11 ms·

Managing your boss: adjusting to narcissists, 'ghosts,' gaslighters

112 points by apress 6y ago

teddyh 6y ago
I have two relevant, maybe slightly more helpful, links: Getting Things Done When You’re Only a Grunt https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/25/getting-things-done-when-youre-only-a-grunt/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/25/getting-things-don... The Manager FAQ https://www.seebs.net/faqs/manager.html https://www.seebs.net/faqs/manager.html
- mikestew 6y ago
  Those links are immensely more helpful than the hollow shell of an article that was posted. The Manager FAQ in particular does a better job of delivering on what this article promised (and failed to deliver on).
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  If I can add a note on why I think these are so useful and how it pertains back to the subject article: they let you figure out whether you've used the tools in your power to try and work with said manager. If you use these tools and exhaust them, it tends to make it a lot easier to figure out for those borderline cases whether poor management is situational or intrinsic to the manager. You can work with the former. With the latter, the most ROI positive option is usually to leave (as many have been chiming in throughout the thread)
- steveBK123 6y ago
  On Joel's list I've done 1,4,5,6 myself This one is hardest I think- Strategy 4 Neutralize The Bozos We had a guy that would work nights and weekends on other people's assigned tickets committing non-running half assed code to trunk. Note this was in lieu of doing any work actually assigned to him, coming into the office, attending meetings, or participating in L3 rotation. This was sometimes in coordination with the boss in which Bob underbid other devs by 1 or more orders of magnitude (They said 1 week? I can do it in an afternoon!) We would get into office in morning and be told by the boss - well Bob already did that ticket last night, just help him get it working.. and spend a month of effort getting his "afternoon" hack implementation to semi-work. Sometimes he'd even email people code to commit on his behalf. This went on for a few years. Eventually we did two things: 1- The rest of the team transitioned to a release branch and let him keep committing his non-working fixes to trunk as the new major version release. We had an agreement that when he got it all working we would merge back and release to PROD. He felt like the all-star he was because he was working on the strategic improvement while us peons piddled away on "feature requests" and "bug fixes". 6 months later he admitted he couldn't get trunk running, which then lead to the next step. 2- Explained to a couple hops up in management that this developer was actually producing negative work. It wasn't that his work was subpar, it was that every hour of work he did produced 2 or more hours of work for other people. Morale was shit, the project was shit, and the whole team was going to leave if you keep this guy around.. here's a bunch of examples of him producing negative work. We presented him with the ultimate juicy prize - cut cost and increase productivity. The whole process still took about a year to get rid of a peer. I've never seen it work on a higher up. Every place I've been with a bad boss I've only seen things go from bad to worse, just interview and leave. And when you quit, all the promises they make are BS too, I've never been talked into staying but in retrospect, every "don't leave because we will do __" would turned out to have been a lie. I once had a manager try to talk me out of leaving who, when I showed up at the new shop after 2 weeks.. arrived himself 2 weeks later, so during this chat he had probably already quit himself given the extended notice period for his seniority ..
- efwfwef 6y ago
  I like the "Strategy 4 Neutralize The Bozos". People have used tactics against me like that. For example, if they don't like what you're proposing, they will gain time by asking you to perform metrics, or write up a better proposal. The funny thing is that I had both, but the person didn't spend the time looking at what I was proposing.
rightbyte 6y ago
Is this article an add for Careerstone? Why do Reuters write this? There is just gossip and phrenology like personality types without the sculls.
- medicineman 6y ago
  I noticed this too. Was wondering how to handle one of my bosses ghosting me. Yet here I am, all the keywords but no answers.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  The supposed editor describes themselves on LinkedIn as "I develop and execute editorial concepts for global digital sponsorships" so yes, this might be an advertisement. Thomson-Reuters contains a legitimate news organization but it also contains many, many other things.
  - rightbyte 6y ago
    Ok good find. It should be disclosed in the article. Maybe my view of Reuters is colored by that local newspapers cite them for the "there has been an election in Nigeria and the tomatoe harvest in Spain is bad this year" serious kind of news.
darth_avocado 6y ago
Yes, managing up is a thing. No, the article did not provide any value.
marcod 6y ago
Q: What if you find yourself in a truly toxic work environment? A: My advice is to get out if you can. Toxic situations make you emotionally and physically sick. It can take years to recover. Have a good support network in place, limit your exposure with that toxic boss and stay under the radar. Adopt a survivor mentality until you can get out. Yes, this sounds obvious, but at my last job I could have really used somebody telling me as much.
- psyc 6y ago
  Most important lesson I ever learned and I share it freely, because I could have saved 2 years of misery had I really understood. People be like “well you say that but some of us have mortgages, families, kids, cats to feed”. Well guess what. If you burn out, not only will you lose that income, but you won’t be able to look for a job at best, or wind up with hospital bills at worst. In other words, you risk a far worse situation than if you had quit with no notice and nothing lined up. There is no possible excuse for risking catastrophic illness, especially when you have more job mobility and are in greater demand than most professions. There is no “if you can” as hard as that may be to accept, or as irresponsible as it may sound to you or look to others. It’s not good but it’s the least worst option. If the job is harming you badly enough then sorry but if you cannot negotiate a better situation where you are, you must leave for yourself and anyone who cares about you.
  - marcod 6y ago
    So true! I also lost about 2 years and my physical and mental health really deteriorated and 5 years later I'm still dealing with fallout. I was a manager under a toxic director, so I had the added pressure of making sure my team was all right. After most of them had found positions elsewhere, I finally left.
    - lazide 6y ago
      For future reference, having done it both ways - finding a good out for yourself(and putting your oxygen mask on first) is usually better for the people under you too, as it shows them what they should be doing AND gives them (often) a place they can reach out to and land.
gamedna 6y ago
Important topic that should be discussed more so employees can truly succeed, regardless of their reporting chain. Unfortunately this article didn't really deliver, and lacked substance for me.
arbitrage 6y ago
This is a very week article; there is nothing specific in it about managing your boss. This only mentions that the concept exists. This is clickbait.
- l33tbro 6y ago
  > This is a very week article. I don't usually police spelling, but ... yeah.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  It reads like something you read in the airplane magazines in the pocket infront of you. I didn't know Reuters wrote these kind of articles. I wonder if it just is an add for Careerstone what ever that company does. I guess recruiting.
draw_down 6y ago
Obviously these things are real, but I think you should be very careful before you decide, oh I'm being gaslighted, or so-and-so is a narcissist. It is very very easy to dismiss whatever you'd rather not deal with using this terminology. At least in my country (US), this is increasingly prevalent. (Not in work environments specifically, but that's only a matter of time.) Again, the things they describe are real, and bad. That's why it's important to be judicious when using them. Then again, if you're just cynically using these for political purposes or otherwise to make people look bad, go nuts. That seems to work pretty well.
dandanua 6y ago
This article is useless and gives no real advice except "get out". To deal with abusers you have to learn to see tricks they use to emotionally destabilize their victims. For example, they can use hints and innuendos for intimidation. I wrote a blog post about such communication https://dandanua.github.io/posts/counterfactual-communication-and-intimidation/ https://dandanua.github.io/posts/counterfactual-communicatio... Also, you can't really "manage" your boss if he/she is gaslighting you. This is a criminal offense (or should be, depending on where you live) and must be punished accordingly.
- evocatus 6y ago
  Thanks for this article, this clarifies a number of things that have been causing me great distress lately.
- skim_milk 6y ago
  Let's be honest, telling people they have to accept their abuse and "get on your abusers' level and 'outsmart' them" is kind of wrong. The advice to leave your abusive boss and your insecurities behind and find a better paying job is, really, the only ethically correct advice. Your "option" of "trying to outplay" your boss only plays into the victims' insecurities and validates the abuser's hold.
  - dandanua 6y ago
    In some cases you can't just leave, you can have obligations and responsibilities. You can be tied with the firm and an abusive boss can take full advantage of it. In this case you have to play, it doesn't matter do you want it or not. But to "outplay" you don't have to be much smarter. If you are honest then the advice of trying to make communication more explicit will do it by itself, hopefully.
    - skim_milk 6y ago
      This has essentially become a subjective debate over how to live one's best life. Yes, many of us prefer freedom over financials. However, very often in reality, at the heart of the argument that one has to just hang on and suffer well with their job is an insecurity that one doesn't deserve better. To mental health professionals, I assume they would understand that the people looking for advice and reading their articles are from emotionally/physically/economically insecure environments, from which the advice "suffer well" is essentially entirely non-productive because it is their lack of a feeling of security that prevents them from knowing they deserve better. From the lack of security, which causes the lack of the knowledge that they deserve better, these people will typically not ever try to come up with a way out of their abuse until they hit rock bottom. It's not that that's inherently a worse way to live, but the reason behind this way of living is typically (but not always) due to hidden insecurities, which abusive bosses freaking love to exploit because it's works very well at controlling their insecure employees. Yes someone can be secure and live like this but I think many would agree that this is a rare scenario and not the best advice for the average person looking at these articles.
nednar 6y ago
> Adopt a survivor mentality What does that even mean. Somehow I feel the article doesn't speak about the title's content at all.
goatcode 6y ago
This read like a really shitty, saccharine, abridged, disjointed article. It barely touched on its title. How did this get to the front page?
- trulyme 6y ago
  Probably because the topic is interesting and novel (at least to me). I agree the article is crap though.
jancsika 6y ago
I feel like "gaslighting" and "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" are in a race to see who can gossip their away around the world first. As I understand it, "gaslighting" is quite nearly a form of kidnapping. The perpetrator is (consciously or otherwise) fucking with anything they can that provides the victim an anchor on reality. Cult leaders use this tactic all the time. Does it mean something else now?
u678u 6y ago
Have many people had toxic bosses? I've had a string of the opposite - tech guys that took on team lead roles but would rather code, were too meek to give direction, didn't give any negative feedback even when I knew I did something badly, let people do what they wanted with little coordination.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- chartpath 6y ago
  That's just lack of leadership skills and possibly incompetence about subfields of development they don't have experience with. It can become toxic in its own way when the first bully/troll is hired since that person will pull the wool over this poor dev manager's eyes and make everyone else's lives terrible through bikeshedding and pointless meetings to debate unnecessary architecture proposals.
  - u678u 6y ago
    Wow bikeshedding thanks for this, this describes my company incredibly well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
- rtlfe 6y ago
  The thing you just called non-toxic definitely sounds toxic to me.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    If that's toxic, then everything is toxic, and the word no longer means anything.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  I've never had "toxic" bosses. I've had bosses that treated their underlings like tools that they owned, whose purpose was to enact the plans that they had made. Maybe some people are ok with that but I'm not. Sometime I have my own ideas and I want to try them out without being questioned. Fortunately most of my bosses have been easy going "if you have a good idea and it's good for the company then do it" types. I actually counted recently and it's 6 out of 8 bosses that have been good like that. Fortunately we're in a seller's market. People really do quit bosses.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
quercusa 6y ago
A book recommendation: Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work by Babiak. Lots of good material on recognizing the situation. But once you do, the advice is simple: get out.
sbuttgereit 6y ago
For a delightful, humorous take on the subject, I would recommend reading: "Throwing the Elephant: Zen and the Art of Managing Up" by Stanley Bing.
loopz 6y ago
While I think most people should probably leave a toxic environment, it fixes nothing. If boss is bad, it's the best advice though! You must give energy to what works for you, then shelter is possible in any environment.
IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
I have seen at least 1 narcissist move up the ranks of a well regarded organization and receive awards in the process. I also see the person is hardworking and from what i can tell, there is no obvious abuse. Is this not the experience people have with narcissists? From the company's perspective, they seem like ideal employees, driven to impress at whatever personal cost, and deriving their self worth by what others think of them. Do i have this right?

112 points by apress 6y ago

I have two relevant, maybe slightly more helpful, links: Getting Things Done When You’re Only a Grunt https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/25/getting-things-done-when-youre-only-a-grunt/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/25/getting-things-don... The Manager FAQ https://www.seebs.net/faqs/manager.html https://www.seebs.net/faqs/manager.html

mikestew 6y ago
Those links are immensely more helpful than the hollow shell of an article that was posted. The Manager FAQ in particular does a better job of delivering on what this article promised (and failed to deliver on).
yowlingcat 6y ago
If I can add a note on why I think these are so useful and how it pertains back to the subject article: they let you figure out whether you've used the tools in your power to try and work with said manager. If you use these tools and exhaust them, it tends to make it a lot easier to figure out for those borderline cases whether poor management is situational or intrinsic to the manager. You can work with the former. With the latter, the most ROI positive option is usually to leave (as many have been chiming in throughout the thread)
steveBK123 6y ago
On Joel's list I've done 1,4,5,6 myself This one is hardest I think- Strategy 4 Neutralize The Bozos We had a guy that would work nights and weekends on other people's assigned tickets committing non-running half assed code to trunk. Note this was in lieu of doing any work actually assigned to him, coming into the office, attending meetings, or participating in L3 rotation. This was sometimes in coordination with the boss in which Bob underbid other devs by 1 or more orders of magnitude (They said 1 week? I can do it in an afternoon!) We would get into office in morning and be told by the boss - well Bob already did that ticket last night, just help him get it working.. and spend a month of effort getting his "afternoon" hack implementation to semi-work. Sometimes he'd even email people code to commit on his behalf. This went on for a few years. Eventually we did two things: 1- The rest of the team transitioned to a release branch and let him keep committing his non-working fixes to trunk as the new major version release. We had an agreement that when he got it all working we would merge back and release to PROD. He felt like the all-star he was because he was working on the strategic improvement while us peons piddled away on "feature requests" and "bug fixes". 6 months later he admitted he couldn't get trunk running, which then lead to the next step. 2- Explained to a couple hops up in management that this developer was actually producing negative work. It wasn't that his work was subpar, it was that every hour of work he did produced 2 or more hours of work for other people. Morale was shit, the project was shit, and the whole team was going to leave if you keep this guy around.. here's a bunch of examples of him producing negative work. We presented him with the ultimate juicy prize - cut cost and increase productivity. The whole process still took about a year to get rid of a peer. I've never seen it work on a higher up. Every place I've been with a bad boss I've only seen things go from bad to worse, just interview and leave. And when you quit, all the promises they make are BS too, I've never been talked into staying but in retrospect, every "don't leave because we will do __" would turned out to have been a lie. I once had a manager try to talk me out of leaving who, when I showed up at the new shop after 2 weeks.. arrived himself 2 weeks later, so during this chat he had probably already quit himself given the extended notice period for his seniority ..
efwfwef 6y ago
I like the "Strategy 4 Neutralize The Bozos". People have used tactics against me like that. For example, if they don't like what you're proposing, they will gain time by asking you to perform metrics, or write up a better proposal. The funny thing is that I had both, but the person didn't spend the time looking at what I was proposing.

rightbyte 6y ago

Is this article an add for Careerstone? Why do Reuters write this? There is just gossip and phrenology like personality types without the sculls.

medicineman 6y ago
I noticed this too. Was wondering how to handle one of my bosses ghosting me. Yet here I am, all the keywords but no answers.
jeffbee 6y ago
The supposed editor describes themselves on LinkedIn as "I develop and execute editorial concepts for global digital sponsorships" so yes, this might be an advertisement. Thomson-Reuters contains a legitimate news organization but it also contains many, many other things.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  Ok good find. It should be disclosed in the article. Maybe my view of Reuters is colored by that local newspapers cite them for the "there has been an election in Nigeria and the tomatoe harvest in Spain is bad this year" serious kind of news.

darth_avocado 6y ago

Yes, managing up is a thing. No, the article did not provide any value.

marcod 6y ago

Q: What if you find yourself in a truly toxic work environment? A: My advice is to get out if you can. Toxic situations make you emotionally and physically sick. It can take years to recover. Have a good support network in place, limit your exposure with that toxic boss and stay under the radar. Adopt a survivor mentality until you can get out. Yes, this sounds obvious, but at my last job I could have really used somebody telling me as much.

psyc 6y ago
Most important lesson I ever learned and I share it freely, because I could have saved 2 years of misery had I really understood. People be like “well you say that but some of us have mortgages, families, kids, cats to feed”. Well guess what. If you burn out, not only will you lose that income, but you won’t be able to look for a job at best, or wind up with hospital bills at worst. In other words, you risk a far worse situation than if you had quit with no notice and nothing lined up. There is no possible excuse for risking catastrophic illness, especially when you have more job mobility and are in greater demand than most professions. There is no “if you can” as hard as that may be to accept, or as irresponsible as it may sound to you or look to others. It’s not good but it’s the least worst option. If the job is harming you badly enough then sorry but if you cannot negotiate a better situation where you are, you must leave for yourself and anyone who cares about you.
- marcod 6y ago
  So true! I also lost about 2 years and my physical and mental health really deteriorated and 5 years later I'm still dealing with fallout. I was a manager under a toxic director, so I had the added pressure of making sure my team was all right. After most of them had found positions elsewhere, I finally left.
  - lazide 6y ago
    For future reference, having done it both ways - finding a good out for yourself(and putting your oxygen mask on first) is usually better for the people under you too, as it shows them what they should be doing AND gives them (often) a place they can reach out to and land.

gamedna 6y ago

Important topic that should be discussed more so employees can truly succeed, regardless of their reporting chain. Unfortunately this article didn't really deliver, and lacked substance for me.

arbitrage 6y ago

This is a very week article; there is nothing specific in it about managing your boss. This only mentions that the concept exists. This is clickbait.

l33tbro 6y ago
> This is a very week article. I don't usually police spelling, but ... yeah.
rightbyte 6y ago
It reads like something you read in the airplane magazines in the pocket infront of you. I didn't know Reuters wrote these kind of articles. I wonder if it just is an add for Careerstone what ever that company does. I guess recruiting.

draw_down 6y ago

Obviously these things are real, but I think you should be very careful before you decide, oh I'm being gaslighted, or so-and-so is a narcissist. It is very very easy to dismiss whatever you'd rather not deal with using this terminology. At least in my country (US), this is increasingly prevalent. (Not in work environments specifically, but that's only a matter of time.) Again, the things they describe are real, and bad. That's why it's important to be judicious when using them. Then again, if you're just cynically using these for political purposes or otherwise to make people look bad, go nuts. That seems to work pretty well.

dandanua 6y ago

This article is useless and gives no real advice except "get out". To deal with abusers you have to learn to see tricks they use to emotionally destabilize their victims. For example, they can use hints and innuendos for intimidation. I wrote a blog post about such communication https://dandanua.github.io/posts/counterfactual-communication-and-intimidation/ https://dandanua.github.io/posts/counterfactual-communicatio... Also, you can't really "manage" your boss if he/she is gaslighting you. This is a criminal offense (or should be, depending on where you live) and must be punished accordingly.

evocatus 6y ago
Thanks for this article, this clarifies a number of things that have been causing me great distress lately.
skim_milk 6y ago
Let's be honest, telling people they have to accept their abuse and "get on your abusers' level and 'outsmart' them" is kind of wrong. The advice to leave your abusive boss and your insecurities behind and find a better paying job is, really, the only ethically correct advice. Your "option" of "trying to outplay" your boss only plays into the victims' insecurities and validates the abuser's hold.
- dandanua 6y ago
  In some cases you can't just leave, you can have obligations and responsibilities. You can be tied with the firm and an abusive boss can take full advantage of it. In this case you have to play, it doesn't matter do you want it or not. But to "outplay" you don't have to be much smarter. If you are honest then the advice of trying to make communication more explicit will do it by itself, hopefully.
  - skim_milk 6y ago
    This has essentially become a subjective debate over how to live one's best life. Yes, many of us prefer freedom over financials. However, very often in reality, at the heart of the argument that one has to just hang on and suffer well with their job is an insecurity that one doesn't deserve better. To mental health professionals, I assume they would understand that the people looking for advice and reading their articles are from emotionally/physically/economically insecure environments, from which the advice "suffer well" is essentially entirely non-productive because it is their lack of a feeling of security that prevents them from knowing they deserve better. From the lack of security, which causes the lack of the knowledge that they deserve better, these people will typically not ever try to come up with a way out of their abuse until they hit rock bottom. It's not that that's inherently a worse way to live, but the reason behind this way of living is typically (but not always) due to hidden insecurities, which abusive bosses freaking love to exploit because it's works very well at controlling their insecure employees. Yes someone can be secure and live like this but I think many would agree that this is a rare scenario and not the best advice for the average person looking at these articles.

nednar 6y ago

> Adopt a survivor mentality What does that even mean. Somehow I feel the article doesn't speak about the title's content at all.

goatcode 6y ago

This read like a really shitty, saccharine, abridged, disjointed article. It barely touched on its title. How did this get to the front page?

trulyme 6y ago
Probably because the topic is interesting and novel (at least to me). I agree the article is crap though.

jancsika 6y ago

I feel like "gaslighting" and "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" are in a race to see who can gossip their away around the world first. As I understand it, "gaslighting" is quite nearly a form of kidnapping. The perpetrator is (consciously or otherwise) fucking with anything they can that provides the victim an anchor on reality. Cult leaders use this tactic all the time. Does it mean something else now?

u678u 6y ago

Have many people had toxic bosses? I've had a string of the opposite - tech guys that took on team lead roles but would rather code, were too meek to give direction, didn't give any negative feedback even when I knew I did something badly, let people do what they wanted with little coordination.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
chartpath 6y ago
That's just lack of leadership skills and possibly incompetence about subfields of development they don't have experience with. It can become toxic in its own way when the first bully/troll is hired since that person will pull the wool over this poor dev manager's eyes and make everyone else's lives terrible through bikeshedding and pointless meetings to debate unnecessary architecture proposals.
- u678u 6y ago
  Wow bikeshedding thanks for this, this describes my company incredibly well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
rtlfe 6y ago
The thing you just called non-toxic definitely sounds toxic to me.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  If that's toxic, then everything is toxic, and the word no longer means anything.
IshKebab 6y ago
I've never had "toxic" bosses. I've had bosses that treated their underlings like tools that they owned, whose purpose was to enact the plans that they had made. Maybe some people are ok with that but I'm not. Sometime I have my own ideas and I want to try them out without being questioned. Fortunately most of my bosses have been easy going "if you have a good idea and it's good for the company then do it" types. I actually counted recently and it's 6 out of 8 bosses that have been good like that. Fortunately we're in a seller's market. People really do quit bosses.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

quercusa 6y ago

A book recommendation: Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work by Babiak. Lots of good material on recognizing the situation. But once you do, the advice is simple: get out.

sbuttgereit 6y ago

For a delightful, humorous take on the subject, I would recommend reading: "Throwing the Elephant: Zen and the Art of Managing Up" by Stanley Bing.

loopz 6y ago

While I think most people should probably leave a toxic environment, it fixes nothing. If boss is bad, it's the best advice though! You must give energy to what works for you, then shelter is possible in any environment.

IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago

I have seen at least 1 narcissist move up the ranks of a well regarded organization and receive awards in the process. I also see the person is hardworking and from what i can tell, there is no obvious abuse. Is this not the experience people have with narcissists? From the company's perspective, they seem like ideal employees, driven to impress at whatever personal cost, and deriving their self worth by what others think of them. Do i have this right?