Every week somebody tells me about their boss.
The micromanager who tracks bathroom breaks. The liar who takes credit and reassigns blame. The one who makes jokes in meetings that nobody laughs at and everybody remembers. The screamer.
The stories are depressingly similar to the ones I lived through. The names change and the logos change. The pattern never does.
Why does everybody believe they are the only one?
Because I believed it too.
In the moment, inside it, I was certain I was the only person going through that particular thing with that particular person. It felt specific to me. It felt like something about my situation, or about how I was handling it.
Looking back with a great deal more experience behind me, I know I was one of millions.
That isolation is what the book exists to break. People blame themselves for failing to handle treatment that would break anybody. They stay because they have no idea how ordinary their situation is, and ordinary is exactly what it is.
What is this a rewrite of?
An earlier and much shorter book called My Boss Is Whacko, spelled with an h.
Same pattern as several of my other books. A first version identifies a real subject and does not go far enough into it, and then years later I come back and write it properly. This version is longer, better organized, and considerably more useful.
What is the boss supposed to be doing?
Getting you to be maximally productive. That is the job of your immediate supervisor and of their managers above them.
Your job is to produce, and to gain as many benefits from that workplace as you can, while avoiding harm to yourself through overwork.
Those two things are compatible. A boss doing his job and an employee doing hers are not in conflict, and a workplace where both happen is a workplace that functions.
Work-life balance was not a concept when I was employed. Nobody used the phrase and nobody cared. I am also not convinced the boss should be the one who cares about it, since protecting your own hours is your side of the arrangement instead of a service management provides.
So where does it go wrong?
They turn into monsters. It is that simple, and it happens more easily than anybody expects.
A boss discovers he has power over you. Then he exercises it, and the exercising becomes the point, and the work becomes the excuse for the exercising.
What I call the I-am-the-boss disease. They believe they control you, and after a while they believe they control you outside your working life as well. Weekends. Evenings. What you do with the hours they do not pay for.
The book catalogues nine varieties: the racist, the one harassing over religion, the liar, the one who is retiring and has stopped caring, the unethical one, the micromanager, the psychotic, the hostile, and the sexual harasser.
None of the stories are invented. Names and details are changed and the events happened.
Why does the book start with a good boss?
Because you need a baseline, and almost nobody has one.
Chapter one describes what a good boss looks like before the book describes anything else, so that every variety afterward can be measured against something instead of against a feeling. A reader who has only ever had bad managers has no comparison available, and without a comparison the bad ones start to look like what a boss simply is.
It also means I would recommend this book to bosses. Not as an accusation. As a description of what they might be doing that they have never seen named, since a great many bad managers learned their behavior from a bad manager and are reproducing it without inspection.
My own count, across thirty-three years: nobody I would call excellent. Two I would call decent. The rest were various shades of insanity.
What was the certificate?
One of my bosses had a document declaring him legally insane, framed and hanging on his office wall.
He was proud of it. He had obtained it deliberately, because he expected to be fired and he wanted ADA protection when the moment arrived.
He was an interesting person to work for.
I include it because it sounds invented and is not, and because somewhere a reader is going to recognize a version of it. When people hear a story like that, the first response is that it cannot be true, and the second response, if they have been in enough workplaces, is a name.
What changes when you recognize the pattern?
You stop negotiating with the person and start assessing the situation.
A great deal of energy goes into trying to fix a bad manager. Working out what he wants. Adjusting your approach. Arriving earlier, over-preparing, rehearsing conversations in the car. All of it rests on an assumption that the behavior is a response to something you are doing, and that different input produces different output.
Once you have read nine varieties of this and recognized yours, that assumption comes apart. The micromanager was micromanaging his last three reports. The credit thief has been taking credit since before you arrived. Your performance is not the variable.
That recognition is worth more than any tactic, because it moves the question from how do I fix this to what are my options, and only the second question has answers.
It also does something for people who have spent months wondering whether they are the problem. Reading a description of your own boss written by somebody who never met him settles that question in about four pages.
What should you understand about HR?
That HR is not there to help you.
The comparison I use is a courtroom. You have your lawyer, and the other side has theirs. Nobody expects the opposing lawyer to help them, and nobody feels betrayed when he does not, because his role is understood from the beginning.
HR is the company’s lawyer.
Go to them with a complaint and the objective on their side is saving the company money. If your harasser is an actionable liability, they will come down on him, because removing him is cheaper than the alternative. If the situation is a management decision, they may find that removing you is cheaper. Both outcomes come from the same calculation.
And they will be sympathetic while it happens. They will be warm, and they will seem like your friend, and they will be taking notes.
None of this makes them bad people, and I want to be careful here because the point gets misread constantly. Some HR people are wonderful. Some will go to bat for you and expend real credibility doing it. But in the back of every one of their minds sits the obligation to protect the company, because that is what they are paid for.
Ideally HR would be unbiased. That never happens, and it cannot, because they are paid by one of the two parties. An unbiased HR function would have to be paid by somebody else, and no company is going to arrange that.
So the mindset you need as an employee is simple: HR is on the company’s team, not yours. Do not be antagonistic toward them, since that helps nobody and makes you memorable in the wrong way. Just remember where they sit.
One more thing on this, because people get themselves and other people hurt with it. If you have friends who work in HR, keep those friendships and keep them separate. An HR person as your friend outside work is a different relationship from an HR person in their professional role, and dragging one into the other puts them in an impossible position and can damage their career. Do not cross those streams.
Does documentation protect you?
Less than my own sales page suggests, and I would correct it.
Documentation is the only real protection available, and it is weak protection. It does not function as a shield. Nothing about a folder of dated notes stops a bad manager from behaving badly tomorrow.
Where it helps is later, if you end up suing the company or defending yourself in a formal process. And if you have reached that point, you are already gone. The relationship is over and what remains is the settlement.
Keep it anyway. Keep it on your own equipment instead of the company’s, because company systems are revoked the day you announce you are leaving. Just understand what you are keeping it for: the aftermath instead of the situation.
What protects you while you are still there?
Money.
Enough savings, at enough depth, that you can make a choice. If something happens tomorrow you can leave without panic, and a person who can leave is a person who is being treated differently already, whether or not anybody has noticed why.
My number is a minimum of six months, and these days closer to a year.
Liquid money. Not credit cards, not available credit, not the theoretical value of things you could sell. Actual cash you could spend, in an amount that covers a year of your life without cutting a single bill. Longer if you started cutting.
Your protection is that you are not dependent on the job. If you are living paycheck to paycheck, or anywhere close to it, you are in trouble regardless of how good your boss happens to be this quarter, because the situation can change in a morning and you have no move available.
Everything else in the book is technique. This is the foundation, and a reader who takes one thing away should take this one.
Who is it for?
Somebody with a boss who makes the job unbearable. Somebody who has started to wonder whether the problem is them. Somebody who needs to know what is documentable and what is not, and who wants to leave properly instead of dramatically.
It is not for anybody who wants revenge instead of an exit, and it is not legal advice.
You are not the only one. You are not imagining it. You are not stuck, though it will feel that way until somebody tells you otherwise.
The Guides That Get Your Book Written, Published, and Sold
Four short, practical guides on writing, publishing, and selling your book, plus the occasional note when there's something worth your time. No fluff, no daily inbox clutter. Drop your email and they're yours.
We use MailerLite to manage our list and send these emails. Your address is used only to send you what you signed up for. We will not sell it, share it, or use it for anything else, and you can unsubscribe anytime.