How To Manage Your Boss

November 16, 2009

Interview with Katherine Crowley, co-author of the book Working for You Isn't Working for Me: The Ultimate Guide to Managing Your Boss

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Mike Carruthers:
Just about everyone can find something wrong with their boss.

Katherine Crowley:
It’s not that bosses overall as personalities - as human beings are horrible people. It’s that many bosses have specific traits that drive people crazy.

Katherine Crowley

Katherine Crowley, co-author of the book Working for You Isn't Working for Me... 

So, someone may be a very kind, understanding boss and yet be spineless when it comes to defending you or advocating for you in some way. Someone else may be very dynamic and yet they scream in moments that aren’t good and get right under your skin. So it’s a tricky, tricky relationship. And it’s also the person who gives you your paycheck - so we tend to endow them with a certain kind of power.

Katherine says unless you’ve got another job all lined up you really need to make that relationship with your boss work.

It’s better to accept – this is the person that I’m working for (which is very hard) but say, “Ok I’ve got a very controlling boss” - and understand that it’s THEIR issue and try to work with them than it is to throw your arms up and say, “Ok well I give up, I’m not going to try.”  Because then you look like the lesser person.

What’s really interesting is once you accept the boss for who he or she is you can then begin to manage the relationship. How?

De-personalize. Take it less personally. The yeller has always been yelling from the day you weren’t there to the day you started to after you leave. Start to work with the person, follow their example and eventually you will be heard.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here.