AMY GALLO: So tell me—what, right now, do you want from this situation? What is it you want different? What’s your goal, ultimately, here?
MARIA: So I do want to find a way to fix the relationship with him because the times where we were having a good, trusting relationship and he was taking what I was saying and using it and acting on it, we worked really, really well. Then something happened and now he’s out to prove something to the world. And he’s trying to do it alone.
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
MARIA: And so that brings upon a tremendous amount of stress and pressure that he’s just passing along to me, to the team. It’s not healthy. It’s not sustainable, and if we can’t overcome that negative energy, I fear that this team won’t exist in three to six months.
AMY GALLO: You’re listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I’m Amy Gallo, and this is our “Getting Along” series, where I teach you how to deal with different types of difficult people. Here’s how these episodes go. A listener guest tells me about the difficult person who’s wearing them down, and I recommend tactics and phrases that, according to behavioral science, should counteract that bad behavior. The goal is that, through those small actions, the listener can build a more functional relationship for the sake of their sanity and their career.
Today’s guest is Maria, though that’s a pseudonym she’s using so she can speak candidly about her situation. Maria’s a project manager. She builds data models and visualizations for the finance and sales teams at her company. She’s dealing with what I’d call a tormentor—someone senior who should be a supportive figure at work, but instead is punching down. Maria’s tormentor used to be an actual mentor and her boss.
MARIA: We can just call him Mike.
AMY GALLO: Maria and Mike worked well together. She admires his intelligence, his ability to read people and deescalate conflicts, and the good feedback that he’s given her. He’d even helped her choose between two job offers when she’d briefly taken a break from the company. Then he gave her an opportunity, come back and lead a software change within the department. He was now head of.
MARIA: He knew of my work, he knew what I was capable of, and so he brought me onto his team to get that project done successfully. And he was very hands-off during that time, which worked out perfectly for me.
AMY GALLO: He let her decide how to do the work, intervened only when she asked him to. He didn’t micromanage. The relationship, though, started to change when the company did a reorg and put Mike as the head of a different department.
MARIA: He was essentially demoted, so that impacted him, I think, mentally, and also his ego. And so I moved over with him because he was my mentor, because I valued working with him directly. And so I came over to that new team with him.
AMY GALLO: Then one day, Mike turned on her. Here’s what happened. The guy who’d replaced Mike, we’ll call him John, invited Maria to meet one-on-one.
MARIA: To kind of get to know me, get to know some of the projects that I was working on.
AMY GALLO: When she realized they’d been talking so long that she was going to be late for her one-on-one with Mike, she texted him and said so. Mike’s reply? “Okay, that’s fine.” Clearly, it wasn’t though because when Maria showed up to their meeting, he launched in with-
MARIA: “Why did you take that meeting? So, you have time to meet with John, but you don’t have time to do all these other things that I’ve asked you to do?” And he went on a really weird tangent where he talked about not being able to trust me and I am pleasing this other guy, John, and not worrying about what I need to do on this team. And I was really caught off guard because I made him aware that John put this on my calendar. I made him aware that I was going into a meeting with him. So, it’s not like I was doing things behind his back, but yet, he was acting that way.
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
MARIA: That was the first time I really felt like, wow, this is not the relationship, this is not the person I thought it was.
AMY GALLO: Does this sound oddly familiar? Are you dealing with someone who’s weirdly hostile and excessively controlling and a senior person in your organization? Then I think my conversation with MARIA will help. We get into how to push back professionally without jeopardizing your own credibility and how, if possible, to get the relationship back on track.
Maria, thank you for chatting with me about your challenging coworker. So it sounds like you enjoyed working with him for the first part of your working relationship.
MARIA: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
AMY GALLO: He then moved over to this division and what sounded like a demotion.
MARIA: Mm-hmm.
AMY GALLO: You moved over with him.
MARIA: Mm-hmm.
AMY GALLO: It was this meeting with John that seemed to really spark tension between you and change. I mean, would you say changed the way he thought of you, treated you? What would you say really shifted in that meeting?
MARIA: I think that he raised his expectations. Whatever I was doing before was maybe fine and okay, but afterwards, he came at 1000% just more expectations, more urgency to everything. And I could tell he was getting a lot of pressure from his old colleague, John, as well as other colleagues to deliver results. And he was constantly trying to prove the value of this team. Still to this day.
So, at a certain point, I came to him and I said, “Mike, I really need your help. I’m finding that I’m not really enjoying my job anymore. I am stressed, I am overwhelmed.” And his response to me was, “Welcome to the club.”
AMY GALLO: Oh, “I’m miserable. You should be miserable too.”
MARIA: Yeah.
AMY GALLO: Right?
MARIA: Exactly.
AMY GALLO: Yep. Yep.
MARIA: And I found that profoundly telling. At that point I was just like, okay, this is definitely not the relationship I thought it was. If someone comes to me and is like, Hey, I’m overwhelmed, I’m stressed, I need this, I need that. I’m going to say, “Okay, let’s figure out what is actually a priority.” I’m going to help them through. I’m going to support them. I’m not going to go, “Oh, guess what? Me too.”
AMY GALLO: And I would argue the job of a manager is to do exactly as you described. To say okay, let’s figure it out and to buffer, to protect you from my own stress. Not to say, “Yeah, we’re all stressed out, whatever. Get over it.” So, not only was he being a bad manager, I think he was just not doing one of the critical jobs of a manager.
MARIA: Yeah. And you know, Amy, I have really learned probably in the last year by working for him that there’s a difference between a manager and a leader.
AMY GALLO: Yes.
MARIA: And he’s a manager. He can do that well, but he’s not a leader and that is really sad for this team.
AMY GALLO: Well, I’m not hearing leadership qualities. I’m not sure I’m hearing good management either. And I know you had told our producer about an incident around parental leave. Can you explain what happened with that?
MARIA: Yeah, yeah, of course. So we got licensed as foster parents last January. So we’ve been licensed about a year and a month now.
AMY GALLO: Congratulations.
MARIA: Thank you. Thank you. And really, it came about from my own upbringing. I grew up very lower middle class and we always, my family, had to rely on the kindness of others. So as my own kids got older, we kind of just took the leap. And so, I told him very early on like, “Hey, we’re starting this process. Once we get licensed, we will probably get a foster placement relatively soon.” So I found that in FMLA-
AMY GALLO: Family Medical Leave Act. Yep.
MARIA: Exactly. Foster parents are included in that. And so, I reached out to him and I said, “Hey, I’m going to take advantage of it.” And he was like, “That sounds great. Just keep me informed,” et cetera. So come the summer, we received placement of a 10-day-old baby girl.
AMY GALLO: That is young.
MARIA: That is little. And so I reached out to him and I said, “Hey, can we talk about this parental leave? I haven’t really slept in a couple of days.” I sent him a message. I sent him an email as well, and he was traveling for a team workshop. He replied to me and he said, “Yeah, we’ll talk about it later.”
So we had a one-on-one that was scheduled on Monday, and then he moves our one-on-one. And then he canceled the one-on-one. He was like, “Hey, I’ll just give you a call on Thursday.” Thursday comes and I received a message from my coworker, teammate and one of my best friends here at work. And she said to me that during the workshop, Mike had told the team that he was going to try and negotiate with me so that I wouldn’t take parental leave or I wouldn’t take it for a couple of weeks or something.
So I was already in a very heightened mindset because I got this information. And so I’m waiting all day Thursday for his call and it doesn’t happen. So I just went ahead and put in my parental leave. I took two weeks. Baby girl was with us a total of three weeks, and I’m glad that I did it. I know that when I came back, he was not happy that I just took it so abruptly.
AMY GALLO: I assume you had to interact with HR about the FMLA, right?
MARIA: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
AMY GALLO: It’s not like you just didn’t show up to work. You were following a process.
MARIA: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So with the baby girl, I took two weeks, and then roughly two weeks later, we got a 12-day-old little boy.
AMY GALLO: Okay, another young one.
MARIA: Exactly. And my partner and I actually kind of traded off parental leaves for him because we knew it was going to be a much longer-term placement. So, he took four weeks off and I used those four weeks to set the team up for my leave. And there was a lot of tension during those four weeks because that was also during the performance reviews. And I got no helpful feedback from that at all.
And at one point, he was saying that I am not good at project management. That the way that I do it is not correct. So I asked what I felt like was a very neutral-toned question and I said, “Well, can you give me an example? Because it would be really helpful for me to draw on an experience.” And almost offended, he said, “Do you imagine what my boss would tell me if I asked him to give me an example?”
AMY GALLO: I mean, I wish people could see my face because I’m just shocked right now. Of course you ask for examples. We encourage people, ask for examples. Sorry.
MARIA: Yes, yes.
AMY GALLO: I’m getting too excited, but yes.
MARIA: Exactly.
AMY GALLO: It’s a very normal question. I mean, I have a feeling we could talk, Maria, for a long time listing all of the things he’s done, but I do want to just… He is such a sort of perfect example—I don’t know—unfortunate example of the tormentor. Like, someone who you expect to be a mentor or as in your case has been a mentor in the past but actually does the opposite. So it feels like they’re undermining you as opposed to supporting you now, right? They accuse you directly or indirectly of not being committed to work. They set near impossible standards. They assign you needless or inappropriate work. They call that, in the academic literature, like “illegitimate tasks.” Things that don’t really matter to the work. They put down your accomplishments. They deny time off or flexibility for nonwork commitments. They proudly talk about the sacrifices they made.
I mean, he literally is the sort of quintessential tormentor. And they often claim that this mistreatment of you is an exercise in character building. That they’re trying to actually—”toughen you up: is often a phrase we hear, or “show you the ropes.” But it often can feel like hazing. It can feel like fraternity hazing. This is what it took for me to get in here and now you have to do it.
What’s interesting about him is I also have mentioned I think he fits that insecure manager archetype or insecure boss archetype because he wasn’t always like this. And it sounds like that demotion, his ego took a hit from that. And that moment where things changed, where you took that meeting with John, there was something that just seems like he all of a sudden was deeply insecure about his position in the organization and your loyalty to him. And I think that sometimes we see that with the insecure manager too, is that we see them try to test your loyalty and try to hoard resources. That comment he said of, “How do you have time to meet with John when you’re supposed to be doing all these things for me?” Of course. That’s just again, classic insecure boss behavior.
What I want to get to sort of what do you do, but first I want to take a moment to just acknowledge you’ve handled this incredibly well so far. I think that a lot of people wouldn’t have pushed back in that initial meeting where he complained about you meeting with John. You kindly reinforced your loyalty. You also set boundaries around that meeting, your time, but also around your FMLA. I think you’ve really done a nice job of managing the situation. I want to get to present day because if I understand correctly, you don’t actually report directly to Mike anymore.
MARIA: That’s correct. That’s correct.
AMY GALLO: So tell me what your reporting relationship is now.
MARIA: Yes. So now I actually report indirectly to him. There’s a person who’s now my manager and that person reports to him. But I don’t have any direct one-on-one interaction with Mike anymore, and I only have interaction with him in sort of a team setting. And it’s actually kind of made things worse to be honest with you because I… And my coworker the other day told me this. She said, “I feel like you are not Maria anymore and we need that on the team.” And she said that because we were having a meeting about how we’re going to organize and how we’re going to structure around scrum—scrum being an agile project methodology. But I haven’t really been giving my feedback because if I were to do that, he would find a way to undermine me.
So yeah. So, I’ve kind of retreated in a sense because I don’t want to be undermined in front of 10 other colleagues. I don’t want to be berated in front of 10 other colleagues, and if that’s going to be the case, why even give my feedback? Right?
AMY GALLO: Right. Okay. So you want this team to be successful. It also sounds—and tell me if I’m putting words in your mouth—but it sounds like you also want to be able to contribute in the way you always have been. To take your colleague’s comment of being the Maria that you’ve always been, who’s bringing your knowledge and expertise.
MARIA: Exactly. Mm-hmm.
AMY GALLO: There is interesting research that we’ve published some of this in HBR about insecure bosses and how when you move up in the organization, we expect that people in those more senior positions to have more leadership ability, knowledge, access to information, and data. That they’ll be more competent. When they fear they are not up to those standards—and maybe they’ve been shown they aren’t by getting demotion, in this case—the discrepancy between how confident and capable they actually feel and the high expectations results in what the researchers call ego defensiveness. Where they engage in actions to protect their self-esteem. So, it seems like Mike has sort of gotten in this spin of, “I’m not up to the task, but I have to prove I’m up to the task.”
MARIA: Yes.
AMY GALLO: And anyone who’s at all going to make me look bad in any way is just collateral damage. I just have to sort of get rid of them, undermine them, make sure that others don’t trust them.
MARIA: Yeah, that’s 100% his personality. Yeah.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. And it’s hard to deal with. Now, I’m about to say something I really don’t like to say because I don’t think it’s a tactic that anyone wants to do, but it has been shown in research to work. And that is that sometimes the way to reduce that ego defensiveness or sometimes it’s called ego sensitivity, is to actually get them in a more positive frame of mind about themselves. And that calls for flattery. And again, I do not like to say, oh, let’s go in and tell Mike all these wonderful
