Recognizing a bad manager, how to design your way out
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Work had started feeling like a continual swim upstream, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. I kept trying different things until after I talked to a friend, who told me my manager sounded like a bad manager. This was very surprising to me – I thought this was how interactions with managers should go, and there was something I needed to fix. Later on, I realized that my manager had a pattern of mismanagement across all her reports.
As I’ve grown in my career journey, I’ve grown better at learning when to not misplace the cause to myself, and realize when my options are limited, so I can design past them. I’ve realized a manager can make a big difference in your career trajectory – people with great managers consistently get more opportunities while equally high-performers with bad managers do not get promoted – and these little differences magnify down the line.
I’ve learned that if I have a bad manager, it’s hard to do much – you can’t change a manager’s behavior. Instead, one of the best things to do is simply be aware that I have a bad manager. Rather than trying to fix the situation and appease my manager, I instead recognize what I can’t change, and become confident in my decision to either tolerate the situation, or change positions.
It's crucial to acknowledge a caveat before diving further. A strained relationship with your manager might, in some instances, stem from your own performance. It's important to note that the aim of this memo is not to endorse a culture of blaming managers. Instead, we’re aiming to help you distinguish between situations where the manager is the root issue, rather than misplacing the problem to yourself, resulting in wasted time.
Signals you have a bad manager
It can be hard to realize when you have a bad manager. Especially if you’re just starting your career, you might think the behavior is normal. So, how do you know you have a bad manager?
Signal #1: Other reports face similar challenges
My manager would frequently cancel our 1:1s and also push me to prioritize everything. I felt overwhelmed, as if everything were urgent, but it was hard to see the situation clearly just looking at my own experience. When other reports shared with me a similar experience, I developed a more objective view of the situation, and learned they also felt they were lacking clear direction. Bad managers leave traces and display a pattern. Their past reports, and their current reports will speak of the patterns you recognize, for example micromanaging or being unreliable.
Here are questions you can use to get at this information from your manager’s past and current reports, without inadvertently spreading gossip:
Make it constructive, assume best intent, ask for advice: “I’ve been trying to get 1:1 time with our manager, but have a hard time getting it scheduled. Have you had a similar experience or do you have any advice for how to find time with the manager?
State facts, ask for advice: “Our manager tells me that XYZ are all high priorities, and I’m having a hard time doing all of them well at once. Do you have any advice for me on how you’d talk to the manager to improve the situation?”
Rather than going in with the intent of collecting evidence for your manager being bad, you’re instead trying to figure out how to better work with your manager. At the very least, you’ll get advice from your peers. Or if you do identify a pattern, your peers will provide a signal on how prevalent the behavior is.
Signal #2: Your manager doesn’t know what they want
When a manager doesn’t have a clear sense of what they want from you, they’re not able to give you the goal of the project, guardrails, or examples to help you get started. Delegating work to reports is one of the important jobs of managers, and it requires time and practice on their part. It’s surprisingly common for managers to expect reports to be mind readers, and then get frustrated, often with a phrase “with your years of experience, you should know this already.” It also manifests as excessive micromanaging.
A good manager sets a goal with guardrails, while a bad manager makes specific suggestions.
For example, I had a manager who would ask to review all emails before I sent them out to our partners, so she could make minor wording changes. When I asked her why she chose certain words, she couldn’t tell me why. For a while, I didn’t know how to extrapolate her fixes into a broader lesson, and felt frustrated because every time my manager gave me feedback, it was a surprise - I could not get to the bottom of what underlying framework led her to give one specific feedback over another.
My bad manager wasn’t trying to be antagonizing by rewording all my emails – rather, bad managers are bad because they are not yet good at what they do. They were only able to operate in a more reactive mode – commenting after seeing an email, rather than having the clarity to give me guidelines on what good looked like. Here, it is ok to also ask managers what you need, because they may not be even thinking in terms of “guidelines that help my report long term” rather than “another task I need to do which is editing my report’s email.”
Don’t be afraid to engage in a conversation with your manager: “I appreciate your edits, and I’ve been trying to find patterns so that I can apply this learning to my future emails. I’d love to learn - do you have a general sense of what a “good” email looks like, perhaps a bar from which you’re comparing my emails to? Would love to hear more about it so I can get better.”
Signal #3: You know something is wrong but you just don’t know what
If you feel like something is wrong, but you’re spending a lot of time trying to convince yourself otherwise – chances are, something is wrong. Keep an eye out for yourself to check if you’re telling yourself a negative narrative. This is a clue to start being curious about whether you’re working with a bad manager, and approach it as a discovery process to find out the root cause.
Examples of negative narratives:
“I guess my coworkers manage stress better than I do.”
“I have to accept feeling like this since it’s part of the job.”
“I guess I just need to ramp up more.”
“There must’ve been something I could’ve done.”
“I guess it’s normal to not be able to talk to my manager for weeks, and for our 1:1s to be canceled.. he is really busy.”
Undermining your own emotions and feelings is a way of denying your reality. We’re quick to ignore these signs because we can usually muscle through them. But keep an eye out for these negative narratives, as they’re important alarm bells.
Conclusion
Discovering that you're in a situation with a bad manager can be disappointing – but acknowledging the signs and understanding that the issue lies with your manager, not with your own performance, gives you the power to make well-informed decisions about your next steps.
Instead of succumbing to negative narratives or settling for a suboptimal work environment, you’ll gain the ability to navigate around unconstructive patterns and reclaim control over the direction of your career.