A manager can make or break your job.

I know I couldn’t handle a manager who constantly belittled me, but this person unfortunately had to deal with that.

Let’s see what they did to handle it…

Special course ‘How to manage your Manager’ – fail

This happened years ago but as I was reminded of it yesterday:

I had AH of a Sales Manager (IT system Sales), who would micromanage everything.

He was a caffeine & nicotine addict to boot always living on the edge, in some ways I understood his drive for ultimate perfection but…. sadly he died from stress in his 50s.

Whilst this is not his story he was the cause, I went above him to the Sales Director for help and was put on a course.

This is how the course went…

‘How to Manage and manage your Manager. I was pleased I’d been listened to and happily set off to go on the external course.

Like many courses there’s a lot of waffle and then we got to the role play which I complained about as it wasn’t very realistic and certainly didn’t reflect what I had to deal with.

Smug presenter said OK, you be your manager, told ‘X’ to be the victim saying to him I’ll show you and the others how to easily deal with this situation.

This is when things kick into high gear…

Cue Malicious Compliance.

So I became my Manager, and I had learnt a lot on how to be a total AH, I played him to the hilt, never abusive or loud, that was never my bosses style, every argument he suggested to ‘X’ I quashed.

I was completely in the frame, being argumentative, petty and obtuse and more importantly rewinding back to correct earlier parts of the discussion.

After 10-15 minutes he suggested I take a more conciliatory stance as I was being unreasonable.

I pointed out that this was my Manager’s behaviour and I can’t ask him to be conciliatory, but as I’d achieved my objective and shown how pointless his course was I obliged.

They thought they’d made their point clear…

At the end he turned around to say that’s how to do it.

I laughed and said you were completely unable to deal with ‘My Manager’, I can’t ask him to be reasonable like you did me. This course has been of no value to me at all.

Let’s take to Reddit to see the responses.

This user stands by what this person did.

Others related to the struggle of bad managers.

This commenter had constructive criticism for the situation.

Everyone was in agreement that the company was in the wrong.

Sometimes you have to stick it to the man, right?

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