Working for Someone Difficult Without Losing Yourself
Before I ran my own business I worked for a man who managed by mood. Good mornings, he was generous. Bad ones, nothing was right and someone paid. You never knew which one you’d get, so you spent half your energy reading the weather and the other half bracing. I lasted three years. I’d do it differently now.
You won’t change them
Get this out of the way first. Difficult people in authority have usually been that way a long time, and it’s worked for them, or they wouldn’t still be in the chair. Your excellent work won’t convert them. Your reasonable feedback won’t land. Accepting this early saves you years of trying and a particular kind of despair.
What you can control is what their behaviour does to you, and that’s a lot more than it feels like from inside.
Document everything, quietly
Not out of paranoia. Out of clarity. Keep a plain log: what was asked, when, what you delivered, what was said. It protects you if it ever comes to that. More importantly, it protects you from the gaslighting that difficult bosses specialise in, where last week’s instruction becomes this week’s “I never said that.” The log knows what was said.
Confirm in writing
After every verbal instruction that matters, a short email: “To confirm, you’d like X by Thursday. Let me know if I’ve got that wrong.” It’s polite, it’s professional, and it quietly removes their ability to rewrite history. Most difficult bosses behave better once they realise there’s a paper trail.
Keep your standards yours
The real danger isn’t the shouting. It’s that, over time, you start doing work to avoid punishment rather than to do it well, and then the standard becomes theirs instead of yours. Decide what good work looks like to you, do that, and let their reaction be weather. Your name is on the work for decades. Theirs is on it for the duration of the job.
Don’t take the mood home
Easier said than done, but there’s a mechanical trick: a transition ritual. Mine was a specific walk between the office and the car, during which I said, out loud, what had happened and what it meant, and then declared it finished. Sounds foolish. It worked better than carrying the day into dinner for three years.
Find one ally
Not a gossip partner; that’s poison. One person, inside or outside the building, who sees the situation clearly and can tell you when you’re being reasonable and when you’re not. Difficult bosses isolate people by making them doubt their own perception. One honest witness breaks that.
Set the date
Decide, privately, how long you’re prepared to stay and what has to be true to stay longer. Write it down. A difficult job with an end date is a tour of duty. One without is a sentence. The date doesn’t have to be soon. It has to exist, because knowing you’re choosing to stay, for your own reasons, is what keeps you from feeling trapped.
What I took from it
A clear picture of how I’d never run a business, which was worth something. A log of my own work I was proud of regardless of what he said. And the knowledge that I’d kept my standards through three years of someone trying to make me adopt his.
This week
Start the log. Send the confirming email. Pick the walk. Write the date.
Launch list
Be there on day one.
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The book itself — 40 laws in ten parts, 320 pages, each ending with The Work — is funded first on Kickstarter.