I am making a generalisation here but many of the people I have worked for recently have been crazy. And I don’t want to stigmatise mental health as it’s obvious that if you’re ‘crazy,’ (whatever that means) then you shouldn’t be judged and need access to good support etc.
There are however people who are only crazy when it comes to their work personality. Not anywhere else. Their social media looks pretty epic with lots of holidays and nice snaps by the sea drinking cocktails. They look like they are functioning on many levels.
‘Don’t you think it’s funny that there’s a particular pattern emerging?’ a friend said to me recently, ‘Everyone you have worked for is someone you’ve hated and said was crazy. Maybe YOU are the problem.’
She had a point. I also welcome friends who don’t mince their words around me. Yes, I have reached the stage where I am more difficult to manage. Take any woman worth her salt who has been through 5+ decades of life and no longer wants to submit to the will of someone half her worth.
I do not want to be tamed.
But it’s more than that. I also don’t want to be treated like crap. I don’t want to work with unreasonable people. I don’t want to have passive aggressive demands placed on me. I don’t want to be unable to sleep on a Sunday night because I hate the person that manages me, and am worried about what fresh hell they will throw at me this week.
In my 5-6 year work history I have experienced the following:
A boss who tried to fire me whilst she took me for a rapid walk outside and trod in dog poo and carried on walking as if nothing had happened (this felt like good karma).
A boss who was consistently late for meetings but blew up and shamed the individual who was one second late dialling in because they’d had to drop their sick kid off with a mum friend.
A boss who made me go through a time sheet and account for every minute of each day with a view to improving my productivity.
A team that interviewed me for a role even though they had no intention of giving it to me. Told me that they wanted me to work for them. Then promptly ghosted me (to be clear this was a team I was already working for).
A senior management team that announced their promotions on the day I was made redundant (not just me but an entire level of the same company).
A boss that inspired so much fear that people would cry as they heard her coming up in the lift. They would then physically have to go to the toilet to empty their bowels.
Another boss who used to go into my powerpoint presentations whilst I was writing them and would change my bullet points whilst I was writing them. When I quizzed her about this she swore that she wasn’t there and I was ‘imagining it and getting paranoid.’
A boss that triggered an eating disorder in a colleague because she remarked on their weight after a presentation.
‘These are narcissistic behaviours,’ my therapist said, when I talked through some of these experiences, ‘These people don’t have any empathy and so override others feelings as a matter of course.’
I thought about whether I was unlucky to have had these experiences but then when I spoke to people I discovered that everyone was having them.
Were we losing our humanity?
Were people becoming less empathetic?
Why were these narcissists taking over the world?
Was it the patriarchy?
Were women (because they were predominately women doing this) becoming more masculine in some of their character traits? Were they becoming…mean? (not that mean is a masculine trait- anyone can be mean but it definitely felt like some of these women were losing their moral compass along the way).
Apparently some studies suggest that narcissistic tendencies are on the rise as more young people experience high self-esteem and are more concerned with what others think of them. This is what I just Googled anyway. So it makes sense that we are experiencing more of these fuckwits at work. And being managed by them.
It is hard. It’s especially hard if you are already menopausal and feeling the full cultural impact of being an older woman in a society that sees you as pretty much useless.
My advice?
Well the first thing is to get away from them. Which is why I am currently freelancing. I can deal with bullies if the impact is occasional but I can’t be permanently under their spell.
The second piece of advice?
Emotionally disinvest yourself. Remove yourself. Do not engage. Do your work. Do it as best you can. Look for alternatives. Find refuge in friends and family. Do not surrender your soul. Do not allow them to define who you are. It will pass. You will find better things. They are arseholes. Whether this is a trend or not is irrelevant. Focus on survival. Find small morsels of joy until you can escape.
The third piece?
Write about it. Okay you might not be able to go public but you can at least write it down in your journal. The kind of journal you perhaps kept at school when Angela Rodgers hit you over the head with an A4 folder and almost knocked you out. Channel venom. Draw pictures of the enemy in a plane with flames coming out the side. Picture them going through the most terrible experiences. Having their teeth pulled without any anaesthetic. Being dumped by their partner at the altar. Having halitosis so bad that they can’t speak even from twenty feet away. This is called reverse manifestation and isn’t particularly mature but really helps. There is nothing to say that it doesn’t work. I have tried it and have actually found some of it does.
Also look at your own relationship with work. Are you the one who is actually in need of change? Do you refuse to be tethered? Are you actually at the stage where you cannot and will not be bought to heel?
Then that is a bigger question and you must figure out who you are right now.
And head towards it. They are batshit crazy. You are not. You are graceful. Amazing. Everyone and more. Run. Run. Run.
Unfortunately I have encountered a few of these bosses as well all women. Do women have to turn this nasty to prove themselves. I remember two of my managers fighting for attention over each other during meetings about could deploy the most nastiness for attention and promotion. I still want to vomit when I think of it.