Dear Daughter,
A question that often comes up in my coaching sessions is "How do you deal with a bad manager?"-- a manager who is disrespectful and who doesn’t care about your career. Unfortunately, I have experience with managers like that, but that didn’t prevent me from learning new things and growing in my career. It taught me what kind of manager I don’t want to be, and things I will never do to my team members. These are also valuable lessons!
In these situations it is important to observe your manager’s behavior and be mindful of the learnings. For example, if your manager doesn’t show up for your weekly check-in meeting, be aware of how that makes you feel. I can tell you from experience that it doesn’t make you feel very valued or supported. Every time it happened to me, I swore that I would never do that to my team regardless of how busy I was. One of my direct reports actually said to me the other day how impressive it is that I never skip our meetings. Remember the RSV, Elsa. We all want to feel Respected, Valued and Supported, and showing up to your weekly meeting with your direct report is an easy way to practice the RSV model.
I’ve always made a point of not letting bad manager’s behavior get to me. You have to remember that whatever reason they have for behaving the way they do, is due to their own challenges, and not with you. Don’t let their behavior impact you and your brand. When they go low, we go high. In these situations, I’ve just continued doing my job, making sure I was true to my own brand and finding ways to highlight my work to co-workers. One approach I’ve used to highlight my work is sending a weekly email update to my manager, regardless if they wanted it or not. That way I kept them updated on what I was working on as well as documenting my accomplishments. I felt that it was necessary that I documented and highlighted my work since I didn’t feel that the manager wasn’t looking out for me. Those emails also help during the yearly evaluation reviews since I had notes to go back to for writing my self-assessment.
So the point is, Elsa, if you ever get a less than ideal manager, observe them and learn what not to do. We are all going to have a bad manager in our career, so we need to learn how to approach the situation. Since we can’t change other people but only ourselves, we need to learn how we ourselves approach those situations. I hope you never have to have a bad manager, but if you do, you will know what to do!
