Dear Kally,
Help! Help! I truly need some advice from you and your readers. Anyone who can spare some time to read my problem and tell me what to do. Actually, it is not just me but my whole team (5 people) need your help.
We have a narcissistic boss. He is demanding, arrogant and borderline abusive. He blackmails us into working overtime and doing tasks way out of our job scope. He made us take turns to go out and buy lunch for him. He has a very specific diet and if anyone gets the wrong order, he will throw tantrums like a 3 year old toddler!
If we don’t do our assignments the way he wanted, he will throw it on the ground and demand that we start all over again. Nevermind that we are not trained or equipped to do his assignments. He doesn’t offer any guidance. He will sneer at our incompetence and makes snide remarks.
At meetings, if one of us don’t praise him or agree with his ideas (most of them are good ideas but some are ridiculous), he will throw us under the bus or make one of us attack the other verbally.
Last Christmas, he held off assigning work to us for the whole of December so that he can throw tasks at us during the week of Christmas. None of us was able to go home on time during Christmas. My kids were so upset that I didn’t get to celebrate Christmas or New Year with them because I had to rush through impossible deadlines. I’m dreading this coming Christmas.
We did report him to HR individually last year and some did this year. But HR will always come back to us with flimsy excuses like “we don’t like firing people” or “we know he is a problem but he has told us he is seeking help”. My boss is very manipulative and he will charm his way with HR. HR has told me that he has been attending therapy and asked me to give him some leeway. That was a year ago and it doesn’t seem to me that his behaviour has improved, in fact, it got worse.
Other than quitting my job, I don’t know what to do! I love my job, I love my company and I love my colleagues. The salary is awesome and the health benefits are best in my industry.
Hoping someone can help us get rid of this tiny problem.
Seeking Help, Wayne S.
Dear Wayne,
Oh dear! You’ve got yourself quite a handful boss indeed. It’s a wonder why you and your coworkers will stay under him for so long.
You did mention that you and your team reported him individually. Perhaps the next action is to gather around and report him as a group. It is easy to brush off an individual report but once it is a group effort, it will be harder to ignore.
Don’t just stop at reporting him to HR. Bring your report to the attention of your upper management. It will be good if you can get another manager (his peer level) to endorse your report as well.
In your report, list down each fact (like the Christmas incident) with time and date. Besides being abusive to yourself, I’m sure there are plenty of others that had crossed his wrath. Also, do list down the number of times, each of you had individually confided in HR and any follow action been done.
A toxic workplace caused by a single person is damaging to the team’s morale and create a hostile environment to work in. Any company who value their profits will be able to see that it is an obstacle that must be removed or at least, dealt with.
I believe in your case, a year has passed and no improvement in your boss’s behaviour isn’t about just showing leeway or compassion to someone. Even given the benefit of the doubt, his behaviour should be improving or show some form of constraint on his part, even ever so slightly.
I wish you all the best and if after taking the report to your management, there is no action taken or no satisfactory explanation, you probably should start looking for a job elsewhere to save your sanity.
Regards, Kally@MiddleMe.net
Hey! Check these advices out: A Word of Advice: Jobless & Homeless A Word of Advice: Dealing with the Missing Piece A Word of Advice: I don’t have time for myself
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