CITRON
  • Home
  • Coaching
    • Get unstuck
    • Career accelerator
    • Testimonials
  • Speaking
  • About
    • Privacy
  • Blog

What can you get out of having a bad manager?

10/5/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Photo: Paul Skorupskas
We’ve all had at least one: the terrible boss, the one you dreaded spending time with, who never saw you in a good light, no matter what you did. Some of them yell and scream, some pile on the tasks and some of them just ignore you. What they all have in common is that they have created a bad experience that can be very scarring.

There are lots of great tips on the internet on how to deal with this, mostly focussing on what you can do to manage them or the situation but I want to focus on the opportunities having a bad manager offers you. “Opportunities?” you say? Yes, opportunities. You may learn more from a bad boss than from a good one. Lets go through a few possibilities:

  • First off is that you learn some bad boss behaviours that you know to avoid in the future. Most people don’t get much in the way of management training or guidance so they are totally unaware of what they should be doing or what it feels like to be on the receiving end of their behaviour. By experiencing it first hand, you know to eliminate it from your own leadership style and your future colleagues will be grateful.
  • Recognise which saboteurs are driving them - and you! When we are little, we develop guidelines that help us feel safe and some of them don’t translate well into adult life because the follow a child’s simplistic logic.  Take the saboteur test and see if you can spot what drives you and how that may be interacting with what drives your manager.
  • Learn not to take things personally. This is a really great perspective to tune into. Your manager is unlikely to want to destroy your life. He/she probably has a lot going on and isn’t managing it as well as you might wish. They also may have formed an impression of you that isn’t entirely correct. It’s a lot easier to step back and think about how to change the situation if you don’t think it’s targeted at you, personally.
  • Learn useful conflict resolution tactics. Conflict arises when expectations are mismatched. Is there something you can do differently that will change the dynamic? It may sound cliche to say it but the only thing we have full control of is ourselves and when we change what we do and how we are, it has the potential to change everything.
  • Get better at asking for what you need. Many of us hesitate to ask for what we need or give the whole story because we think it will make us more vulnerable, but telling a boss about the impact they are having on you can be exactly what is needed to get things to change. Your boss isn’t psychic and may not realise they are not explaining things well or asking you to do more than you have time for.
In short, sometimes a bad boss can teach us more than a good one. Remembering that, and using it as a learning opportunity can help transform how we feel about a situation. If you see it as a gift, you can even get excited and curious about dealing with the situation - and that will help you at the time and forever afterwards.

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    25 years experience in helping teams build user centred products and services, now helping digital colleagues learn how to bounce back better than before from the challenges life throws at us from time-to-time.

    Archives

    December 2022
    October 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    March 2022
    August 2021
    July 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    September 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    August 2019
    May 2019

    Categories

    All
    3 Brains
    Change
    Coaching
    Coaching Tools
    Confidence
    COVID
    Decisions
    Digital Transformation
    Emotions
    Grief
    Impostor Syndrome
    Neuroscience
    Positive Intelligence
    Reason For Being
    Reinvention
    Resilience
    Self Sabotage
    Taking Stock
    Time Management
    Transitions

    RSS Feed

  • Home
  • Coaching
    • Get unstuck
    • Career accelerator
    • Testimonials
  • Speaking
  • About
    • Privacy
  • Blog