From my earliest jobs after college, I have vivid memories of incidents when my bosses at the time called me into their offices to reprimand me for doing something wrong. These dressing-downs were usually about breaking confidentiality – one boss said I had talked about a pending contract when the details were supposed to be confidential and another said that he had heard I had been speculating about the ups and downs of a director who was causing a great deal of agita in the organization because she was going MIA for long periods of time.
My main memories of these incidents have to do with the intensely negative emotions I experienced while getting reprimanded: feelings of bewilderment (I went into these conversations not knowing that I had done anything wrong) and of being unjustly accused. Because I found these reprimands so shocking, and so unexpected – more often than not, they were delivered in harsh, god-did-you-fuck-up-here tones, I almost always dissolved into tears either during or immediately after the reprimands were delivered. Likely my reactions to these reprimands were also colored by my Korean upbringing, because Korean parents always, always find a way to make you feel as if you were at fault for something bad that happened, and so I developed a chronic anxiety about screwing up.
(For example, when graduating from law school, I discovered that the registrar had not counted my credits correctly – even though I had received the official notice from the school that I DID have sufficient credits. I was threatened with summer school by the administration, until professors intervened with the dean on my behalf. And my parents’ first reaction – in retrospect, I shouldn’t have told them – was, “How did you let this happen?”)
Anyway, I’m not sharing my memories of these incidents to make you feel sorry for (or contemptuous of) the wide-eyed, inexperienced, naïve person I was back then. No, I’m sharing these stories from my early working days because as it turned out, colleagues behaving poorly – especially people who are your manager, or supervisor, who are theoretically responsible for managing your development and performance – is a repeating and extremely common occurrence.
If you’ve had even one paid job, I should be coming off as Captain Obvious, here. People behaving poorly is a built-in feature of humanity, and therefore it is a built-in feature of the modern workplace. (Right now, it is the DEFINING feature of the workplace known as our federal government, where evil clowns are masquerading as leaders and taking a sledgehammer to the rule of law.) But the reason I am calling out poor behavior in the workplace is because no matter how many times we experience it, no matter how much we try to condition ourselves to expect it, it still has a disproportionately negative impact on our well-being that feels, at times, out of sync with the sometimes minor scale of the behavior itself. What I mean is, many of us – especially and including myself – seem to get all twisted up in anger and shock when a boss or a colleague behaves poorly, even when it’s happened to us many times before and even when we rationally know that it will likely happen again.
When poor behavior in a manager or colleague becomes a debilitating pattern for all, the label often used is that the boss or employee is “toxic,” and the standard recommendations – to dig into what is behind the behavior, or to extensively document what is happening – indicate that if it gets really, really bad, you may want to consider involving human resources in the conflict. (FWIW, it has hardly ever, in my experience, been a good idea to involve human resources in a workplace conflict, mostly because even the best and most enlightened HR departments are rife with many competing and conflicting imperatives.) This piece is not really about that. I think there’s a whole range of workplace behavior that sucks but doesn’t rise to the level of anything that can be documented or remediated through legal means. In the incidents I described above, my bosses were not chronically or repeatedly abusive (although I HAVE had managers like that). They were guilty of some things – like, failing to clarify that certain things were to be kept confidential or that certain topics were verboten, and then yelling at me, the most junior employee possible, for breaking rules I had no idea existed. (One of my age-old questions for incompetent managers is: how is one supposed to color inside the lines if I was never told or informed about what the lines are?) But I don’t think they were toxic managers or colleagues. They were guilty of behaving poorly, in that moment, and in many other moments, as well.
I am now in the twilight of my career and throughout the many jobs I’ve had, and the many projects I’ve worked on, I’ve almost always experienced poor behavior from either a supervisor or a colleague. And while it sucks each and every time it happens, I’ve built up some resilience to these happenings, and some more understanding of why it happens. The understanding is what I want to share in today’s piece, because I know lots of young people who are at the very beginning stages of their career and they are like me, when I experienced those early incidents – they are shocked and angry and devastated when they encounter their supervisors and colleagues behaving poorly. And while part of me thinks that resilience and understanding are only achievable by, you know, going through it, I am also offering these insights in the hope that it makes these events feel a little less devastating.
Here are some things for you to consider when your boss or colleague is behaving poorly:
- One, what is the power dynamic at play? Is this your manager behaving poorly or is this a peer/colleague? If the former, please know that your manager is absolutely, in most cases, supposed to be giving you feedback about your growth and your performance. However, you should also know that your manager should be aware that she/he/they should not be yelling at you if they failed to clarify expectations in the first place. Meaning, when managers yell at subordinates for screwing up tasks that were vaguely scoped or assigned, the manager is failing to take responsibility for their own lack of leadership or clarity or communication. Almost every dynamic or situation is the result of all parties involved contributing (or not). So when managers attempt to lay ALL the blame for a screw-up at a subordinate’s feet, they are showing a marked lack of self-awareness, and failing to take responsibility and accountability for the screw-up. In other words, the manager is behaving poorly. (So. Many. Managers. Do. This.) When it’s your peer/colleague behaving poorly – gossiping about you, failing to do their share of their work, undermining you instead of acting collaboratively or supportively – this is when you need to buckle down and consider your options. Which leads me to my next thing to consider which is:
- What are your options/remedies if a manager or a colleague is behaving poorly? If it’s your manager doing it, well, I’m sorry – your options are quite limited. This is why the power dynamic matters – your manager holds the cards, in this case, and you really don’t want to be the type of employee who obsesses over and documents every transgression against you. This is why so many job descriptions ask for “self-starters” or hope that you can “thrive in ambiguity,” – the most successful employees are not the ones who keep track of what others are doing or not doing for them, but instead are simply doing their job, and doing it really, really well. Sometimes, trying to understand the source of the poor behavior helps. It doesn’t excuse the behavior, but it does help you at least de-link the poor behavior and you. I have to tell you, even when it’s super-obvious that I didn’t do anything wrong or deserving of a reprimand, I still – still! – question whether I did something wrong. Or even whether the person just doesn’t like me, which still hurts on some level. To avoid this type of self-gaslighting, I think about whether the person who behaved poorly is going through something that’s hidden – like a stressful divorce, for example, or a family member illness. Or I discreetly check in with trusted colleagues to see if I’m the only one who’s affected by this poor behavior. Again, none of this excuses the person’s poor behavior – but it does help make it feel less related to you.
- Am I saying that you should just keep your mouth shut and not answer back when your manager behaves poorly towards you? Well, yes, sort of, but with a caveat. You should document if it’s a repeated and persistent pattern of behavior. When an incident of behaving poorly happens, you should write down what happened immediately, and send an email to yourself (to a personal, not a work, email account). DON’T write down your feelings about it, e.g., “Darth Maul is such a whiny, egotistical clueless jerk!” Instead, simply write down the facts of what happened, e.g.,: “I was told on May 10th that our lead client wanted recommendations to improve the efficiency and speed of their payment systems. I was asked to analyze their data system but all of the data was either corrupt and incomplete. I asked on several occasions for guidance on how to handle and move forward with this project and did not receive a response. On June, Darth Maul called me into my office and told me that I had messed up the project, and that the client was dissatisfied, and I was entirely responsible for this issue.” I believe, by the way, that this type of documentation is helpful for all sorts of reasons, not just HR/documenting purposes. Writing down what happens helps you practice your own self-advocacy in the future – when you are less inexperienced, and more able to discern what in the Sam Hill might actually be going on. When you are more senior, if someone yells at you, early habits of documentation might help you practice tactful pushback – i.e., by listening and then asking the manager or colleagues questions about what exactly they think happened, and more importantly, whether it’s possible to work together to avoid this problem in the future.
In general, when managers and colleagues behave poorly, they are often like Trump voters – they don’t really want to admit responsibility for anything bad that happens. I have known a very few managers and colleagues who will apologize for behaving poorly or acting out but they were extraordinarily mature and evolved human beings to begin with, and for the most part, managers and anyone in the workplace don’t always operate to the higher standards of behavior.
Human beings are capable of behaving very well. But ever since we’ve existed, we’ve always proven that we are capable of behaving very badly, too. Some of us try harder than others to not let our lapses affect others, but there are many who don’t, and unfortunately right now, we have people in the highest elected offices in our country who are role-modeling the worst possible lapses in behavior and ethics and decency that I have ever seen. As a matter of fact, I think that the terrible wanton behavior of Trump and Musk and others is, actually, the point for the millions of people who voted for MAGA – that they have this not-so-secret desire to give in to their worst impulses and behaviors, and then actually, you know, not get judged for it or suffer any ill consequences.
But for those of us who are trying – trying to behave well, trying to be decent to others, especially in a work situation, I have come to believe that you are having exactly the opposite impact as the people who are behaving poorly are. Remember when I said that people who behave poorly in the workplace have this disproportionately negative impact on people, even if the reprimand feels fairly minor and/or short-lived? Similarly, people who make the time or effort to behave well in the workplace to others have a disproportionately positive effect on their direct reports and colleagues. I wrote about this before, about the effects and rewards of good behavior in the workplace, but I think that it is especially important now. When a young person in my life tells me about something especially shitty that someone at work did or said to them, I first commiserate with them, because I know how awful and unjust it feels. But at the same time, I hope and have faith that the person at the receiving end of the poor behavior has just learned an important lesson about how to NOT behave like that, and how to be a better example to everyone who they work with in the future. In other words, having a crappy boss or a colleague is a blueprint for how not to act in the workplace in the future. There are better ways to learn that lesson – from great managers and colleagues – but the lesson is still there to be learned.
Minna Jung Consulting 