How to Deal with a Difficult Boss
It is something that most people have experienced at one time or another, a difficult boss who makes them feel undervalued, pressured or micromanaged. Even though it is a common experience, it is not one that is talked about all that often outside of workplaces, so it can be difficult to gauge how to react to it and what to do to improve your working life.
One of the largest problems with bosses can be that they are narcissistic and believe that their abilities outstrip those of their employees. “It’s why they earn the big bucks, you know!” In reality, they would be a middling performer doing your job and they aren’t great in the position they occupy, pushing their unrealistic and oftentimes ill-informed expectations onto employees.
Some of the more narcissistic bosses employ tactics such as talking about you behind your back to other colleagues and expressing their dissatisfaction, in the full knowledge that it will come back to you. They are often belligerent about even the smallest mistakes and can go off at the deep end about the smallest indiscretion while ignoring their own which can have much larger consequences for the business.
Unrealistic expectations can be another hallmark of the narcissist as a boss and this is something that is played out in many workplaces across the country and the world. It can be telling when they expect you to do unpaid extra time to catch up with your workload. If you find this happening regularly, it is a sign that you are being worked too hard, and this can cause burnout and health problems in the longer term.
Strategies for Dealing with Difficult Bosses
There can be many different tactics employed when trying to deal with the situation. They are, after all, your boss and they have the power to fire you from your current position or to promote you if things go better. We have included some ideas below for the best ways to try to improve your working life when your boss is less than ideal.
Ask for a Meeting with the Boss
If you are feeling under pressure and are being made to feel that your hard work is under-appreciated, it may be worth asking for a meeting with your boss in the first instance. Being brutally honest about how you perceive the situation and the impact that their actions make on you and your self-esteem may make them reconsider how they treat you in the future.
If being micromanaged is your problem, ask them to give you a week of working pretty much unsupervised in order to demonstrate that they don’t need to keep such a close eye on your actions. If they agree and you can successfully pull this off, you may actually be lifting some stress from their shoulders as well and your boss may become better to deal with in the long-run.
The key to being able to pull this off is to agree to some key performance indicators (KPIs) or targets that you should hit by the end of the week. This way, you are both using the same metrics to measure your success and they can’t bring up something completely unrelated to try to prove that they should go back to micromanaging you.
Start Keeping Emails
A common frustration when dealing with narcissistic bosses is that they may tell you to take a particular course of action but a couple of days later ask you how you got on with the task and mention that you had agreed on a different course of action. They may then get angry at you for not doing the course of action that they didn’t ask you to undertake.
This is where having their original email comes in handy. Start keeping any requests they make of you in email form so you can always back up your assertions about what they have asked you to do. If they then switch to asking you verbally to do things, so that you are no longer able to disprove their assertions, start to make a note and email it to yourself straight after they ask you to do anything, as this allows you to have a contemporaneous note of what you have been asked by them.
Keep Your Anger in Check
It can be difficult to keep your anger under control when you know that you are being treated unfairly in the workplace, but this is very important. You can’t let loose at your boss in the way that you may want to, as this can lead to instant dismissal for gross misconduct.
Try not to get worked up and to stay scrupulously professional and polite, even in the face of intense provocation. Just remember that you only have to fail once and they will be able to terminate your employment. It isn’t fair and it feels very demoralising but it demonstrates that you are able to deal with even the most difficult of bosses and that they can’t get under your skin.
Discuss the Matter with Colleagues
It is important to be able to gauge whether the way your boss treats you is a matter between you and the boss or if it is how they treat everyone at the company. If it is just you, you may have some protected characteristics that allow you to claim constructive dismissal, and if it is a wider problem, you may be able to enlist the help of your colleagues in dealing with it.
It is true that a problem shared is a problem halved and colleagues may be able to help you with tips and strategies for dealing with the difficult boss and managing them and their behaviour. If they are well-versed in how the boss behaves,
Look for a New Job
If nothing makes any difference, it may be worth your while looking for a new job before you are too ground down from the current one. Every job has its expiry date and sometimes the bosses are the ones who make them untenable in the end.
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