“Max,

You seem to be the only I know of that talks about the bad bosses in our lives. My name is Steve and I am a 42 years old data scientist, now divorced. I have a seven year old son not living with me. I am going to tell you what happened to me with the most devilish whirlwind boss I’ve ever had. I hope no one has to go though this like I had. I’ve lost my home, my family, and I sleep and live in a flop downtrodden hotel downtown. My room is 8X8 with holes in the walls and there are mice inside those walls. The residents in my hotel are the unlucky and the druggies. The room number on my door is part written in a sharpie. The shower has mold everywhere and only cold water flows. My next door neighbor, Tina, is a 50ishs crack lady who sleeps during the day and starts going out at night. at 11 PM- 12 AM. This is worse than Bates Motel.

I’ll start two years ago while I was working as Director of Analytics at Company X. When my new boss, James, came on board I knew he had it in for me. He started saying things like: “Have you run those projections for me yet ? Steve, what’s with you ? He started texting me: what you’re doing, Steve,  Have you been able to do this, Steve ? and this and that ? One day, he invited me and my wife [I was still married at the time ] for dinner at his place. I thought I should not refuse him, so we went. When he met my wife he was going bazookas over her. [He was divorced]. I tried to play it down tactfully. At the dinner table, he was talking things that were close to my wife’s interests. My wife, who is a high school educator, had always thought that her school had a problem with the students that scored lowered and weren’t getting enough attention, with the quality of remedial classes at her school. He was saying things that he was giving away 4% of his income to his School District Fund. Does Steve do that ? Well. I did not. James was there caring about things that I did not, looking better than I was .

So my wife thought we should invite him over to our house in reciprocity. I thought it was a bad idea. Went along with it anyways. The evening he came to our house -a relatively modest three bedroom, as he came in, he stood tall in there and said: “I can go along with those crown moldings”. “Your terrace is just the way it is supposed to be. Isn’t it wonderful ?” As he was saying that, he was looking at my wife.

Image: Traveltips

That night I had an argument with my wife explaining to her that James was a awful boss who liked to put me on the spot. That we needed to stop giving him any fuel. That his arguments were smoke.

At work it got from bad to worse. James put me out at our department meetings for “lack of cooperation and poor performance”. He fired me 7 months after that. He was “we need to shake things up” here. “Where where’s going we don’t need any dead weight”.

At the firing meeting, which lasted less than 15 minutes:

“Steve, what’s wrong with you ? Are you having any problems ?
-No, I didn’t say I have a problem.
You’re always on the defensive, aren’t you ? You are letting us down. You work just isn’t what it was.
-What are you talking about ? I’m doing just fine.
Isn’t that your defensive voice speaking ? Look at these [he pulls my latest graphs] If that’s work well done, then you tell me… I’m sorry Steve, but we’re just going to have to let you go.” I warned you twice before already. The writing is on the wall. You’ve let us all down. You did this on yourself.“

Since my wife was earning very little and what she had was going towards paying family debts (her family had a money losing business), about 10 months after that I lost our house unable to make the mortgage. My wife stopped talking to me and filed for divorce. She took our son with her and moved in with a friend of hers. And I am now living in this dump. For the final nail in the coffin, I heard now my former boss is buying my house !  This is my story. What did I do wrong? What is it that I can do ?”

Max responds:

Before I get into this, let’s take a deep breath and listen to Weightless, “(the most relaxing song that can reduce anxiety by up to 65% when listened to for 10 minutes “(Business Insider,  Inc ) from British trio Marconi Union.

I heard of “can’t have rotten apples spoil the barrel”, “no dead weight where we’re going”, defense like the one they allegedly fired you for. So you’ve let this guy into your life and now you’ve lost your home and he bought your house ?! Incredible ! Your wife left you and you live in a roach motel.

You didn’t handle yourself well in the face of a bad boss and one or two years later you lost your home and your wife. You needed to put some screws on your boss when you had the bad boss. You should have known better than to roll out the red carpet to a bastard boss. You have no excuses ! You do not say anything about putting any kind of fight, or setting any boundaries between you and him. This is not what I teach. I teach wrestling, grappling, X Chokes, Omoplatas, Head and Arm Chokes (figuratively speaking), moves that paralyze a bad boss. So now you’re in the gutter. The good thing about being in the gutter is that you can rise up. Rise out of it and be a man. Best of luck !

“Hi Max,

My name is Tom. I am an Executive Director of Information Technology at a known brand company, have been in this position for about three years. I am asking for your opinion on a touchy work issue that has me upset. I sleep poorly and have started having trouble with my health-my asthma. I feel trapped. My department head, the CTO, is a woman who detracts my work consistently; everything she does is office politics and somehow I don’t fit in. She knows close to nothing about IT architecture and procedural improvements, yet she has built a reputation on the results of people such as myself. She recently hired a friend of hers from her college days and is trying to get her my job. Pretty soon everyone around her is going to be a friend of hers. Recently she embraced the adjective of “efficiency guru” but the laurels rest on people like myself. She’s not giving the credits to those that deserve it.

It is our company policy not to discuss compensation at work. Despite my high quality work I haven’t been given a raise in the last three years while my peers have gotten raises ! I am afraid of touching the subject with her, because she is looking for ways to remove and replace me.”

Answer:

I understand she has been digging your hole for three years. You shouldn’t have given that much time for the situation to deteriorate.

I’ve heard about those “efficiency gurus” that are praised in Silicon Valley: for the most they are bull***t artists. For those that don’t know, “efficiency gurus” are people who claim to take a company 10X [or 14X or whatever] in a relatively short period of time. Efficiency gurus have a 90% failure rate coming in a new industry, and for those that do succeed the results are independent of their making. I call efficiency gurus “moon kangaroos” [the moon landscape is similar to Australia’s deserts and you could make high jumps because of low gravity on the Moon, there are no kangaroos on the Moon, anyone can jump high].

Bosses that want the workplace filled with “buddies” are not new.

What you can do:

1. Face your worst fear and face her. Call her out. Have a private meeting where you confront her. The outcome: she either fires you or you[r situation] will improve in some way. Transfer to another city if you can. The confrontation, however, would be coming in late and the odds are not in your favor.

2. Report her to her superiors, but make sure you collect evidence. You can’t do anything without evidence to back your claims.

3. Protect yourself by following the company’s codes of conduct to the letter. Under no circumstances you should make sexist remarks, because a woman will unscrupulously turn this against you and accuse you of sexism. Women often paint themselves being the victims to the default -female- sexual harassment standard.

4. Since your work is high value, there is a good chance she’s sabotaging you in fear of you getting her job. So she is a power hungry slime-ball in fear of her own seat. If your intention is not to get her job, make that clear, there is so much misunderstanding in the workplace for lack of clear communication. Say it to her face [if it holds true] “Listen, I don’t want your job !”

5. If “everything is office politics”, then you’ve failed to pay attention to it. I will address office politics in a future post for your benefit and for the benefit of other readers.

Let me know how that went. Just get out of the uncertainty and misery. -Max

More fan mail coming…