You Can’t Change Your Boss

I frequently get asked for advice on dealing with a bad boss. That’s not special: “my boss sucks, what do I do?” is an incredibly well-represented genre in advice columns like Ask a Manager, etc.

My advice here is simple: you can’t change your boss’s behavior. It’s best to treat your boss’s behavior as fundamentally immutable, like a force of nature. You can certainly try asking the rain to hold off until after your hike, but it’s unlikely to be effective. Assume that trying to get your boss to change their behavior will be similarly ineffective. Your only real choices when you have a bad boss are: learn to live with it, or find another job. (These choices suck, I’m aware.)

Thing is, giving feedback across a power gradient is rarely successful. At work, feedback always carries an implicit “or else”: when your boss tells you to make a change, there’s an implicit “… or I’ll fire you” that’s rarely spoken but always there. Even in the most egalitarian workplaces, even with the best bosses, you’ve got an incentive — keeping your job — to listen to your boss’s feedback. The reverse isn’t true: you have no power over your boss, and they have no reason to listen to do. And worse: the kind of bad boss who might need the feedback most is precisely the same kind of dude who’ll get angry at receiving “pushback” from someone “beneath” them (as they’ll see it). Feedback to your boss is unlikely to have any positive effect, and quite likely to have a negative one. You won’t change your boss, but you might get fired for trying.

This isn’t true all of the time: good bosses who are capable of listening to feedback from subordinates do exist. I’ve been lucky enough to have a few! But they’re rare. And, the kind of person with the emotional intelligence to take feedback from people who work for them is the kind of person who’s intelligent enough seek out feedback proactively. They realize the risk that their reports take in giving feedback upwards, so they don’t put them in that position. They ask for feedback from their boss and their peers; they hire coaches, take classes, read books; and they stay attuned to the job satisfaction signals coming from their reports. So even if you’ve got a boss who’d be fine with your feedback, chances are they don’t need it.

Your boss is like the weather. It’s fine to complain about it – necessary, even. But you don’t get to decide if it’ll rain, only whether to pack a raincoat.