You can't fire your boss
The saying goes "people don't quit companies, they quit managers". So what to do if you're unhappy with your manager.
Someone I’m coaching is going through a manager transition. They loved their previous boss, but are finding it challenging to work with the new one. They came to me for some advice on what they should do, and that got me thinking: What can you do, what should you do, and what are the dynamics of a situation like this? Let’s analyze it together.
First off, what can and should you do? Seemingly there’s two paths: Stay or go. The most direct answer is to go. You don’t like your manager, so what you do is get a new job. This new job may be in the same company, or at another company. This is the maximum agency move that internalizes control directly. It is however also the most one way door, really big and scary decision you can take, for two reasons.
First of all, you’re walking away from a context you know well and have probably been successful in, as a reaction to one person. That’s a lot of power you’re investing into that person over your own life. Second, practically, it’s May 2024, not May 2021. High paying executive jobs aren’t exactly flying off the shelves.
So you may want to have a cooler head about it, and stick around. Maybe you can change the situation? Well, maybe. To answer that, we need to think about what sticking around really means? Sticking around means you’re betting one of three outcomes: First, you adjust to the new situation and become OK with it. Second, your new boss goes through a growth journey and fixes the flaws you dislike about them. Third, your boss leaves or is fired, and someone else is put in their place.
In case it wasn’t obvious, I’ve sorted these in descending order of likelihood, because of the ability you have to affect each of the outcomes.
Let’s look at all three outcomes in turn. First - you adjust to the situation.
To do that means making sure that the things that annoy you today won’t annoy you tomorrow, and that you actually observe progress in your happiness. I would do this by doing two things: Set a point in the future where you want things to be better, and then document that. Write down a doc that says, essentially, “In three months, to feel comfortable staying in this role, I want to feel better about the following things: (1) decision making, as evidenced by… (2) credit-sharing, as evidenced by…”.
By writing it down like this, you have a concrete manifestation of your current unhappiness, and something to measure progress by. So if, on a scale of unhappiness from one to ten, you’re an eight in April, if you’re a six by July, does that give you enough conviction that things should improve and you should stick it out?
Once you have that, you should consider giving your boss feedback.
This goes to the second outcome - your boss improves. Very likely is that they want to be a good boss (most people want to do a good job) and that they are simply missing the mark. So by giving them feedback, you both give your boss the ability to adjust to the situation, and you also open the door to future actions. Now, chances are they will be unable to adapt to the feedback you’re giving. People ascribe at least parts of their success to their behaviors - and as such they’ll be slow to change behaviors they believe have helped them achieve their current success. In particular if the feedback is bottoms up instead of top down. (We can discuss at a later time how to effectively give feedback upwards - a topic on its own).
How about the third one - your boss is fired or leaves? Well, I would simply not bet on this outcome. If they’re new in the role, they are eager to step in and be successful, so they are unlikely to give up on the job voluntarily. And their boss, your grandboss, has just placed a bet on them, invested effort in hiring and onboarding, and generally invested themselves heavily in the success of your boss. So they will have a very strong incentive to see any feedback from their new directs team members through rose-colored glasses, or as solvable issues, rather than any grounds for dismissal.
It may be the case that the feedback is loud and overwhelming enough that your grandboss will change their mind. But the more senior you get, the less likely this is to happen. Your boss is probably pretty good at managing up and across, they come with good references, and as stated, your grandboss have very strong incentives to make it work. So if you’re betting your future happiness on this outcome, you may be disappointed.
In short – if you have a new boss that you can’t work with, you have a few options. The more you are able to internalize those options - do things that require only you to change, the likelier you are to come out of the situation happy. The more you bet on the context around you changing to your liking, the likelier it is you’ll end up disappointed. Or in the words of Marcus Aurelius, “you have control over your mind not outside events”.