Presenting issues
Helping your client deal with a di ffi cult boss starts with encouraging them to step into their shoes, says Michael Skapinker The difficult boss
T erry was resting, phone in hand, propped up on the bed of his Brussels hotel room after a day of meetings with potential clients. He scrolled through the headlines on the BBC website, checked how many ‘likes’, ‘comments’ and ‘impressions’ there were for his latest LinkedIn post (not many more than this morning) and then tapped on his Gmail inbox hoping there wouldn’t be any new messages since he last looked 10 minutes ago. There was just one – the one he least wanted to see. It wasn’t actually an email; just two peremptory phrases in the subject fi eld: ‘U in? Pop by pls.’ It was from Miles, his boss in Cambridge, one of the three owners of the IT consulting fi rm he worked for. Terry hit reply and tapped out ‘I’m on the drumming-up-new-business road trip in Brussels. Back in on Tuesday. Would you like a phone chat?’ He pressed the send arrow, did the day’s Wordle, checked to see whether there was any reply from Miles (nothing), did three Duolingo Spanish lessons, enough to get him out of the ‘Pearl league’ demotion zone, checked Gmail again (still nothing) and then put on his shoes and walked out to the restaurant. ‘The thing is,’ he told his old Brussels friends Jean-Marie and Martine, after they had placed their order with the waiter, ‘I have no idea whether he wants to see me so he can praise me to the skies for landing one big win and one extension, or whether he’s going to damn me as the most useless individual
the fi rm has ever hired. It’s always one or the other. Never anything in between. And I never know which one it’s going to be.’ ‘That’s stressful,’ Jean-Marie said. ‘It sounds like he’s got a real problem with you.’ ‘It sounds like he’s got a real problem with himself,’ Martine said. ‘Why would you even care what he thinks about you?’ ‘Because he’s my boss, and he decides what account I work on, whether I get promoted to MD this year and what my bonus is. Big reasons to want his approval,’ Terry replied. ‘But what,’ Martine responded, ‘if you’re never going to get it?’ This fi ctional account is a composite of some of the cases I have come across in my practice as a counsellor specialising in career and workplace matters. But it is also based on some of the issues I encountered before I started training as a counsellor – when I was approached to be an informal and unpaid adviser to my workplace colleagues. The problem they wanted to discuss was often their boss – how to deal with their irrationality, their unpredictability, their bullying and, above all, how to win their approval. It was my puzzling over these issues, and what lay behind them, that led me to decide on my third, late-in-life career. Being bossed It was my fi rst career that provided me with my inaugural encounter with an unreasonable boss. I had been hired by
a London-based language school to travel to the Greek port of Piraeus as part of the teaching sta ff of an English school it was setting up there. The owner of the London school seemed slightly vague and distracted as I signed my contract, giving me a couple of weeks in a cheap hotel until I found a fl at, an economy-class plane ticket and a monthly salary of 28,000 drachmas, about £280 at the time, a pittance today but a sturdy amount in the early 1980s when a steak and Greek salad at a local taverna cost little more than a pound. The students were lovely, but the Greek principal the London investor had appointed was a problem. He was pocketing the students’ fees and taking them to the casino. We had di ffi culty getting him to pay us at the end of the month, and the London owner wasn’t receiving the dividend he expected. The principal was also what my students called a mythomanis , a pathological liar. We could laugh it o ff when he told us that the Athens pollution cloud across the bay was caused by people kicking up dust with their shoes. Less funny was his promise that our work permits were on the way when he hadn’t actually applied for them. Eventually we tired of begging to be paid each month. We went on strike. He locked us out. I was unemployed and set out to develop a second career, fi rst in Athens, then in London, as a journalist. I loved it – for 40 years, the last 34 on the Financial Times , where I wrote about everything from computer chips to bingo operators to aircraft manufacturers. I also occupied two senior leadership positions, my fi rst experience of being a boss rather than being bossed, and then stepped down from those to write a weekly column on management – as well as providing the informal advice I mentioned above.
‘The problem they wanted to discuss was often their boss – how to deal with their irrationality, their bullying and how to win their approval’
THERAPY TODAY 36 MAY 2024
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