“I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the Stern Fact, the SadSelf, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nearly a third of my coaching practice involves working with clients, who want to “runaway” from their troubles: Bad boss, no promotion, perfidious colleagues, too much work, company in trouble, and on and on. Most of these clients—and other clients, too—do not realize that these are life’s encounters that one must learn how to combat and deal with to develop your immunity, so that no matter where you go you are equipped to deal with them and build new immunities to combat with the similar problems endemic to that organization, company, or community.
Most fail to realize that no matter where one decides to go (run towards) there are people very similar to the place you are leaving (running away from), so it is futile to assume that the people in that new place would be fundamentally any different from your current place.
So, what is one to do to deal with such situations that seem to challenge you and suck the oxygen from your life and deprive you of the simple joys you deserve? Let us take a few typical ones that are more common in my business:
Bad Boss: I have written in many of my previous blogs that bad bosses are the norm, not the exception. Studies (by Gallop and others) have shown that during the past 60+ years that these surveys have been conducted their outcomes have not changed. Nearly 80% of the managers at alll evel are incompetent, dysfunctional, indifferent, or disengaged. Any particular combination of these maladies results in a managerial malaise that depends on who their boss is and many other political factors. The problem is that this disease is a human condition that travels far and wide with no barriers to it, so no matter where you go these manifest in their full glory, in one form or another.
So, what is one to do?
Although there is no generic cure for this condition, only a redress. The following are some of the way to develop your own immunity to such bosses:
Problem Definition: Rather than throwing your hands up and looking to find yourself another—better—boss take a clinical view of your situation and analyze it with some objectivity. If your boss is behaving in a certain way towards you explore and see how much of that is contributed by your own behavior and their reaction to how you respond to them on an everyday basis. It is easy to point finger or blame outwardly, but most interactions result from mutual behaviors. Explore and see what you can change in the way you respond to your boss to mitigate their wrath through compromises, changed attitudes, and accommodating their needs and wants. Also, explore their deeper psychological needs to see what you can do so that they “like” you. This takes some effort, patience, tolerance, and diplomacy, but is doable. Once you find their vulnerabilities it becomes easier to deal with them on “their” terms. What you need to understand is how those terms also can serve your agenda; a’ la, killing two birds in one stone.
A recent use case may illustrate this point:
A client was “blessed” with a micromanager. She was already overloaded with her boss’ myriad tasks that were ill-defined and deadlines that often did not make sense to her. He would pile on more tasks as she was struggling with the overload and was constantly feeling inadequate in her abilities to please her boss. When he’d send her the next task by email my client did not respond to that email until she was done with a pending task to free herself up for this new task. Sometimes, this response took my client several weeks and her boss would ride her for her lack of alacrity in responding to his every new task, no matter how burdened she was with tasks already in her queue. This situation was frustrating to them both.
So, when my client came to me for help, I suggested a simple remedy: As soon as her boss piled on yet another task on her already full plate, immediately acknowledge the receipt of that email and give him a completion date based on her current backlog. This approach required her to carefully schedule her current workload, prioritize it, get her boss’ approval, and then start this acknowledgement strategy immediately upon her receipt of an email on a new task from her boss. As soon as she implemented this simple regime her boss not only backed-off, he started respecting her workload and was careful in how he piled on new work on her desk. In the process her workload also became more manageable and her boss perceived that she had become more efficient (here, killing three birds in one!)
Difficult colleagues: Toxic and difficult colleagues is today’s workplace reality. Avoiding them can work, but it is difficult to carry on your everyday work by doing so. The best strategy is to learn how to deal with them and to make them feel important or irrelevant as needed (a few suffer from these insecurities). Here, too, you can step back and rather than fight the behavior trying to understand how you can make them feel important by feeding into their needs and then getting them to cooperate with you.
In one such case, my client was constantly being undermined by his peer, who was also a manager reporting to the same boss. She would go to their boss and complain about my client gratuitously just to poison him against my client and to elevate her own esteem in the boss’s mind. My client was frustrated by this perfidy but did not know what to do about it. Going to her directly may have raised some new problems (gender attack? for my client) So, when he came to me with this problem, I told him to go to his boss and make a request that if she came to him with a complaint about him to shut her up and ask her to do so only when he was in the same meeting to defend himself against her attacks. His boss was also getting tired of these incessant tirades against my client, so the next time she went complaining to him about my client, he simply asked her to go back, bring my client along and then start the discussion. As soon as the boss started using this approach all her complaints stopped in their track. This approach also made my client’s boss happy.
These are just two of the most common type of problems many face at work and these are the remedies you can apply to deal with them in a forthright way. Getting to the root-cause of one’s behavior is at the heart of this approach and it applies to any kind of misbehavior that others exhibit, including your boss and skip boss; you just have to be more diplomatic when dealing with such remedies in the cases involving your higher- ups.
Running away from your problems is not the best approach to dealing with life’s challenges. Dealing with them forthrightly by taking charge of your own situation and getting to the root-cause of your grief by changing your approach to dealing with the miscreant is the best way to develop the immunity you need to succeed on your own terms right where you are, without having to run towards yet another place with its own set of problems.
Good luck!