I remember the longest conversation I ever had with my boss because it was the day I applied for the job. For the occasion, I swapped a fresh, sparkly manicure for a more conservative neutral nail polish, but I needn’t have worried that my nail polish would look girly. My future boss herself preferred feminine skirt suits with metallic accents. On the day of my interview, I sat across from her at a small conference table and wanted to impress her. To me, she was the epitome of corporate success, and I hoped that if I played my cards right, I could be like her one day. Of course, that was before I knew her.
There is a world theory in which the end justifies the means. The job was done, so it was done right. The fact that I remember so little about the actual work and so much about the interpersonal dynamics of our team perhaps speaks to my own weaknesses: a flippant interest in human behavior over the technical demands of the task.
A feared leader may be obeyed, but the risk of his absolute authority lies beyond the limits of his knowledge, which has finite goals for all people. What they cannot predict will surprise them. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s yes men have led him into the swamp of Ukraine. Of course, in the situation I describe, we were not at war. We were at work.
The spoils of brilliance often include some license to behave badly. In return for great contributions, we as a society have historically been willing to tolerate a bit of mischief – and more. Among the revelations in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk, published this summer, were anecdotes about the celebrated founder vacillating between charm and what his girlfriends called “demon mode.”
Modern corporate structures have policies and tools in place to discourage such actors from showing the worst of themselves, but not all behavior rises to a level that can be eliminated through lawsuits and anti-harassment training. What should we think of the mild tyrant, the unpleasant person who makes work difficult but not impossible?
I imagine that the traits I discovered in my former boss are probably not the ones celebrated by management consultants and assiduously cultivated in the next generation of MBAs: rigidity, vindictiveness, and pronounced cruelty, particularly toward working parents.
I worked for this woman for almost two years. Here are some things she did: deny a colleague his two weeks of paternity leave for no apparent reason; fired another colleague while she was on maternity leave, seemingly in retaliation for working from home during the final weeks of a difficult pregnancy; Preventing a third party from going to the closing date on their new apartment because they were once five minutes late for a meeting. And that excludes all the everyday indignities that she might scold someone who reflexively glances at the caller ID on her Polycom when a call comes in during a meeting, to accuse them of spying on her, or someone else in a large meeting to embarrass with a derogatory reaction. It wouldn’t allow working parents to use sick leave for their children’s doctor’s appointments. Vacation was granted or denied arbitrarily (“No consecutive Fridays off”).
Any deviation from the desired look would be punished with censure. All of this existed in a separate area from the work itself. The job had two main components: actually completing the assigned tasks and completing them in a way that did not disrupt the feelings of the person supervising them.
And yet, despite all the contempt with which she viewed her people, nothing would anger her more than leaving. When a senior member of the team walked into her office to tell her that he had accepted a new role, I watched through the glass walls that enclosed them both as all the color and excitement drained from his face and she told him that she She felt even more insulted in her life because she was upset that he had accepted the role without speaking to her first. She seemed to care about making life harder, not less, for the people who worked for her.
Every day my boss wore her hair tied back. The ponytail was part of her impenetrable uniform. Until one day after I had been there for a few months. She walked out of her office onto our almost empty floor, held her hair in her hand and announced that the hair tie had broken. Her short-haired assistant had nothing to offer. This was my chance. I had a full pack in my desk drawer. What my junior status prevented me from showing with work, I was able to show with my organized willingness to live. I imagined I would give it to her and it would somehow convince her that I cared about the work and wanted to do a good job. She accepted the elastic tie without thanks and with a look that suggested her capacity for human vulnerability was another crime for which I needed to be punished. Oh no, I realized. My boss hates me.
It’s not the most dramatic story. Surely other people have had to deal with worse things. We respected their expertise and knowledge, and if you could learn to operate within the narrow confines of their preferences, the work itself was interesting and engaging for most people on the team.
My job was so simple that from day one I sensed how easy it would be to create a program to accomplish my core tasks, a basic automated decision tree of logic that could handle 90% of my tasks. If I had sensed that this boss appreciated new ideas, I would have shown her my program. Instead, I was happy to let the colleague who had insulted her poach me for his new team. She responded by blocking my transfer for six months.
“Have you ever been afraid of someone you work for?” I once asked a friend over dinner. The invisible threat behind my boss’s rules was that she made life difficult for anyone who challenged her by blocking promotions or putting them on an industry blacklist.
As the limbo of my employment dragged into its sixth month, the invisible threat that was once so acute became dull. “I wanted to let you know: The boss noticed you were late,” her buddy told me one day at 9:35 a.m. after I had just arrived.
“Oh, interesting,” I said, at which point relishing the opportunity to make fun of my stalled transfer.
When I worked for this woman, I thought her behavior was normal. I imagined that the trade-off between proximity to talent and expertise would leave one easily unbalanced and left apprehensive. Today, rather than neutralizing my understanding of her over time, the experience has only reinforced how unnecessary her behavior was. What kind of person won’t let her take two weeks off to spend time with his newborn baby when the rest of the team is happy to fill in for him?
What I learned from my boss is that if I have to behave like her in order to be successful, I’m fine too. Since leaving their team, I have watched my former colleagues, who were always kind and hard-working despite our manager’s cruelty and paranoia, achieve career success with more emotionally balanced employers. I’ve met enough brilliant people to realize that cruelty is not one of their essential ingredients.
At the end of the day, when she retires, she will be replaced like all worker drones. When I think about her now, I have no respect for her at all.
Kara Panzer is a New York-based author.
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