Chapter 8: Coping with a Bad Boss and Competitive Peers

Overview

Most leaders expect to work in consistent, rational environments, and most of the time their expectations are met. More specifically, they expect the people they work with to operate in certain ways: conform to cultural norms and practices, adhere to commonly accepted values, communicate honestly and accurately, and act like professionals. They also naturally assume that they’ll behave like decent human beings.

When these expectations aren’t met, even great leaders struggle to cope. Think about a boss you disliked or a coworker you wanted to avoid or ignore. Perhaps your boss was volatile, or maybe your coworker was overtly friendly but covertly withholding key information from you. The odds are that their behavior struck you as irrational. It’s likely that you felt, at some point, that they had betrayed your trust, and you found it difficult to work with them afterward. They may have become the reason you left your company to seek employment elsewhere.

We consider this experience a passage, because most leaders will go through it at least once in their careers. Good leaders learn to use the passage to improve their leadership ability. Ineffective leaders let their anger and self-pity overwhelm them, and they don’t take the time to reflect or talk about this emotional experience in terms that go beyond their immediate, visceral reaction. Good leaders resolve to understand the dynamics inherent in the situation and how their behavior may have contributed to creating it.

There’s more to having a bad boss or aggravating coworker than meets the eye, and we need to understand that “bad” means different things to different people.