How to deal with a bad boss while the pandemic keeps us apart
Remember the good old days, when you could clear up an ambiguously curt email from your boss with a stroll by her desk? Or when the anxiety of getting a dreaded “We need to chat” Slack message could be alleviated with a quick pop-in?
If only we knew how good we had it!
By this point, those of us who have moved to working from home have figured out the big stuff. Maybe your kitchen doubles as a desk now, and your pet has become a frequent surprise guest in your Zoom meetings, but a year into the pandemic most of us are making it work.
But there are certain things about communicating digitally that don’t always translate so easily, and one of those things, experts said, is how we communicate with our bosses. And if yours wasn’t great before the age of working from home, odds are he or she hasn’t improved.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t hope to salvage the relationship — and now, as pandemic fatigue has fully set in, may be a better time than ever, said Mollie West Duffy, a co-author of “No Hard Feelings,” which looks at how emotions affect our work lives.
“We know through research that we’re much more likely to read into a lack of emotion in digital communication as being negative, because we’re missing all the context cues,” West Duffy said. “So if your boss says, ‘I want to chat tomorrow’ without saying something like ‘I think you did a great job and I just have some comments,’ you’re going to assume your boss has something negative to say.”
She added that because a return to normalcy is kinda-sorta on the horizon, “we’re in a transitional moment, and we like to capitalize on transition moments because it makes having these conversations that can be awkward a little less awkward.” (However: If your relationship with your boss has veered into territory that can’t be fixed with a few conversations, it may be time to escalate — more on that later.)
How to interact
Outside the work itself, a poor relationship with one’s manager often boils down to bad communication, said Mary Abbajay, author of “Managing Up: How to Move Up, Win at Work and Succeed With Any Type of Boss.”
This was true in normal times, and is even more so now that we’re unable to read body language and other nonverbal cues that provide useful context and information when we communicate. Establishing how to interact is just as important as the actual communication itself.
Maybe your boss would prefer a text over an email, or a Slack message over a video chat. But whatever the medium, knowing how to communicate can be just as important as what you’re saying.
“Make sure that you’re communicating and adapting to other people’s preferences in terms of getting their attention and time,” Abbajay said.
She agreed with West Duffy that now would be a good time to check in and have that talk, as annual reviews may be happening.
“Take the time to really assess how well the virtual engagement and communication is going,” she said. “What’s working well? What are the ways we’re not communicating well?”
Managing your manager
There are many types of bad bosses, Abbajay told me a few years ago. You might have a ghost boss (someone who’s seemingly never around), a seagull (bosses who, she said, “swoop and poop” or “swoop and scoop,” meaning they “divebomb into a project” and leave a mess behind “or they dive into it and take it away from you”), or a simple “incompetent.”
Of course, most managers are a combination of styles. But working remotely can add entirely new layers to those archetypes — and we may be behaving in those ways ourselves, too.
“The pandemic has turned a lot of us into ghosts,” Abbajay said. “It’s going to be up to you to help your manager learn how to manage remotely.”
Directness, West Duffy said, is often the best way to get what you need from your manager, and being proactive and naming an issue rather than hoping it will go away on its own can help give you agency in improving a bad situation.