Questions to Ask Before Fighting or Fleeing

When you have a bad boss, your reactions may swing between an impulse to confront him or to look for another job. If you have a bad peer, you may have a similar impulse; you might not look for another job in response, but you may decide to avoid him or challenge him. (In coaching executives, we are no longer surprised to learn how focus on a boss or peer who violates expectations can turn into an obsession that is brought home, discussed continuously, or becomes the basis for an entire coaching intervention.) These responses, however, fail to take into consideration the lesson of the previous sections; bad bosses and peers vary considerably and change frequently. If you approach them with learning in mind, you’ll tailor your approach to the particular individual and situation. Therefore, answer the following questions before taking action:

Where does your boss or peer fall on the bad continuum? Use the criteria we’ve provided to determine approximately where he or she resides.

Are you aware of the context for your boss’s or peer’s bad behavior? In other words, is he under an unusual amount of pressure or facing a difficult situation in his personal life? It may be that your boss has just experienced a personal loss or that his own boss is placing tremendous pressure on him. His bad mood may be an anomaly or the result of temporary stress. A few discrete inquiries can tell you if off-putting behavior represents who this person is or who this person is in a given situation.

Are you expecting too much? It’s not unusual for people to look at bosses as mentors or even father or mother figures and coworkers as confidantes or sometimes siblings. When these individuals don’t live up to their expected roles, people view them as bad. In fact, some bosses aren’t particularly paternal or particularly adept as developers of talent. Similarly, some of us view our peers as friends and confide in them. Because we work closely with them and get along so well with them, we assume that they’ll support us as a friend would and watch our backs when we’re in trouble. Although coworkers certainly can be our friends, in certain instances they’re not. They have their own agendas and concerns, and when our needs conflict with these agendas, they may not be particularly friendly or supportive. That’s the byproduct of a competitive workplace. We deem these peers bad but, in fact, our expectations for them have been unrealistically high.

When you answer these questions, you’ll have a much better sense of the way you should go through this passage. If, for instance, you find that you’re expecting too much of a boss or a peer, you may find it easier to hang in there and wait until the pressure eases up and they return to their normal behaviors. In this way, you won’t prematurely leave a boss who has much to teach you or cut off a potentially productive, collaborative relationship. Just as significant, you’ll learn how to work with people when they’re not at their best and tolerate a certain degree of bad behavior without making snap judgments based on this behavior.

Similarly, recognizing where someone is on the continuum and placing his or her actions in context gives you more information with which to make an informed decision. If you have an Unethical or Value-Averse boss, the right course of action may be to leave the company, and this is a good lesson for any leader to learn. However, if someone is on the continuum’s cusp—somewhere between Flawed and Value-Averse—you may want to give him the benefit of the doubt and wait and see what happens. The choices you make in these situations will affect what you learn from this passage, so let’s look at what you should be learning.