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I don’t remember much from the time I spent working for bad bosses except the feeling “I can’t wait until I don’t work for this person anymore.”
I was too young and inexperienced to realize that working for a bad boss is only painful if you take the bad boss seriously. Of course, it is your lousy boss’s fondest hope that you will take him or her very seriously, but just because your boss wants you to be afraid of them doesn’t mean you have to do it.
One of the best things you can do for yourself when you’re stuck working for a terrible boss is to grow a thicker skin. It took me ages to learn that lesson.
My bad bosses gave me gifts that I didn’t appreciate until years later. Now I look back and see that in many ways, it is more beneficial to spend some time working for lousy bosses than to have an unbroken string of great managers coaching you.
The great managers teach us a lot, of course — but awful managers teach us lessons that we couldn’t learn any other way!
Here are five wonderful lessons I learned from bad bosses:
1. How to separate my thoughts from my feelings
2. How to bite my tongue when I wanted to defend myself
3. How to consider the source
4. How to take the long view
5. How to stay sunny and level even when I was being treated badly.
When I was growing up I never thought about thoughts and feelings — who does? It’s not something we talk about in school. If my boss was being a jerk one day, my day was wrecked. I felt bad and walked around upset and grumpy. Sometimes I cried in the ladies room.
I didn’t know I could separate my thoughts from my feelings. Bad bosses taught me how to do that. Gradually I learned to hear the unfair criticism or a stinging tone in my boss’s voice, note the tone, note the criticism and move on to my next appointment or action item. I learned that just because my boss was upset didn’t mean I had to be upset, too.
I learned to have my feelings — I wasn’t going to deny them — but not to let them rule me. I knew that with every minute that passed following my boss’s descent into Jerk Mode, the clouds would part a little more. Eventually I could tell that I would feel much better by the next day, and so I learned not to freak out and get emotional when my boss was being horrible.
Bad bosses taught me to bite my tongue when I was dying to speak up. Why wouldn’t I speak up in my own defense? I did that sometimes, but more often I learned that there was no point — that I had nothing to prove or to defend.
I learned that keeping silent is often a better way to resolve a boss’s juvenile snit than to jump to my own defense. Later I learned that bad bosses are just regular people in great fear. Some of them have never known another state except the state of extreme fear. Talk about being ruled by your emotions!
If a person is in crushing fear, do you want to get into a fight with them? That could only make things worse!
I learned that it was up to me to change jobs or bide my time under the lousy boss until I could hatch a getaway plan. There was no need to defend myself, most of the time. Now I’m glad that I learned that it’s not always necessary or appropriate to speak when someone is ranting about something that really has nothing to do with you.
Your lousy boss is just venting, and you are a handy person to vent at. You might be doing an incredible job. That might be the reason your boss is so critical of you!
Just because someone is put in a position to supervise you does not mean that they are smarter, wiser, more professional or more mature than you are. You cannot take the unequal power relationship too seriously.
That’s why you can’t freak out when an unequipped or fearful boss tells you that you need to improve your skills in something you already know much better than the boss does.
Instead, you can consider the source. You’re not going to change your boss’s view of the world, especially not from a subordinate position. They are on their path. You are on yours. Does it matter whether your boss says smart things or stupid ones? It is irritating when your boss behaves badly, but you can still get all of the good stuff your job has to offer you when you work for an irritating person.
You are a mighty warrior, so you will put up with your boss’s irritating ways in order to get the good stuff you came to this job to capture!
Those times when I cried in the ladies room, I thought “How can I stand this horrible boss for one more day?” but work has a funny rhythm.
Some of the days at work stretch into oblivion but somehow the weeks and months race by. A few months after I got free of each lousy boss I was back to my usual self. I learned to take the long view. I didn’t enjoy my bad bosses, but I could tell I was growing muscles working for them.
I realized that people can only get under my skin if I let them.
Bad bosses taught me that nobody has the right to rob me of my equilibrium. Managers can fume and yell and threaten or do whatever they want to do, but I still decide how I’m going to react. I’m not about to let some no-account little tin god manager spoil my mood — and neither are you!
Credit:
Liz Ryan is the CEO and founder of Human Workplace. Follow her on Twitter and read the rest of her Forbes.com
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