Navigation

Key Books

When Smart People Work For Dumb Bosses

Problem Bosses: Who They Are and How to Deal With Them

The Bully at Work: What You Can Do to Stop the Hurt and Reclaim Your Dignity on the Job

[Back to message list] [Reply to this topic] [Start a new topic]

Inconsistent and Incoherent

Posted by: bradburyesqu
Date: 10/4/2009 11:46:40 AM

I’ve had all kinds of good and bad bosses, but I’ve never had anything like the man I am dealing with today. As you read this keep in mind that I work in a professional office environment. (in IT to be exact)

First off his communications skills are near none existent. He makes up his own words as he talks. He contradicts himself while he’s talking, often in back to back statements. He will ask you a question and then as you start to talk right over you when you try to anwser. He doesn’t listen to what others are saying and just continues on with the thoughts he’s having. Often I find my self staring at him waiting to replay just incase he’s going to start talking again. Even after a question.

He has this delusions grandeur and thinks he’s the best manager in the world. He will often get into systems and make changes and meddle with other technical details bringing down large portions of systems or entire servers. He will then either call me (or others) to fix them professing he has no idea what happened or he will just walk away and leave it to be found by someone else. In the second situation I’m not sure if he’s hiding or if he doesn’t even realize the havoc he’s caused.

To make matters worse when there is a system outage he will out right lie to upper management about what happened. Or in his own eyes distort the truth. He then expects us to do the same. More over he expects us to be able to predict his lies and tell the same thing he did. And he gets upset if we tell people to talk to him about what happened.

Where I believe a managers job is to break down walls on projects my boss goes out of his way to put them up. Any project that wasn’t his idea he will try to sabotage in the most passive aggressive manor possible. Finding excused to take resources away from the project and even argue about the simplest things, like building a new server. I tend to be very results oriented. I feel like I fail every day do to the behavior of my boss.

The final straw came last week. A couple months ago I was called into his office for not delivering on his requests in the way he wants them done. So I’ve started more questions in an attempt to understand what is going on inside his head. Friday he asked me to write an SOP. When I asked him what the objective of the SOP was he responded with “I need you to be more imaginative if I have to figure out every detail I might as well just do it my self.”

I just bought a house last year and am getting married in October, I really need this job and now isn’t the best time to find a new one in my area. I’m not even sure how to handle this any more. To make matters worse my VP knows what this guy is like but won’t do anything about it because he is friends with my bosses girl friend. I’m beyond frustrated.

To reply to this topic or add a comment, just complete our 20-second registration process which is free and confidential. If you have already registered, you need to log in.

[top]

Login

Registration is confidential, free, and has a number of benefits.