I spent 20 years in retail management before building my writing business. I’ve managed teams. I’ve reported to a wide range of managers. And I’ve watched talented people burn out because they couldn’t figure out where their job ended and someone else’s began.
I’ve also ghostwritten 54+ books, many for executives and entrepreneurs who were dealing with exactly these dynamics at a much higher pay grade. The problems are the same at every level. The stakes just get more expensive. I wrote an entire book about this. My Boss is Insane comes from 33 years of corporate experience dealing with racist, lying, micromanaging, and psychotic bosses. Not theoretical scenarios. Real people who made real workplaces terrible. The strategies in that book come from surviving those situations.
The Boundary Problem
From the podcast
Nikhil Raval spent a decade in financial services before pivoting to leadership work across Asia, and has watched the pattern from what he calls the ringside, on Leaders and Their Stories:
Over the years that’s given me a perspective of what it’s like from the ringside.The ringside view is where the boundary problems are visible. Inside the ring, they look like normal work.
Most people don’t get in trouble for refusing to do their job. They get in trouble for doing everyone else’s job on top of their own. It starts small.
You help a coworker with something outside your role because you’re capable and willing.
Your manager notices you handled it well and starts routing similar tasks your way. Within six months, you’re doing the work of two positions for the salary of one, and the expectation is now baked into your role. Try to stop, and you’re suddenly “not a team player.” That’s exploitation dressed up as opportunity.
The difference between growth and an employer taking advantage of you is whether additional responsibility comes with additional compensation and recognition. If it does, you’re advancing. If it doesn’t, your employer is using you. The Ethics in the Workplace handbook addresses this directly: sometimes the most ethical choice is to protect your capacity so you can deliver quality work on the commitments you made. Overcommitment doesn’t just affect you. It affects everyone who depends on your work being done well.
Is quiet quitting just doing your job?
The term “quiet quitting” got popular because it gave a name to something people have always done: working within the boundaries of their actual job description instead of volunteering for unpaid extra work.
The framing is wrong. Doing the job you were hired to do, during the hours you agreed to work, for the compensation you accepted, is fulfilling a contract. That this behavior needs a special name tells you how broken workplace expectations have become.
The problem is workplaces that treat above and beyond as the baseline and then act surprised when people pull back to sustainable levels.
I watched this cycle repeatedly during my management years.
The best employees would absorb extra work because they were competent and cared. Management would notice they could handle more and keep adding. Eventually those same employees would either burn out, disengage, or leave. Then management would complain about the difficulty of finding good people, never connecting the departure to the unsustainable workload they created.
Promotion Without Pay Is Not a Promotion
If your title changes but your compensation doesn’t, what you received was additional responsibilities under a new title, and nobody should call that a promotion.
Companies do this because it works. The new title feels like recognition, and most people are uncomfortable negotiating salary, especially when they’ve just been told the company values them enough to promote them. The flattery creates social pressure to accept the terms without pushback. The company identified work that needs doing at a higher level, determined you can do it, and figured out they can get it done without increasing their costs. That’s a good deal for them.
How good a deal it is for you depends entirely on whether you negotiate. Before accepting any promotion, know the market rate for the new role.
Document your contributions. Present your case clearly. If the company can’t or won’t compensate the promotion properly, that tells you something about how they value your work. Use that information to make decisions about your future.
What is the overtime trap?
Overtime as a norm instead of an exception is a management failure. When a team consistently works beyond their scheduled hours to meet deadlines, the problem isn’t insufficient effort. The problem is unrealistic scheduling, understaffing, or both.
I’ve seen managers treat overtime as evidence of dedication instead of evidence of poor planning. The team working weekends is compensating for a manager who can’t scope a project accurately or who refuses to push back on unrealistic timelines from above. If you’re regularly working unpaid overtime, you’re subsidizing your employer’s operational failures with your personal time. That’s a donation.
The Goldman Sachs junior analyst situation made this visible at scale. Analysts documented 100-hour work weeks and severe health impacts. The firm’s initial response was cosmetic: protected Saturdays. The underlying culture that rewards overwork and treats burnout as weakness didn’t change because the incentive structure didn’t change. The lesson: if the system rewards overwork, individual boundary-setting will always be swimming upstream. Sometimes the answer is a different system.
What do you do when your boss makes your job impossible?
Sometimes “just do your job” is impossible because your boss is actively making your job impossible.
The credit thief who presents your work as their own to senior leadership. The micromanager who times your bathroom breaks. The favoritism boss who gives the best assignments to their inner circle regardless of qualifications. The scapegoat boss who takes credit for successes and disappears when things go wrong. Over 33 years in corporate America, I encountered all of them.
The racist manager who nearly dropped the n-word in front of witnesses. The religious bigot who demanded I hide my faith.
The pathological liar who stole my commission. This is part of my Leadership Hub, where I collect everything on the topic. The psychotic executive who had to be fired with armed security present.
These aren’t hypothetical scenarios from a management textbook. These are people I reported to. The patterns repeat because toxic managers often get promoted because their dysfunction looks like strength to people above them who don’t understand the difference.
People mistake aggression for decisiveness. They mistake micromanagement for attention to detail. They mistake taking credit for others’ work for leadership.
The most dangerous toxic boss tactic is gaslighting: denying things they clearly said, claiming you’re being too sensitive, insisting you misunderstand their intentions.
This is designed to make you question your own perception so you stop trusting your instincts about what is wrong. If you find yourself constantly second-guessing your interactions with your manager, walking on eggshells, or noticing that other people avoid them too, trust those signals. You’re not crazy.
And don’t count on HR to save you. HR departments exist to protect companies from lawsuits. The “investigation” process is often theater designed to document reasons why the complainer should be managed out. Policies and procedures mean nothing when toxic managers decide they don’t apply to them.
The practical strategies: document everything in writing. Build relationships outside your direct reporting line so your value is visible to people other than your boss. Keep your skills current and marketable. Build an escape fund so you’re never so dependent on one paycheck that you can’t afford to leave. And plan your exit strategically instead of rage-quitting without a safety net. The full survival guide for dealing with every type of toxic manager, from the merely incompetent to the dangerous, is in My Boss is Insane.
Unfulfilled Promises
Stock options that never materialize. Raises that are always next quarter. Promotions that are coming soon, just keep doing great work. Future rewards are the cheapest form of compensation because they cost nothing until they’re delivered, and they frequently aren’t delivered.
If a commitment matters, get it in writing. People leave, priorities shift, budgets change, and verbal promises made by a manager who’s gone in six months have no enforcement mechanism.
I tell my ghostwriting clients the same thing about their book projects. Everything goes in the contract: scope, payment schedule, timeline, revision terms, confidentiality. Clear documentation prevents the ambiguity that creates problems. Workplace commitments deserve the same standard.
What Does ‘Just Do Your Job’ Mean?
Doing your job means fulfilling the responsibilities you agreed to, at the level of quality expected, within the time and compensation structure you accepted. It means being reliable, professional, and competent. It doesn’t mean being available for everything, absorbing unlimited additional work, or accepting that your worth is whatever your employer decides to pay you.
Setting boundaries isn’t laziness. Negotiating compensation isn’t greed. Declining work outside your scope isn’t insubordination. These are professional skills that protect your ability to do your actual job well over the long term.
The people who last in their careers without burning out are the ones who understood what they were hired to do, did it well, and maintained the boundaries that made sustained performance possible.
For a complete exploration of workplace ethics, including boundary-setting, overcommitment, compensation advocacy, and building sustainable work practices, see Ethics in the Workplace. For specific strategies for surviving toxic managers, see My Boss is Insane.
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