The very strategies and skills that may have made them star performers can make them terrible to work for .
Lawrese Brown, the founder of C-Track Training , a workplace education company, said bad bosses who used to be star performers “are following the script of ‘I do my job really well,’ but they don’t realize that their job has changed and they have to change, too.”
The first step to countering a boss’ bad behavior is identifying how they operate. Here are the most common types of incompetent leaders who think they are actually good bosses.
This is a bad boss who may seem like a good boss at first. If you have any trouble with a project, they’ll just take over. Any conflict with a client, they’ll deal with it for you.
Consultant Peter Block identified this work archetype as the “rescuer” in his book “ The Empowered Manager: Positive Political Skills at Work .” According to Block, the rescuer is someone who is highly sensitive to discomfort and believes “the path to power, influence and gaining some control over the situation is to
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