My Boss Is Toxic: Now What?
From A Victim to An Empowerment Mindset
“According to a 2023 Harris Poll, over two-thirds of people have had a toxic boss at some point, with nearly 1-in-3 working with a toxic manager today.”Overview
When we feel the boss is subjecting us to indignities at work, our tendency can be to collapse into a victim narrative and harbor feelings of contempt, for our boss or ourselves. Staying in a victim mindset has the potential to block growth and the potential for a healthy relationship with our boss. There are short term advantages to acting out the victim mindset. However, in the long run, becoming stuck in a victim mindset is unhelpful to living a fulfilling life and realizing our potential.
We do have choices. A positive first step can be planning and having an honest and open conversation with the boss. This may include considering your part in the situation, reflecting on the boss's perspective, and what changes you'd like to see to feel more motivated and empowered to do great work. And almost everybody wants that.
In this piece, I define 'toxic' as systematic behavior that deliberately signals to a person that they don't matter. This erosion of feelings of worth can create a hostile environment where the individual feels vulnerable to exclusion, marginalization, or termination.The Power of Outrage
On a hot morning last week, my phone rang continuously as I sipped a cup of dark roast coffee and ate breakfast. To savor the tastes, I generally ignore my phone in the morning until I’ve finished breakfast, read the NY Times and completed the day’s Wordle.
This time, however, the caller refused to give up. Each time the call went into voicemail, the caller redialed. I finally picked up. A woman on the other end —a former client—was in tears and clearly angry: “I hate my boss, I hate my job. I don’t want to do this anymore.” I listened for a few minutes and managed to ask her what had happened.
As a trained coach, I listened carefully to understand what was causing her to feel so angry.
In a calmer voice, she explained: “In a team meeting this morning, my boss again singled me out —this time, for taking too many breaks and distracting other people in the office. After all the hours I’ve worked and all of my hard work—all she does is criticize me—she refuses to accept me for who I am! I’m a social, active person and I need to take breaks to focus! Otherwise, I can’t do my job well.”
After a few minutes of listening, I asked for permission to pose two more questions and she consented. I asked her:
“What do you intend to do about your feelings about the situation?”
“What do you intend to do about the situation?”
She responded: “there’s nothing I can do—I can’t afford to lose my job and I’ll need a positive reference when I eventually look for another job. Bringing it up is a career killer. I’ll have to suck it up like I always do.”
Carrying around this kind of “unfinished business” with a boss is rarely the best choice. Unfinished business can fester inside us, sap our motivation, and cause counter-productive behaviors. Perhaps most importantly, it can block us from using the information from our emotions to explore a plethora possible solutions.
Cost of Unfinished Business
Successfully tackling these kinds of difficult emotions and situations requires both the courage and the skill to engage in open, honest conversations. A mindset open and curious about different perspectives that approaches conflicts as reconcilable. Without these skills, sustaining healthy relationships, in the workplace and out, can prove difficult. Dealing with perceptions of systemic dignity violations by a "toxic" boss is no exception.
The cost of ignoring this kind of behavior from a boss is immeasurable.
When you feel your boss’s behavior is toxic and you’re unwilling to deal with it directly, you’d better start spending time in job-search mode. You’d better expect your workplace experience to be uncomfortable and much less fulfilling. If you think your boss’s toxic behavior is your fault, you’d better be ready for deteriorating health and less time for other things you enjoy in life.
Finding the courage to confront your boss and honing your ability to engage in “real” conversations is the only possible path to resolving your unfinished business and thriving at work.
Toxicity Is Not Black and White
Until fairly recently, I can’t recall using or hearing the use of the word “toxic” to describe a workplace culture or the behavior of a manager. Today, “toxic” rolls off the tongue like the first line in “that book by Nabokov.” Fairly recently, the National Institute of Health and the World Health Organization contributed analyses that linked the effects of “toxic workplaces” to employee health, happiness and longevity. This causal link to an individual’s life experience surely infused the concept of workplace toxicity into the general public’s lexicon.
Perhaps you’ve experienced first hand what you consider a toxic workplace culture or a toxic boss and you creatively adapted your behavior to cope with the situation. Maybe you even resigned in response.
As an executive coach, I see the difficulties team members have building healthy, trusting relationships with their bosses. Bosses, after all, can hold the power to make or break career trajectories or cause personal embarrassment. When the manager-team member relationship turns sour, I often see two polar mindsets adopted by the team member:
Mindset 1: “I’m the victim of systemic indignities from my boss. My boss is bad intentioned and toxic.”
Mindset 2: “It must be my fault. I will work more hours to prove my worth, even if it means exhaustion and ignoring other important personal priorities.”
Both mindsets can be anchored in fear: contempt for the boss in mindset 1 and contempt for the self in mindset 2. No matter which mindset emerges, the team member can experience and cling to overwhelming feelings that diminish cognitive abilities, erode motivation and drive unhealthy behaviors. This serves nobody’s interest: not the boss’s, not team member’s and not the company’s (except in cases where the manager is a psychopath, which I cover below).
These mindsets also take a static view—that any painful feelings triggered by a boss’s behavior means the boss is toxic and that you’re a victim or that you’re the cause of the boss’s behavior—can be quite limiting.
This raises four important questions. First, what possible framings are there between mindset 1 and mindset 2? Second, how aware is the boss of how their behavior is affecting team members? Third, what would it take to find out what’s really going on and assess whether the boss is open to change? Last, to what degree are you ready for change?
Victim Mindset
Some situations in the workplace are incontrovertibly abusive and lead to real trauma. Most are more nuanced, however, and this is especially true in the context of remote workplace relationships.
When you feel you’re experiencing dignity violations, you may retreat into a victim mindset and become stuck in the feeling. In his recently published book “Rise Above,” Scott Barry Kaufman explores the increasing and counter-productive tendency for people to fall into this mindset. In Kaufman’s view, while feelings of humiliation and insecurity can drive us into a hopeless spiral, we humans are perfectly capable of taking actions that allow us to transition to hopefulness. This means taking real steps to improve the situation and rising above the feelings we have about the situation.
Kaufman recognizes that it may require a lot of practice and experimentation to transcend the victim mindset and reap the rewards from learning how to resolve these kinds of negative situations.
The short-term benefits of adopting a victim mindset can seem compelling:
We may feel more protected from a person who has some power over us in the hierarchy.
We can deflect all responsibility and blame for the situation.
We can protect ourselves from potentially painful feedback.
We can join our co-workers who share our grievances with the boss.
Despite these benefits, a victim mindset can block us from tapping into our resilient abilities and finding positive resolutions, even if it means leaving a job.
Most importantly, living with a victim mindset can block our intrinsic creativity and dampen our motivations, limiting our personal growth and our ability to live a satisfying and fulfilling life.
To those of you who have suffered from toxic bosses—who often refuse to accept responsibility for their actions and are disinterested in how people are affected by their behavior—what I’ve written may appear to be blaming the “victim” and awarding the perpetrator a free pass. This is not at all the case: there are many toxic bosses out there and when they systematically treat people in indignant ways, something needs to be done.
Between these two views is a spectrum of more nuanced explanations and potential solutions that your assumptions may be blocking. For example “How certain are you that the boss is intentionally tossing indignities at you? How certain are you about your boss's appreciation of you and your work? What if you’re boss would be willing to listen to how you are experiencing the behavior? What is your part in this breakdown and what changes could you make?
Should I Go or Should I Stay!
No one debates that working for a toxic boss can feel extremely frustrating. When the boss demonstrates harassing, discriminating, retaliatory, and systematic humiliating behavior, expecting a boss to change is likely to be a bridge too far. On the other hand, many situations are not so black and white.
In either case, learning to understand the source of our feelings in a situation and asking a boss for a conversation —even if it feels like a confrontation— are essential skills to develop.Confronting a boss in the workplace can trigger immediate resistance for team members. This resistance is generally the result of one or a combination of these three reasons:
The team member doesn’t fully understand what’s going on and reverts to either blaming themselves or the boss.
Confronting the boss, no matter how it’s done, will put them in harms way. The team member is unable to find the courage to confront the boss; their habitual coping is to change nothing.
Their contempt for the boss is so strong that engaging in a civil and productive conversation seems impossible.
It is well documented by the National Institute of Health (NIH)and by other reputable sources that a certain percentage of leaders exhibit pathological disorders.
An NIH review of studies on the prevalence of psychopathy in the general population estimates it at 4.5%.
If the boss is a psychopath, it is unlikely that a confrontation will resolve the situation. Nevertheless, assuming a normal population, there is only a 5% probability that this is the case; the odds that a difficult conversation can help move you from feelings of being a victim to feeling empowered to create a less hostile and more positive work environment are reasonable.
With the odds in your favor, perhaps a well planned conversation with the boss, instead of putting you in harms way, could actually strengthen your relationship and lead to a more rewarding work experience. And if the conversation goes badly, then at least you know where your boss stands and what your choices are moving forward.
How to Respond (and not)
Feeling your dignity has been trampled on can really sting. When you interact with a boss, you bring your full history of experience and your genetic composition. When you hear words or see actions, you make meaning of it all and your brain makes predictions. These predictions lead you to make your emotions, including anxiety, stress, anger, sadness or joy. We all have different vulnerabilities and habits: some of us are people pleasers while others find it difficult to process fear. This topic is treated in more detail by Carin-Isabel Knoop in The Burnout Puzzle.
Our biggest challenge this: how can we find the courage, the energy and the motivation to let go of feeling like a victim and replace it with a feeling of empowerment. Or as Kaufman warns in his book, “don’t be a victim to your self-esteem,” “don’t be a victim to your cognitive distortions,” “don’t be a victim to your emotions,” don’t be a victim to your need to please.”
Sounds easy, right? Well of course it is certainly not. With experimentation and practice, however, you can learn to respond to these situations with a more empowered stance and avoid the limitations of a victim mindset.
Start with Self-reflection
Developing the ability to self-reflect when you feel your dignity is violated can help you move toward resolution. When such an incident triggers anxiety or stress, you can ask yourself some questions to interpret these emotions:
What is bothering me about the incident?
What have I assumed about my boss’s intentions?
To whom can I turn to for advice and calibration?
What best next steps can I take to better understand my boss’s behavior?
How is this unresolved situation going to effect my motivation at work?
How might my boss feel if he/she knew how I felt and how it might degrade my performance?
By meditating on these questions, you can then consider how to have a positive and productive conversation with your boss to avoid lugging around a “victim” ball and chain.
A Conversation Framework
How you approach the conversation with your boss can make all the difference. After all, your boss is a human being and may avoid taking responsibility for the harm they’ve created. Nobody likes to be in harms way and bringing how you see the situation to your boss’s attention may not make them feel particularly good.
So how do you conduct the conversation with your boss? At the highest level, come to the conversation with an open mind, curiosity, and yes, compassion for yourself and your boss. After all, both of you probably have the same goal in mind: doing great work.
First, consider the outcome you desire. For example, is it to convince your boss to change or what changes you can make to improve the situation? Or is it to assess the possibility that your boss will change to more positive and motivating behavior?
Second, reflect on how you think your boss might prefer to receive feedback. Some bosses appreciate feedback and are grateful for direct communications. Others are defensive; when they perceive a threat they stop listening and even lash out.
Third, particularly if your boss tends toward the latter profile, consider what you appreciate most about your boss. Perhaps your boss is a good mentor and is teaching you about your industry or your function. Maybe you want to do a good job and some things are getting in your way. Starting with these can play an important role in reducing the risk of a defensive response and make it a more positive experience.
Fourth, prepare real, reality based examples of your boss’s actions that you found hurtful, unfair and that undermined your trust in them.
Summary
Toxic managers are in the workplace. Nevertheless, not every feeling of workplace indignity or difficult situation with a boss means things at work can’t be much better. Collapsing into a victim mindset, stuck in uncomfortable feelings, can block the ability to make things better and strengthen trust with your boss. It won’t always work - but it is usually worth a try.
About the Authors
David Ehrenthal is an Executive and Leadership Coach, Advisor, Confidant and a Principal of Mach10 Career & Leadership Coaching. David can be reached at dehrenthal@mach10career.com.