April 21, 2025 • 26 mins
Some bosses are great. Others… force you into a game you never asked to play.
In this episode, Kendall Berg unpacks the real rules of surviving the workplace when you're dealing with toxic leadership—micromanagers, credit thieves, and internal gossip machines. Whether you're trying to manage up, navigate internal politics, or just stay sane in a dysfunctional team, Kendall gives you the scripts, mindset shifts, and tactical moves to stay in the game without selling your soul.
Learn how to stay visible without looking desperate, build your "network tree" to future-proof your next move, and why internal transfers might just be your secret career weapon. Because sometimes the issue isn’t you—it’s the broken org chart above you.
💡 Plus: Kendall shares how to create a regular update tracker, shut down gossip without drama, and leverage peers to escape your boss’s political tornado.
In this episode, we discuss:
-
What should I do if my boss micromanages me?
-
How do I get credit for my work when my boss steals it?
How do I manage toxic office politics without quitting? -
Should I leave or try for an internal transfer?
-
What are signs my boss is sabotaging my career?
Pre-order Secrets of the Career Game (out May 13) to access exclusive resources, a private Slack group, and live Q&A sessions with Kendall.
👉 Pre-order now and send your receipt to thatcareercoach@gmail.com to join the community.
⭐️Get our FREE Accomplishments Tracker: https://fabulous-butterfly-83716.myflodesk.com/n8yzvrtw9v
That Career Coach
Want to know more about Kendal Berg, that career coach?
Follow her on Instagram: @thatcareercoach_
Check out her courses on the website: https://thatcareercoach.net/
Build out the tools you need to navigate the corporate game: — Self Driven Mastermind
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Kendall Berg (00:00):
I am not a fan of corporate politics. I do not enjoy it. I do not find it fun. However, I have learned to be very good at it because I am not going to let corporate politics be the reason that my career stops. And that's the attitude that you have to have in order to be successful in a lot of companies. You don't have to enjoy it. You don't have to be cutthroat and inauthentic and like crazy. Right? Let's not take this too far, but you need to be able to read a room, know who's playing politics, know what to tell people and what not to tell people and how to be careful. So, so if you are in a situation where your boss is playing a lot of politics inter team.
(00:34):
So I'm not talking about your boss is playing politics with this other division and trying to steal their scope so that you guys can grow up, none of that, okay? That is a totally separate episode. But if your boss in your team is playing politics, this could look like pitting internal team members against each other, like assigning you both the same project and then picking who's best or oh, you can't do this. So and so is working on it. If your boss is giving you feedback that they're telling other people who are your peers and if they are hiding information from you that is critical for your job success, your boss is playing entertain politics. Welcome back to this episode of Secrets of the Career Game.
(01:15):
So many people are trying to navigate a corporate world that is laden with secrets, cleverly hidden and unspoken rules to a game that most employees don't even know that they're playing. On this podcast we try to give you a peek behind the curtains and some tips and tricks to ultimately make you successful in your career and help you progress a little bit faster. Today's episode, we are talking about something that has been coming up a lot lately. We are going to be talking about dealing with difficult bosses. So there's a few different types of difficult bosses we're going touch on today. There's, there's also a few different components that come into play when we are thinking of a job change or the job market.
(01:55):
So we're going to talk through those as well and then give some advice on really what you can do to better your working situation when you are in survival mode. So to kick things off back in especially 2020, we saw people jumping from job to job and they were taking huge increases, right? Especially big tech. There were people offering astronomical amounts of money for developer Engineers, people were jumping from company to company and were seeing that salary really very quickly. What we're starting to see now as we come into 2025 is people are still changing jobs, doing job hop, but the salary increases are significantly less. They're still going up, but not as much as they were. But we're seeing people leave their companies for reasons other than just to jump their salary.
(02:39):
They're leaving for reasons like they have a difficult boss, they don't get along with their co workers, the stress of their role is too high, there's no work life balance. And we're starting to see a more holistic view of what does it mean to find job satisfaction. Right. If we think back to the 80s and 90s, it was more like work hard, get promoted, become a director, make a bunch of money so that you can provide for your family. As went into the 2000s, we started to see a shift of like that plus DEI, mental health, work life balance. Now we're seeing a shift where like people are actually turning down management jobs because they don't want the stress of having to manage other people. Especially a trend we're seeing in Gen Z.
(03:17):
We're seeing individuals who are staying at companies longer if they have a good experience or a good manager, good personal relationships, and seeing people jump much faster than they have historically. Right. Some people are only staying in jobs three to six months in order to prove that they don't like the people they're working with and then they're jumping ships. So we're seeing a lot of volatility that combined with the big tech layoffs and the people we've seen flooding the market in recent months. While the job market is relatively healthy in 2025, especially compared to 2024 and the trends that were seeing towards the end of the year, we are seeing a bigger trend towards people leaving jobs for reasons other than just the salary piece. And a lot of that, in my personal opinion, comes down to your manager.
(04:02):
Managers determine so much of your experience in your job. So I've talked about this before, that the difference between a satisfying job and an unsatisfying job very rarely has anything to do with the actual work that you're doing. And it more often has to do with your manager and how they are effectively leading and guiding the team. It's why people stay at startups which are very stressful, low boundary maintenance type jobs, because they have a really good relationship with their leader and they get to work on cool things versus people who go to big companies. And only stay for three months, even though that company may have a really good reputation.
(04:35):
I've talked about it on previous podcast episodes that to me there's a big difference between the company culture, which I call like the ghost culture, and the culture of an individual portion of the organization or within a team. The reason for that is the bigger the company gets, the further the top leadership is from the actual individuals who are performing the work. When that gap gets larger and larger, the impact that the top of house leadership has on company culture gets smaller and smaller. And the reason for this is because most people's experience comes down to their direct manager and their experience with them. So theoretically you have a great leadership team who is building a strong culture. They want collaboration, they want work, life balance, they want people to disconnect, to volunteer in their communities, yada, whatever it says on the website.
(05:20):
They hire leaders who they believe want the same things, and those leaders hire leaders who they believe want the same things, and so on and so forth. But then the average person who's reporting into a manager or senior manager towards the bottom of that triangle hierarchy, they're experiencing whatever their direct manager is doing as opposed to whatever the CEO established when he first started. So in some companies where culture is really important and employee engagement satisfaction surveys are being reviewed heavily and individuals are being held accountable for the performance of their team, not just in metrics and delivery, but also in job satisfaction, the further you get from the top, you could still have a really good culture.
(05:56):
But what I found and what lots of my clients experience is a company could have a really great ghost culture, but your experience within a team could be really terrible. And that's because the leader has not given been given proper coaching, they haven't been given proper resources, they aren't sure how to provide you feedback or how to guide you, there's no open dialogue, et cetera. So that's where people really start to struggle in their job satisfaction, is they're working for a great company, especially golden ticket companies. These are the companies that I say like if you have them on your resume. Getting a job in the future is pretty simple, right? So think any big tech, any monolith bank, any super huge healthcare, health tech companies, right? Once you have them on your resumes, future job opportunities are a lot easier to align to.
(06:38):
But then within your team, your experience could vary greatly depending on what your leadership is like right now. There's all the other things I talk about on this podcast all the time, about soft skills and self advocacy and advocating for yourself and talking about your work in an effective way and building your executive presence and all of those things are important too to your overall experience. But what do you do when you have a bad boss? So we're gonna talk about a few different types of bad bosses and how I like to handle them. The first bad boss is the Micromanager. If you have been eagerly awaiting the Secrets of the Career Game book, it is officially available for pre order.
(07:15):
This book will go over 36 strategies for building success in your career and honestly is some of my best lessons, best templates and best ways for you to start to get the success and the progression in your career that you deserve. If you do pre order the book, make sure that you email a screenshot of your pre order to that careercoachmail.com in order to be added to our top secret community. In that community, you'll have access to me, as well as 2 live Q& A sessions. When the book launches, you'll also get an extra early copy with the first chapter of the book for you to read ahead, go to Amazon Find Secrets of the career game 36 Strategies for your career.
(07:54):
Go ahead, place your pre order and send us an email and I feel like this gets talked about a lot more than I actually see it occur. In very highly technical positions. A lot of leaders end up being micromanagers, but outside of super technical positions, management I don't feel is really all that common anymore. Just because it got in the early 2000s such a big amount of corporate culture communication was around micromanagement. So if you are working for a leader who is a micromanager, you're not going to like it when I say this, but a lot of improving that situation is going to come down to you, not to them. The reason for this is because you need to be more proactive with your communication to keep them from needing to reach out to you.
(08:38):
So the reason that micromanagers become micromanagers is because they don't want something to drop. That seems obvious, right? They don't want to delegate something to someone on their team, get to the deadline and it's not done because that makes them look bad to leadership. It makes you look bad to leadership. And so what they're trying to do is they're trying to stay on top of what they've assigned you so that by the time it gets to leadership, it's in a really good place and you both look good. Or at least they look good. That's another management type. We'll Talk about. So micromanagement comes from a really good place of really not wanting to make your employees super miserable. It just has a really adverse reaction.
(09:13):
So if you're the employee who is being micromanaged, you need to be doing things like providing regular updates to your leadership of what's going on. You need to be proactively reaching out to them to give them updates on things that might happen. We're going to come back to that. And you need to have some type of template or tracker where they have easy visibility into what you're doing. I know that this sounds like more effort than it's worth, but it is going to improve your experience. So, for example, you could create a Trello or a Jira board where you're tracking all the tasks you're working on with statuses so that your manager can go in and see it at any time. You could have an Excel sheet. You could send a weekly email.
(09:52):
A lot of people on my team I have send me weekly updates of like, hey, this is what's going on in my team. This is what we're working on. These are the accomplishments, frankly, because I'm not a micromanager and I have no idea. Okay? So I need that structure. Right. If you're dealing with a micromanager, proactive updates are going to help head them off at the past because they don't need to reach out to you ask what's going on. They already know. The second thing is that when you are encountering situations where things are going wrong or might go wrong, most people have a tendency to keep those things to ourselves. If we can fix it before my boss finds out, they'll never know something happened. If I can fix it before it becomes an issue, then my boss will never know.
(10:32):
If I can handle this person who is causing a lot of issues and I don't have to bother my boss. That's better. But the reality is, at some point, one of those things is going to slip through the cracks and make its way to your boss without you getting to them first. And that's going to look really, really bad. Okay, I'll give examples. You have a meeting and somebody gets really heated with you, and they're very argumentative, and you guys need to table the meeting to pick back up in another week. You don't tell your boss because you're like, hey, nothing bad happened. It's fine. We're going to pick it up in a week. We have a path forward. That person then goes to your boss and complains about You. Kendall was really difficult in this meeting. We weren't able to get anything done.
(11:07):
We had to push the meeting out a week. That's not great. Right now, your boss has no idea that happened. They're finding out from this other person. Second is we find an issue in a report or in some type of thing. We've produced a campaign, an email, something where we catch that there was a typo or there was a data issue, but it had already been sent out. Most people will either try to recall the message or they'll respond just to the person they sent it to and say, hey, there was an issue in this report. Just want to let you know I've already gone ahead and fixed it here. He you need to let your boss know this is a cya. You go to your boss and you say, hey, I want to give you a heads up. I sent out this report.
(11:40):
I quickly found an issue. I've already remediated the issue and sent it to the person wanted you to be aware in case it came up. That way, if that person goes to your boss and says, hey, Kendall messed up on this report, your boss is not surprised. And they can say, yeah, I understand that. Sorry about that. It sounds like she already fixed it, though, for you. Did you end up getting what you need? They can have your defense instead of coming back to you on the offense. These CYAs are so important, and especially people who are junior in their careers don't do this. They think, oh, I'll just. I'll hide it. Nobody will know, nobody will see.
(12:09):
And then inevitably, it gets to your boss or it gets to your boss's boss, or it gets escalated up some chain, and then you look really bad because you didn't warn your leadership it was coming. Okay, There are things all the time that I will go to my boss and say, hey, there's no action for you on this. I just want you to be aware. I had a conversation with this person. This is how they're thinking about this right now. There's no action for us, but it is something that could come our way in the future, right? Giving an update of increasing demands on capacity. Hey, I had a meeting with this person and it was kind of a difficult conversation. Here's how I handled it.
(12:38):
Want you to be aware the benefit of doing these types of awareness updates is because then your boss is never blindsided. If their boss comes to them and says, hey, I heard Kendall got into an altercation with somebody and your boss has no idea what happened, they're going to be like, oh, my gosh, I'm sorry. I'll definitely talk to her. I can't believe that happened. Then they're coming at you. They're very offensive, they're upset, they're coming at you with all this different evidence, and you're like, no, that's not what happened at all. But you didn't defend yourself proactively. So the big thing with a micromanager is that you need to proactively inform what are you working on, what's the status, what are the roadblocks, what are potential risks, what are issues that have occurred?
(13:14):
They need to know those things proactively from you in order to be able to trust you in return. So it comes to a micromanagement, a lot of it's actually going to be on you to update them. Now, I'm not saying that this will necessarily get them to ask for less updates. Generally it does. I've seen this work in a million different situations where generally they back off, they start to trust you more. But what I can tell you is it will make it way less friction to work with them. They'll start to trust you more, they'll give you more tasks, they'll micromanage you less, they'll take your word for things more often over time. That's the way to improve that relationship. The second type of boss is a type of boss who takes credit for your work.
(13:51):
So sometimes this boss and the micromanagement boss are the same boss, which is why we're going to go from one to the other, where you do all this work, you're creating all of this stuff, you send it to your boss, you never see it again. And yet your boss took it up the chain to 52 million people, and you never hear about it again. It can be really frustrating and it can really hurt your visibility, your career progression, your ability to self advocate. It does a lot of things with that type of boss. The best thing you can do for your career is build your network tree. So I've talked about your network tree before on other podcast episodes. If you're not watching the video, you can't see my hands doing this weird tree situation that it's doing.
(14:23):
But basically, your boss and your boss's boss are the tree trunk of your network at any job, because ultimately they do have a lot of impact on your success in your career. But the branches with all the leaves, all those other relationships you build, that is actually what makes your tree flourish. That's actually what's going to help you Grow. A tree cannot grow if it has no leaves and it can't get any sunlight and therefore cannot grow. You're all following me now. Okay, it was analogy made sense in my head. All right? When you are building relationships with your network, it needs to be broader than your tree trunk. Meaning your boss and your skip level cannot be the only people with whom you communicate. You need to build relationships with your boss's peers. You need to build relationships with your peers.
(15:04):
You need to build relationships with the influencers across your organization. They might be your same level. They might be more junior, they might be more senior, but when they talk, everybody else shuts up and listens. Great. You need to be building relationships with this broader tree in order to get credit for the work that you're doing. Especially when you work for a stealing credit boss. Right? Because if you're doing the work and then you're talking to your boss's peer and you're like, oh, it's been so interesting, this work we've been doing on AI. I've really been leaning in. I feel like I've learned a lot about prompts. How's your team using it? Yada, yada.
(15:33):
And then that peer ends up in a meeting with your boss where your boss is presenting their strategy on AI and they go, oh, well, have you talked to Kendall about this? Says, well, yes, Kendall's aware. And say, okay, great. Because I was talking to her the other day. It seems like she's got some great ideas on prompt work. Is that included in this? Right. They're not doing it intentionally in defense of you, but it's going to appear that way in that group where you are not present. It's the same thing if you're building relationships with your skip and your boss goes to your skip and then presents one of your ideas, and your skip is like, interesting. Kendall brought this up in our last one one. She must be involved in this.
(16:03):
Then it doesn't come down to your boss giving you credit because you are getting credit through all of these other connections and relationships. That is what's really important, because we will all have times in our career where the company operates in a more bureaucratic way. And it's not our thing to present. The audience is too senior. We don't have the full context. There might be things going on that are confidential. Right. There will always be times your career, no matter your level of seniority, where you are not the person to present your ideas. The way you get credit for those ideas is you Build relationships with the other individuals who are going to be in that room and as a result, they know you did the work.
(16:40):
Now, what I do not mean is you build a relationship with your boss's boss and your boss's peer and you're like, steve stole credit for my work and ran off with my presentation. No, that's not what I'm talking about. But I'm talking about, hey, Steve, I'm working on this project on AI. I'd love some of your feedback. Here are some of the things I'm thinking, is there anything you can see that I'm missing? And then when that presentation goes up, they're like, that's what Kendall did. She used my idea. Great, right? You're getting credit in a more subtle and influential way as opposed to waiting for your boss to go, kendall made this slide in a presentation. Now the best bosses are going to give credit, right?
(17:15):
Anytime anybody on my team does any analysis and it gets sent to my leadership, I mention, hey, so and so on my team did this work. They did a great job. Here's my takeaways. Right? But a lot of bosses don't do that. Not because they're cruel or because they want to take credit, but mostly because they're just not thinking about it and they're thinking, oh, I'm going to give them credit when it comes to their year end review. And so they're negligent on accident. Okay? It's a little bit of like incompetent curse for each manager. So if you're working for a boss who is stealing credit, who's not inviting you to the meetings, who's not giving you the chance to advocate for yourself, you need to build those broader relationships so that you have other advocate advocacy paths.
(17:51):
Right now this can help you internally in a lot of different ways because also that's how you're going to get your next job. Odds are a boss who's never going to give you credit is also probably never going to advocate for you and promote you. Generally there's exceptions, but generally that's the way it's going to go. So at some point you're going to want a higher level role or you're going to want to do something different. Now you've got all these other relationships in the company that you can look for. Internal moves, right? Jumping back to how I started the episode, I think people believe that when you are unhappy in your role, the only option you have is to jump ship. And that's not true.
(18:21):
You can move internally you can try out different teams, you can work with different leaders, but in order to do that, you have to have relationships. Because what everybody gets afraid of is they think, well, if I find an internal job that I want and I go apply for it, my boss is going to know long before you apply for that internal job. You should have already talked to the hiring manager and made sure that they're a good culture fit for you. You should have already scoped out the people on the team, asked them what they like and dislike about their job, gotten a feel for if it's going to be a good fit for you. You should have already talked to the recruiter and expressed interest before you apply.
(18:54):
That way, by the time we formally apply in the system, everybody's already on our camp. They already think that we're great. They already want us to be successful in this new role. And then they alert your boss. The mistake people make is they're applying to these jobs cold in the portal because they want to get out of their team and their Boss is getting 50 notifications a day that Kendall's trying to jump ship. Don't do that, it's dumb. So that's a micromanagement boss. That's a boss that's taking credit for you. I'm going to talk lastly about a boss who plays politics. Now we all play politics, right? Every boss on the planet has to. It is part of the job. And I'm sorry, if you hate corporate politics and you want to get promoted, you better learn to play it.
(19:32):
You don't have to be the best, but you can't be the worst. It is a dog eat dog world out there. I've talked about this on the episodes before. I am not a fan of corporate politics. I do not enjoy it. I do not find it fun. However, I have learned to be very good at it because I am not going to let corporate politics be the reason that my career stops. And that's the attitude that you have to have in order to be successful in a lot of companies. You don't have to enjoy it. You don't have to be cutthroat and inauthentic and like crazy, right? Let's not take this too far, but you need to be able to read a room, know who's playing politics, know what to tell people and what not to tell people and how to be careful.
(20:07):
So if you are in a situation where your boss is playing a lot of politics inter team. So I'm not talking about your boss is playing politics with this other division and trying to steal their scope so that you guys can grow up. None of that, okay? That is a totally separate episode. But if your boss in your team is playing politics, this could look like pitting internal team members against each other. Like assigning you both the same project and then picking who's best or oh, you can't do this. So and so is working on it. If your boss is giving you feedback that they're telling other people who are your peers, it's different. If your boss gives you feedback about somebody who reports to you, that's a situation where like they're helping you coach that person different.
(20:47):
But if they're coming to you and saying, your peer, Susie, she makes me crazy. Can you believe she wore that skirt? That is not appropriate. Not appropriate. Okay, so if they are gossiping internally about feedback they're giving other team members, if they are pitting you two against each other or you four against each other, they're making it a competitive exercise. And if they are hiding information from you that is critical for your job success, your boss is playing entertain politics. And here's what that looks like for you. For you, it's a lot of confusion. Hey, I've been asked to produce this analysis, but I have no idea why. I don't know the audience, I don't know where I'm supposed to get the data. I don't know what the purpose is. And then when you fail, your boss is like, I knew it. Right?
(21:31):
Okay, that's not cool. Or it looks like you hating one of your peers because your boss is constantly putting you in a position where you're having to compete against one another. Right. If that's you, if you're in competition with your peers, the only way this gets better is you start spending a lot more one one time with your peers. Nobody wants to do it because everybody already hates their peers because their boss has now poisoned the well and now everybody dislikes each other. Right? I get it, I get it. I feel you. You need to be spending one one time with your pe. It is the only way you're going to escape that politics spin. Because what's going to happen is you're going to talk to Susie and say, you know, what are you working on? Is there anything you need support?
(22:12):
Is there anything that my team's not doing that you need? And they're going to go, no, but my boss just assigned me this big project on AI Now I have to go focus on. You're going to go, oh, interesting. I was talking to Steve this morning and he mentioned something about AI. Are you running point on that? And they're like, well, I was going to. I think it makes more sense for it to live in my team. And you're like, cool, yeah, you run point on that. I'll let Steve know that you and I connected and that you're going to run this that way. I'm not stepping on your toes now. We're building trust now. We're building good relationship now. She's going to be willing to step out of your space when something else comes out in the future.
(22:39):
Now you're willing to step out of her space and give her scope and you're able to function much more effectively. I've had a client come to me where this is the exact situation that was happening. They finally started repairing that relationship. They all got into a room. Boss assigned person A a task that very clearly should have lived with person B. And for the first time in years, person A goes, I actually really don't think that's my space. Isn't that person B's Tell me that's not a better experience for you as the individual than getting sucked into politics with your boss. Right. So the only way to overcome that is more time with your peers. All right. If your boss is gossiping about other people on the team, the only way around that is to shut that down. Right. It is uncomfortable.
(23:22):
But to say, you know, I haven't really seen that with this person, but it seems like something that you guys will probably talk about in your one one, let your boss know that you are not that person that they should be gossiping with. Now. Don't be like, don't gossip to me about Steve. Right? That's not going to end well for you. But we could say, like, hey, you know, I haven't noticed Steve doing that, but I'm sure it's something that you're going to bring up in your one one and then change topics. Redirect. Hey, I needed your help with this, or, hey, I wanted to bring up this thing. Hey, do you have time to give me advice on this repurpose? Right? So that's politics, where they're pitting you guys against each other. They're starting to gossip about other people in the team.
(23:56):
None of that is healthy. Right. There are situations where I have given my leadership team, hey, I want to let you know, this is a situation with somebody one of your teams. Here's how I'm handling it. Because they need to be Aware so they don't say the wrong thing or they don't misstep. There are times where you will go to your leaders and tell them things about people on their team. There is no situation where you should go to one leader and go, well, your peer didn't do this very well. I don't want you to make the same mistake. No, absolutely no. So these are three different types of difficult bosses. They can make your situation really negative. As I mentioned, if you're in these, there are certain things you can do to mitigate the problem and make it more survivable. Right.
(24:34):
So that you can last until you can find that next opportunity. Now, an internal transfer is always going to be a shorter time period to land that next role than if you're looking externally. Especially with a job market that's really volatile like today is, internal may be a better fit for you. So when you're in survival mode, we're going to look for internal opportunities first because it's going to be faster. Then we're going to look for external opportunities, starting with our network. People who've worked for our same company or who worked with us in the past who've moved on to some other company. We're going to pick their brain, get to know them, build a relationship with them so that we can then potentially ask for a referral. And then you're going to go cold to market where you're just applying for jobs.
(25:13):
That is the stack rank of how you're going to get out of a difficult situation. But I would say when clients come to me, there's probably about 30% of the time where I'm like, this is really bad and you need to move on to something else. But I would say that there's 50% of the time where I'm like, hey, this is actually more of like a managing up issue. Or we could learn a skill, we can effectively navigate it, we can improve it. We just need the right tool. So make sure that you're assessing your situation holistically and without a dire influence so that you can determine is this actually something that's holding me back or is this something that I can manage well moving forward? Hopefully you guys liked today's episode.
(25:53):
If you did, go ahead and rate us 5 stars, leave any questions that you have for me in the comments below. But additionally, make sure that you have pre ordered your copy of Secrets of the Career Game. My book is coming out May 13th. We're super excited about it. If you send me a picture of that receipt, then I will send you a early chapter and get you added to a secret group where we're talking about it. Additionally, make sure you're following me on Instagram at that career coach underscore and send me the word tracker if you are interested in getting a free accomplishments tracker that will help you advocate for yourself better with your boss. Otherwise, thank you guys so much for tuning in and we will chat again next week.
I am not a fan of corporate politics. I do not enjoy it. I do not find it fun. However, I have learned to be very good at it because I am not going to let corporate politics be the reason that my career stops. And that's the attitude that you have to have in order to be successful in a lot of companies. You don't have to enjoy it. You don't have to be cutthroat and inauthentic and like crazy. Right? Let's not take this too far, but you need to be able to read a room, know who's playing politics, know what to tell people and what not to tell people and how to be careful. So, so if you are in a situation where your boss is playing a lot of politics inter team.
(00:34):
So I'm not talking about your boss is playing politics with this other division and trying to steal their scope so that you guys can grow up, none of that, okay? That is a totally separate episode. But if your boss in your team is playing politics, this could look like pitting internal team members against each other, like assigning you both the same project and then picking who's best or oh, you can't do this. So and so is working on it. If your boss is giving you feedback that they're telling other people who are your peers and if they are hiding information from you that is critical for your job success, your boss is playing entertain politics. Welcome back to this episode of Secrets of the Career Game.
(01:15):
So many people are trying to navigate a corporate world that is laden with secrets, cleverly hidden and unspoken rules to a game that most employees don't even know that they're playing. On this podcast we try to give you a peek behind the curtains and some tips and tricks to ultimately make you successful in your career and help you progress a little bit faster. Today's episode, we are talking about something that has been coming up a lot lately. We are going to be talking about dealing with difficult bosses. So there's a few different types of difficult bosses we're going touch on today. There's, there's also a few different components that come into play when we are thinking of a job change or the job market.
(01:55):
So we're going to talk through those as well and then give some advice on really what you can do to better your working situation when you are in survival mode. So to kick things off back in especially 2020, we saw people jumping from job to job and they were taking huge increases, right? Especially big tech. There were people offering astronomical amounts of money for developer Engineers, people were jumping from company to company and were seeing that salary really very quickly. What we're starting to see now as we come into 2025 is people are still changing jobs, doing job hop, but the salary increases are significantly less. They're still going up, but not as much as they were. But we're seeing people leave their companies for reasons other than just to jump their salary.
(02:39):
They're leaving for reasons like they have a difficult boss, they don't get along with their co workers, the stress of their role is too high, there's no work life balance. And we're starting to see a more holistic view of what does it mean to find job satisfaction. Right. If we think back to the 80s and 90s, it was more like work hard, get promoted, become a director, make a bunch of money so that you can provide for your family. As went into the 2000s, we started to see a shift of like that plus DEI, mental health, work life balance. Now we're seeing a shift where like people are actually turning down management jobs because they don't want the stress of having to manage other people. Especially a trend we're seeing in Gen Z.
(03:17):
We're seeing individuals who are staying at companies longer if they have a good experience or a good manager, good personal relationships, and seeing people jump much faster than they have historically. Right. Some people are only staying in jobs three to six months in order to prove that they don't like the people they're working with and then they're jumping ships. So we're seeing a lot of volatility that combined with the big tech layoffs and the people we've seen flooding the market in recent months. While the job market is relatively healthy in 2025, especially compared to 2024 and the trends that were seeing towards the end of the year, we are seeing a bigger trend towards people leaving jobs for reasons other than just the salary piece. And a lot of that, in my personal opinion, comes down to your manager.
(04:02):
Managers determine so much of your experience in your job. So I've talked about this before, that the difference between a satisfying job and an unsatisfying job very rarely has anything to do with the actual work that you're doing. And it more often has to do with your manager and how they are effectively leading and guiding the team. It's why people stay at startups which are very stressful, low boundary maintenance type jobs, because they have a really good relationship with their leader and they get to work on cool things versus people who go to big companies. And only stay for three months, even though that company may have a really good reputation.
(04:35):
I've talked about it on previous podcast episodes that to me there's a big difference between the company culture, which I call like the ghost culture, and the culture of an individual portion of the organization or within a team. The reason for that is the bigger the company gets, the further the top leadership is from the actual individuals who are performing the work. When that gap gets larger and larger, the impact that the top of house leadership has on company culture gets smaller and smaller. And the reason for this is because most people's experience comes down to their direct manager and their experience with them. So theoretically you have a great leadership team who is building a strong culture. They want collaboration, they want work, life balance, they want people to disconnect, to volunteer in their communities, yada, whatever it says on the website.
(05:20):
They hire leaders who they believe want the same things, and those leaders hire leaders who they believe want the same things, and so on and so forth. But then the average person who's reporting into a manager or senior manager towards the bottom of that triangle hierarchy, they're experiencing whatever their direct manager is doing as opposed to whatever the CEO established when he first started. So in some companies where culture is really important and employee engagement satisfaction surveys are being reviewed heavily and individuals are being held accountable for the performance of their team, not just in metrics and delivery, but also in job satisfaction, the further you get from the top, you could still have a really good culture.
(05:56):
But what I found and what lots of my clients experience is a company could have a really great ghost culture, but your experience within a team could be really terrible. And that's because the leader has not given been given proper coaching, they haven't been given proper resources, they aren't sure how to provide you feedback or how to guide you, there's no open dialogue, et cetera. So that's where people really start to struggle in their job satisfaction, is they're working for a great company, especially golden ticket companies. These are the companies that I say like if you have them on your resume. Getting a job in the future is pretty simple, right? So think any big tech, any monolith bank, any super huge healthcare, health tech companies, right? Once you have them on your resumes, future job opportunities are a lot easier to align to.
(06:38):
But then within your team, your experience could vary greatly depending on what your leadership is like right now. There's all the other things I talk about on this podcast all the time, about soft skills and self advocacy and advocating for yourself and talking about your work in an effective way and building your executive presence and all of those things are important too to your overall experience. But what do you do when you have a bad boss? So we're gonna talk about a few different types of bad bosses and how I like to handle them. The first bad boss is the Micromanager. If you have been eagerly awaiting the Secrets of the Career Game book, it is officially available for pre order.
(07:15):
This book will go over 36 strategies for building success in your career and honestly is some of my best lessons, best templates and best ways for you to start to get the success and the progression in your career that you deserve. If you do pre order the book, make sure that you email a screenshot of your pre order to that careercoachmail.com in order to be added to our top secret community. In that community, you'll have access to me, as well as 2 live Q& A sessions. When the book launches, you'll also get an extra early copy with the first chapter of the book for you to read ahead, go to Amazon Find Secrets of the career game 36 Strategies for your career.
(07:54):
Go ahead, place your pre order and send us an email and I feel like this gets talked about a lot more than I actually see it occur. In very highly technical positions. A lot of leaders end up being micromanagers, but outside of super technical positions, management I don't feel is really all that common anymore. Just because it got in the early 2000s such a big amount of corporate culture communication was around micromanagement. So if you are working for a leader who is a micromanager, you're not going to like it when I say this, but a lot of improving that situation is going to come down to you, not to them. The reason for this is because you need to be more proactive with your communication to keep them from needing to reach out to you.
(08:38):
So the reason that micromanagers become micromanagers is because they don't want something to drop. That seems obvious, right? They don't want to delegate something to someone on their team, get to the deadline and it's not done because that makes them look bad to leadership. It makes you look bad to leadership. And so what they're trying to do is they're trying to stay on top of what they've assigned you so that by the time it gets to leadership, it's in a really good place and you both look good. Or at least they look good. That's another management type. We'll Talk about. So micromanagement comes from a really good place of really not wanting to make your employees super miserable. It just has a really adverse reaction.
(09:13):
So if you're the employee who is being micromanaged, you need to be doing things like providing regular updates to your leadership of what's going on. You need to be proactively reaching out to them to give them updates on things that might happen. We're going to come back to that. And you need to have some type of template or tracker where they have easy visibility into what you're doing. I know that this sounds like more effort than it's worth, but it is going to improve your experience. So, for example, you could create a Trello or a Jira board where you're tracking all the tasks you're working on with statuses so that your manager can go in and see it at any time. You could have an Excel sheet. You could send a weekly email.
(09:52):
A lot of people on my team I have send me weekly updates of like, hey, this is what's going on in my team. This is what we're working on. These are the accomplishments, frankly, because I'm not a micromanager and I have no idea. Okay? So I need that structure. Right. If you're dealing with a micromanager, proactive updates are going to help head them off at the past because they don't need to reach out to you ask what's going on. They already know. The second thing is that when you are encountering situations where things are going wrong or might go wrong, most people have a tendency to keep those things to ourselves. If we can fix it before my boss finds out, they'll never know something happened. If I can fix it before it becomes an issue, then my boss will never know.
(10:32):
If I can handle this person who is causing a lot of issues and I don't have to bother my boss. That's better. But the reality is, at some point, one of those things is going to slip through the cracks and make its way to your boss without you getting to them first. And that's going to look really, really bad. Okay, I'll give examples. You have a meeting and somebody gets really heated with you, and they're very argumentative, and you guys need to table the meeting to pick back up in another week. You don't tell your boss because you're like, hey, nothing bad happened. It's fine. We're going to pick it up in a week. We have a path forward. That person then goes to your boss and complains about You. Kendall was really difficult in this meeting. We weren't able to get anything done.
(11:07):
We had to push the meeting out a week. That's not great. Right now, your boss has no idea that happened. They're finding out from this other person. Second is we find an issue in a report or in some type of thing. We've produced a campaign, an email, something where we catch that there was a typo or there was a data issue, but it had already been sent out. Most people will either try to recall the message or they'll respond just to the person they sent it to and say, hey, there was an issue in this report. Just want to let you know I've already gone ahead and fixed it here. He you need to let your boss know this is a cya. You go to your boss and you say, hey, I want to give you a heads up. I sent out this report.
(11:40):
I quickly found an issue. I've already remediated the issue and sent it to the person wanted you to be aware in case it came up. That way, if that person goes to your boss and says, hey, Kendall messed up on this report, your boss is not surprised. And they can say, yeah, I understand that. Sorry about that. It sounds like she already fixed it, though, for you. Did you end up getting what you need? They can have your defense instead of coming back to you on the offense. These CYAs are so important, and especially people who are junior in their careers don't do this. They think, oh, I'll just. I'll hide it. Nobody will know, nobody will see.
(12:09):
And then inevitably, it gets to your boss or it gets to your boss's boss, or it gets escalated up some chain, and then you look really bad because you didn't warn your leadership it was coming. Okay, There are things all the time that I will go to my boss and say, hey, there's no action for you on this. I just want you to be aware. I had a conversation with this person. This is how they're thinking about this right now. There's no action for us, but it is something that could come our way in the future, right? Giving an update of increasing demands on capacity. Hey, I had a meeting with this person and it was kind of a difficult conversation. Here's how I handled it.
(12:38):
Want you to be aware the benefit of doing these types of awareness updates is because then your boss is never blindsided. If their boss comes to them and says, hey, I heard Kendall got into an altercation with somebody and your boss has no idea what happened, they're going to be like, oh, my gosh, I'm sorry. I'll definitely talk to her. I can't believe that happened. Then they're coming at you. They're very offensive, they're upset, they're coming at you with all this different evidence, and you're like, no, that's not what happened at all. But you didn't defend yourself proactively. So the big thing with a micromanager is that you need to proactively inform what are you working on, what's the status, what are the roadblocks, what are potential risks, what are issues that have occurred?
(13:14):
They need to know those things proactively from you in order to be able to trust you in return. So it comes to a micromanagement, a lot of it's actually going to be on you to update them. Now, I'm not saying that this will necessarily get them to ask for less updates. Generally it does. I've seen this work in a million different situations where generally they back off, they start to trust you more. But what I can tell you is it will make it way less friction to work with them. They'll start to trust you more, they'll give you more tasks, they'll micromanage you less, they'll take your word for things more often over time. That's the way to improve that relationship. The second type of boss is a type of boss who takes credit for your work.
(13:51):
So sometimes this boss and the micromanagement boss are the same boss, which is why we're going to go from one to the other, where you do all this work, you're creating all of this stuff, you send it to your boss, you never see it again. And yet your boss took it up the chain to 52 million people, and you never hear about it again. It can be really frustrating and it can really hurt your visibility, your career progression, your ability to self advocate. It does a lot of things with that type of boss. The best thing you can do for your career is build your network tree. So I've talked about your network tree before on other podcast episodes. If you're not watching the video, you can't see my hands doing this weird tree situation that it's doing.
(14:23):
But basically, your boss and your boss's boss are the tree trunk of your network at any job, because ultimately they do have a lot of impact on your success in your career. But the branches with all the leaves, all those other relationships you build, that is actually what makes your tree flourish. That's actually what's going to help you Grow. A tree cannot grow if it has no leaves and it can't get any sunlight and therefore cannot grow. You're all following me now. Okay, it was analogy made sense in my head. All right? When you are building relationships with your network, it needs to be broader than your tree trunk. Meaning your boss and your skip level cannot be the only people with whom you communicate. You need to build relationships with your boss's peers. You need to build relationships with your peers.
(15:04):
You need to build relationships with the influencers across your organization. They might be your same level. They might be more junior, they might be more senior, but when they talk, everybody else shuts up and listens. Great. You need to be building relationships with this broader tree in order to get credit for the work that you're doing. Especially when you work for a stealing credit boss. Right? Because if you're doing the work and then you're talking to your boss's peer and you're like, oh, it's been so interesting, this work we've been doing on AI. I've really been leaning in. I feel like I've learned a lot about prompts. How's your team using it? Yada, yada.
(15:33):
And then that peer ends up in a meeting with your boss where your boss is presenting their strategy on AI and they go, oh, well, have you talked to Kendall about this? Says, well, yes, Kendall's aware. And say, okay, great. Because I was talking to her the other day. It seems like she's got some great ideas on prompt work. Is that included in this? Right. They're not doing it intentionally in defense of you, but it's going to appear that way in that group where you are not present. It's the same thing if you're building relationships with your skip and your boss goes to your skip and then presents one of your ideas, and your skip is like, interesting. Kendall brought this up in our last one one. She must be involved in this.
(16:03):
Then it doesn't come down to your boss giving you credit because you are getting credit through all of these other connections and relationships. That is what's really important, because we will all have times in our career where the company operates in a more bureaucratic way. And it's not our thing to present. The audience is too senior. We don't have the full context. There might be things going on that are confidential. Right. There will always be times your career, no matter your level of seniority, where you are not the person to present your ideas. The way you get credit for those ideas is you Build relationships with the other individuals who are going to be in that room and as a result, they know you did the work.
(16:40):
Now, what I do not mean is you build a relationship with your boss's boss and your boss's peer and you're like, steve stole credit for my work and ran off with my presentation. No, that's not what I'm talking about. But I'm talking about, hey, Steve, I'm working on this project on AI. I'd love some of your feedback. Here are some of the things I'm thinking, is there anything you can see that I'm missing? And then when that presentation goes up, they're like, that's what Kendall did. She used my idea. Great, right? You're getting credit in a more subtle and influential way as opposed to waiting for your boss to go, kendall made this slide in a presentation. Now the best bosses are going to give credit, right?
(17:15):
Anytime anybody on my team does any analysis and it gets sent to my leadership, I mention, hey, so and so on my team did this work. They did a great job. Here's my takeaways. Right? But a lot of bosses don't do that. Not because they're cruel or because they want to take credit, but mostly because they're just not thinking about it and they're thinking, oh, I'm going to give them credit when it comes to their year end review. And so they're negligent on accident. Okay? It's a little bit of like incompetent curse for each manager. So if you're working for a boss who is stealing credit, who's not inviting you to the meetings, who's not giving you the chance to advocate for yourself, you need to build those broader relationships so that you have other advocate advocacy paths.
(17:51):
Right now this can help you internally in a lot of different ways because also that's how you're going to get your next job. Odds are a boss who's never going to give you credit is also probably never going to advocate for you and promote you. Generally there's exceptions, but generally that's the way it's going to go. So at some point you're going to want a higher level role or you're going to want to do something different. Now you've got all these other relationships in the company that you can look for. Internal moves, right? Jumping back to how I started the episode, I think people believe that when you are unhappy in your role, the only option you have is to jump ship. And that's not true.
(18:21):
You can move internally you can try out different teams, you can work with different leaders, but in order to do that, you have to have relationships. Because what everybody gets afraid of is they think, well, if I find an internal job that I want and I go apply for it, my boss is going to know long before you apply for that internal job. You should have already talked to the hiring manager and made sure that they're a good culture fit for you. You should have already scoped out the people on the team, asked them what they like and dislike about their job, gotten a feel for if it's going to be a good fit for you. You should have already talked to the recruiter and expressed interest before you apply.
(18:54):
That way, by the time we formally apply in the system, everybody's already on our camp. They already think that we're great. They already want us to be successful in this new role. And then they alert your boss. The mistake people make is they're applying to these jobs cold in the portal because they want to get out of their team and their Boss is getting 50 notifications a day that Kendall's trying to jump ship. Don't do that, it's dumb. So that's a micromanagement boss. That's a boss that's taking credit for you. I'm going to talk lastly about a boss who plays politics. Now we all play politics, right? Every boss on the planet has to. It is part of the job. And I'm sorry, if you hate corporate politics and you want to get promoted, you better learn to play it.
(19:32):
You don't have to be the best, but you can't be the worst. It is a dog eat dog world out there. I've talked about this on the episodes before. I am not a fan of corporate politics. I do not enjoy it. I do not find it fun. However, I have learned to be very good at it because I am not going to let corporate politics be the reason that my career stops. And that's the attitude that you have to have in order to be successful in a lot of companies. You don't have to enjoy it. You don't have to be cutthroat and inauthentic and like crazy, right? Let's not take this too far, but you need to be able to read a room, know who's playing politics, know what to tell people and what not to tell people and how to be careful.
(20:07):
So if you are in a situation where your boss is playing a lot of politics inter team. So I'm not talking about your boss is playing politics with this other division and trying to steal their scope so that you guys can grow up. None of that, okay? That is a totally separate episode. But if your boss in your team is playing politics, this could look like pitting internal team members against each other. Like assigning you both the same project and then picking who's best or oh, you can't do this. So and so is working on it. If your boss is giving you feedback that they're telling other people who are your peers, it's different. If your boss gives you feedback about somebody who reports to you, that's a situation where like they're helping you coach that person different.
(20:47):
But if they're coming to you and saying, your peer, Susie, she makes me crazy. Can you believe she wore that skirt? That is not appropriate. Not appropriate. Okay, so if they are gossiping internally about feedback they're giving other team members, if they are pitting you two against each other or you four against each other, they're making it a competitive exercise. And if they are hiding information from you that is critical for your job success, your boss is playing entertain politics. And here's what that looks like for you. For you, it's a lot of confusion. Hey, I've been asked to produce this analysis, but I have no idea why. I don't know the audience, I don't know where I'm supposed to get the data. I don't know what the purpose is. And then when you fail, your boss is like, I knew it. Right?
(21:31):
Okay, that's not cool. Or it looks like you hating one of your peers because your boss is constantly putting you in a position where you're having to compete against one another. Right. If that's you, if you're in competition with your peers, the only way this gets better is you start spending a lot more one one time with your peers. Nobody wants to do it because everybody already hates their peers because their boss has now poisoned the well and now everybody dislikes each other. Right? I get it, I get it. I feel you. You need to be spending one one time with your pe. It is the only way you're going to escape that politics spin. Because what's going to happen is you're going to talk to Susie and say, you know, what are you working on? Is there anything you need support?
(22:12):
Is there anything that my team's not doing that you need? And they're going to go, no, but my boss just assigned me this big project on AI Now I have to go focus on. You're going to go, oh, interesting. I was talking to Steve this morning and he mentioned something about AI. Are you running point on that? And they're like, well, I was going to. I think it makes more sense for it to live in my team. And you're like, cool, yeah, you run point on that. I'll let Steve know that you and I connected and that you're going to run this that way. I'm not stepping on your toes now. We're building trust now. We're building good relationship now. She's going to be willing to step out of your space when something else comes out in the future.
(22:39):
Now you're willing to step out of her space and give her scope and you're able to function much more effectively. I've had a client come to me where this is the exact situation that was happening. They finally started repairing that relationship. They all got into a room. Boss assigned person A a task that very clearly should have lived with person B. And for the first time in years, person A goes, I actually really don't think that's my space. Isn't that person B's Tell me that's not a better experience for you as the individual than getting sucked into politics with your boss. Right. So the only way to overcome that is more time with your peers. All right. If your boss is gossiping about other people on the team, the only way around that is to shut that down. Right. It is uncomfortable.
(23:22):
But to say, you know, I haven't really seen that with this person, but it seems like something that you guys will probably talk about in your one one, let your boss know that you are not that person that they should be gossiping with. Now. Don't be like, don't gossip to me about Steve. Right? That's not going to end well for you. But we could say, like, hey, you know, I haven't noticed Steve doing that, but I'm sure it's something that you're going to bring up in your one one and then change topics. Redirect. Hey, I needed your help with this, or, hey, I wanted to bring up this thing. Hey, do you have time to give me advice on this repurpose? Right? So that's politics, where they're pitting you guys against each other. They're starting to gossip about other people in the team.
(23:56):
None of that is healthy. Right. There are situations where I have given my leadership team, hey, I want to let you know, this is a situation with somebody one of your teams. Here's how I'm handling it. Because they need to be Aware so they don't say the wrong thing or they don't misstep. There are times where you will go to your leaders and tell them things about people on their team. There is no situation where you should go to one leader and go, well, your peer didn't do this very well. I don't want you to make the same mistake. No, absolutely no. So these are three different types of difficult bosses. They can make your situation really negative. As I mentioned, if you're in these, there are certain things you can do to mitigate the problem and make it more survivable. Right.
(24:34):
So that you can last until you can find that next opportunity. Now, an internal transfer is always going to be a shorter time period to land that next role than if you're looking externally. Especially with a job market that's really volatile like today is, internal may be a better fit for you. So when you're in survival mode, we're going to look for internal opportunities first because it's going to be faster. Then we're going to look for external opportunities, starting with our network. People who've worked for our same company or who worked with us in the past who've moved on to some other company. We're going to pick their brain, get to know them, build a relationship with them so that we can then potentially ask for a referral. And then you're going to go cold to market where you're just applying for jobs.
(25:13):
That is the stack rank of how you're going to get out of a difficult situation. But I would say when clients come to me, there's probably about 30% of the time where I'm like, this is really bad and you need to move on to something else. But I would say that there's 50% of the time where I'm like, hey, this is actually more of like a managing up issue. Or we could learn a skill, we can effectively navigate it, we can improve it. We just need the right tool. So make sure that you're assessing your situation holistically and without a dire influence so that you can determine is this actually something that's holding me back or is this something that I can manage well moving forward? Hopefully you guys liked today's episode.
(25:53):
If you did, go ahead and rate us 5 stars, leave any questions that you have for me in the comments below. But additionally, make sure that you have pre ordered your copy of Secrets of the Career Game. My book is coming out May 13th. We're super excited about it. If you send me a picture of that receipt, then I will send you a early chapter and get you added to a secret group where we're talking about it. Additionally, make sure you're following me on Instagram at that career coach underscore and send me the word tracker if you are interested in getting a free accomplishments tracker that will help you advocate for yourself better with your boss. Otherwise, thank you guys so much for tuning in and we will chat again next week.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.