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The Insecure Boss
A recent survey found that 80% of people say they work with at least one terrible coworker. And I wanted to help people figure out how to have more productive relationships with those people who push their buttons. I researched and developed eight archetypes of some of the most annoying patterns of behavior that we see in our coworkers.
One of the archetypes is the insecure boss. The classic behavior of the insecure boss is to micromanage, to take their insecurities out on you by trying to make sure that you don’t interact with other people from other offices because they want to look good. And it can be incredibly frustrating because they don’t trust you to get your job done. Some of the tactics for dealing with the insecurity that you might be on the receiving end of is to help them feel secure. So one of the tactics right away is to point out what they’re good at, and it has to be something you genuinely feel they’re good at. Are they good at pointing out risks? Are they good at bringing the team together? Are they good at managing to higher ups? Point that out. Tell them that you appreciate it.
You also want to make sure that they know that you are not a threat. One of the worries of an insecure boss is that you are out to show that they’re not capable or that you want their position, that you’re trying to take them down. So as much as you can show that you are on their side, that you’re invested in their success, or even just the department’s success, but that you’re interested in collaborating and working together to make that happen, the more that they will see you as an ally as opposed to a competitor. Set up regular check-ins, to keep them in the loop. Tell them what you’re working on, what challenges you’re facing, who you’re interacting with in other departments, what decisions you’ve made, so they feel more secure that they have the full picture of what’s happening on their team and in their department and that you are someone they can trust and rely on.
The Tormentor
There’s another archetype called the tormentor and I use that label because this is typically someone you expect to be a mentor. You want this person to look out for you in your career, but they do the exact opposite. They undermine you. Maybe they challenge your commitment to work, maybe they assign you useless tasks, or maybe they just simply degrade you or demean you in front of others.
Sometimes people will torment because they feel like they came up in their career or in the industry in a much more difficult time, and they had to give up certain things in order to be successful. Acknowledging that can help them feel seen and can sometimes take the sting out of some of their more toxic behavior. You can even have a conversation with them where you address the relationship between you. You might say, “You know, I think we got off on the wrong foot here. I’d like to have a more positive working relationship with you. What can I do to make that happen?” So rather than putting the need to change on them, you’re asking, “What can I do differently?” And ideally, that opens up a conversation about how you might interact in more positive ways.
The Know-It-All
Another archetype is the know-it-all. The classic know-it-all behavior is to talk over you or interrupt you to tell you what they know, to proclaim things as if they’re a hundred percent sure when the reality is they have no way of being sure of what they know. So when you’re on the receiving end of that behavior, there are a couple things that you can do. First and foremost, you might ask for facts and data. So if your know-it-all colleague says, “That will never work, our customers will never go for it,” you can ask, “What are you basing that on? What facts do you have to support that?” If there isn’t data available, you can propose that you run a short experiment. Let’s do a survey with our customers and see how they’ll react to this new strategy or this new product feature, so that we’re not basing it on people’s opinions, but we’re basing it on data.
The Political Operator
Another archetype is the political operator. This is the person who caress so much about their career and does not care at all about how their pursuit of success impacts others. This is the classic “I’m going blow your candle out so that mine looks brighter.” This person might steal credit. They might lie. They might tell others that they are responsible for these huge successes at work when the reality is they had a very small role to play. It can be really helpful to keep a paper trail of your interactions with the person, what was said, what was done, when they were informed of something, how they reacted. That paper trail can come in really handy if they decide later on to tell the higher ups they had no idea this was happening, or that they hadn’t agreed to actually do something which they did agree to do.
Now, the political operator is generally someone who’s focused on themselves, and so some of the tactics that you want to use is to try to remind them that there are others around them who deserve credit or who deserve airtime, who deserve to speak up in a meeting. And so, for example, one thing you might do is to agree ahead of the time on a project with them about how you’re going to share credit. Who’s going to send out the email to the higher ups that explains what’s going on with the project? Who’s going to speak about it in the all-staff meeting? And this will allow the team to make sure that everything is shared equally rather than the political operator taking over right from the start.