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There was a gust from the overhead duct, and my project manager certification floated onto my keyboard—no amount of Fun-Tak and tape could keep it attached to the walls of my cubicle. At the same moment, a meeting invite appeared on my screen, accompanied by Outlook’s distinctive doink—another “emergency” department meeting. As the pop-up slowly faded, I noted with a sinking feeling the words “conflicts with another appointment in your calendar.” That would be my long-delayed interview with Irving, the EVP of Finance Europe.

I wasn’t surprised that my boss—the Commodore, as we called him—had, at the last second, decided he needed my presence. He had a sixth sense for when one of his underlings was attempting to further his career. Once, when I was sitting at the same lunch table as another VP, he had called my cell phone with a desperate request for a document I’d e-mailed him two weeks before.

Now the Commodore had sunk me again. This would be the third time in as many months that I’d had to cancel on Irving. I didn’t deserve to be treated like this. I wouldn’t put up with it any longer. I’d quit. If it weren’t for the new baby. And my adjustable-rate mortgage payments.

It had been much easier to flee bad bosses when I was without responsibility. I recalled one episode when I’d gleefully resigned by tossing my collection of awarded “empowerment beans” (actually just Red Hots) at a terrified manager who’d micromanaged me. But now I was 40 in a rotten economy. Quitting wasn’t an option.

I stood up and rubbed my shoes on my pants legs, polishing them for my trip to 33, the executive floor. I gave one last go at reattaching my certificate, using a pushpin and excessive force, but the pin broke. Admitting defeat again, I raced for the elevator.

I was pondering how I would explain yet another cancellation to Irving—and whether a stapler might work on my cube wall—when I stepped out on 33 and directly into Irving, knocking his briefcase to the ground.

“I, ah, have, um—” I began, while starting to help him.

“Meeting with the leadership committee,” he said, cutting me off. “Can’t stick around.” I saw my project management dashboard among the papers he was gathering from the floor.

“So we should reschedule today’s meeting?” I asked, relieved.

“Today?” he said. He was wearing a tie patterned with Shrek and coffee stains. For an EVP, he seemed to be out of touch with the executive floor dress code. And he seemed to have forgotten our appointment. But if he was taking my dashboard to the leadership committee, who was I to complain?

“I’ll have Irma set up something,” he said and sprinted into an elevator heading to 34—the only floor more important than 33.

Hero of the Shoelace Incident

“Nice of you to join us, David,” the Commodore said as he walked in—late, as usual—a few steps behind me. I edged my way around the table to the only empty chair.

We called him the Commodore because he was ex-military. Not Navy SEAL or Green Beret, although he would gladly have let you believe that. He had run uniform supply. His favorite story was about how he had “rescued” a general by providing emergency shoelaces. He had a pair of laces framed with a thank-you signed “Capt. Mulroney.” Nobody asked why the “general” signed his name “Capt.”

The Commodore’s appearance was that of a fit person gone soft and then softer. To conserve energy, he’d roll in his chair around his office; out to the desk of his secretary, Helen; even down the hall. His voice sounded like toads being strangled at midnight. It haunted my dreams, and whenever I bent to retie my shoelaces, I could hear him croak his catchphrase: “We’ve got a lot to do.”

“We’ve got a lot to do,” he said, as if reading my mind. “So, Steve?”

This was the emergency? The kind of meeting where he went around the room, person by person, and had us update him with information he’d already received in our regular reports? I groaned quietly.

Steve, whom I’d known for years, rattled through his status report in two and a half minutes with several interjections of “as you have approved” and “as you asked us to do”—thus preempting further inquiry. It was one of the methods Steve had developed to manage the unmanageable Commodore.

The next nine participants did their best to be as concise. Occasionally one would misstep, and the Commodore would ask, “And what led you to that conclusion?”

Marissa was near the end, and I roused myself for whatever bullets she might shoot my way. Just that morning she had screeched at me over the phone, “Where are my metrics? You know Thaddeus wants them!” She liked to call the Commodore by his first name, which I found unsettling—as if he were just another member of our after-work volleyball team.

I’d explained to Marissa that the Commodore had specifically directed me to consolidate her numbers with those of other departments. “My numbers?” she’d shot back, arching her eyebrows way up in a manner that made her tight bun bob. “My numbers? These are the statistics on shipping costs for the whole global enterprise worldwide!” I thought better of pointing out that “global” and “worldwide” were synonymous and that “whole” was redundant. She was clearly under stress.

A Hug for the Intern

Now Marissa was smoothing my latest report over and over on the conference room table like a psychopath. “I’ve been working on the reports for shipping,” she said, “and I’d like to go over their presentation in the monthly dashboard.” Her way of dealing with the Commodore was to be insanely cranky—the better to keep him from asking her to do anything. “We really need to tweak the reporting to improve metrics in our enterprisewide facilitation of data gathering for global.”

I thought, Hey, did she just take a swipe at me in front of everyone?

“Excellent,” the Commodore said. “But we’ve got to keep this meeting moving. I’ve got an important announcement.”

He was skipping Marissa and, by default, me. I didn’t know whether to be offended or thankful that his intense dislike of public confrontation saved me from having to defend myself.

“Today I’d like to recognize an employee whose contribution to this department’s success has been significant and is an example to all of us of the results you can get from dedication and resolve.” He held up a plaque.

Me? Could it be me? My dashboard report had been well received by Irving.

“I think you know who you are.”

Maybe the Commodore hadn’t praised me before in order to save it for a public commendation.

“Lorelei, please stand up.”

I coughed too loudly. Lorelei? The intern?

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“Lorelei has done the unimaginable. She completely reorganized my filing cabinets and—quite professionally, I might add—labeled new binders so that I’m able to find everything I need.”

I was sure everyone was thinking the same things: He’d dragged us all here for a summer intern whom he’d hired because her father was the head of purchasing. Those binders were a job that Helen had done most of the work on. An award for an intern for three-hole punching was creepy—just like the uncomfortable-to-watch bear hug he gave her before he handed her the plaque.

Another quarter hour was spent with the Commodore’s reminders that “we all have big responsibilities” and “we’ve got a lot to do,” interwoven with a couple of shoelace references. Then we were free to go.

As I got up, the Commodore shouted, “David, come by my office before you go.” It was 5:30 PM. Stoop-shouldered, I went to wait. Of course, he’d vanished. I’d once spent two hours waiting by the Commodore’s candy dish (for other executives only) before Helen came by and told me she’d seen him off to the airport hours earlier.

“David?” It was Irma, Irving’s assistant.

“Yes,” I said, trying not to stray too far from the mini-Snickers.

“Irving apologizes. He has to head out to Zurich tonight, but he wanted you to have this.” She placed an inter-office mail envelope in my hand. The string had been wound tightly around the button and taped over for security.

“Not Pink. Just Lighter Red.”

“What’s in your hand?” The Commodore had snuck up behind me in his rolling chair.

“Ah, er, a medical form from HR.”

“Your back’s not acting up again, is it?” he said, swiveling his torso as he rolled toward his office.

I recalled how he’d handled my back injury: The doctor had advised injections and physical therapy. The Commodore had given me a heat pack and a “heads-up” that “people have been talking” about how much I was working from home.

I shook my head.

“Well, good. We need you in top form. We’ve got a lot to do.” He flipped through the pages of my latest dashboard. “Several things.”

I took out a notepad.

“First, the red is too strong—too negative. Make it lighter.”

He had complained that the last version was too pink—not masculine enough. Sometimes it helped to remind him of his prior decisions. “More pink?”

“No, not pink. Just lighter red.” And sometimes it made no difference.

He flipped a few more pages. “I thought you were going to make this better.”

I tightened my jaw. His exact instruction had been “Make it sexier.” How do you make a PowerPoint project management dashboard “sexy”?

“On page 3 the charts are 3-D now,” I replied.

He examined them. “Tim’s group puts six charts per page. Can we do that?”

That would mean 6-point type. Not even a hawk could read 6-point type. But my coping mechanism was capitulation. “I’ll put that together for you.”

“And here, on the appendix. Is it ‘appendixes’ or ‘appendices’?”

“I think it’s either.”

He laughed. “I think you’ll find it’s ‘append-ee-cee-ss.’”

I nodded. He enjoyed nothing better than being more knowledgeable about something than an “expert.” Since I was the one in the department with an English degree, he spent a lot of time “fixing” my grammar and usage.

“Good,” he said, and leaned back. The six casters on his chair desperately struggled to maintain contact with the floor. “Now, I’m just thinking that we haven’t had a performance-review discussion in a while. Where do you want to be in five years?”

As I contemplated how to respond to this giant pothole of a query that had come out of nowhere—or, more likely, from an annual HR reminder—he turned his attention to his e-mail and began typing.

“Well, I’ve found my time here—”

“Steve!” He slammed the wall with an open palm. “Steve! What’s the number of Tim in Finance?”

I knew from experience that when the Commodore wall-banged, Steve would head out and then come back from the opposite direction a while later, usually with a fresh coffee, knock on the Commodore’s door, and say, “Do you need anything?” More coping.

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“So I would like—” I said slowly.

“Okay, so I’m going to need that dashboard before tomorrow’s meeting with Tim.”

“I’ll get it to you right away,” I said.

“Good,” he said, and picked up his coat. “You know what I want.”

Escape Route or Dead End?

“He didn’t leave already, did he?” Steve asked, a cup of steaming java in his hand.

“Like a manager about to have a personnel discussion.”

Steve nodded. “What’s the envelope?”

I tore off the tape and string—future users of this interoffice envelope would no longer be able to “recycle if possible.”

“It’s an offer letter from Irving.”

Steve raised his eyebrows.

I read it quickly. But wait—this couldn’t be right. “It says level 10. I’m already level 10.” I handed it to Steve.

“Yep, a horizontal move,” he said. “Same pay, same level, just not working for the Commodore.”

I couldn’t believe it. “Irving’s an EVP. He can’t have a level 10 working for him, can he?”

“Apparently he can. And you should take it.” Steve swigged his coffee. “Whatever Irving is like, he’s got to be better than the Commodore.”

“And maybe he’ll help me get promoted later,” I said, trying to be optimistic.

“Maybe. But if you don’t take it, you’ll never find out.”

Steve returned to his office, and I wandered aimlessly into Helen’s, pondering what it would be like to get away from my tormentor.

“Lost?” Helen was typing away on her keyboard, headset on and instant messages beeping on her screen.

“Sorry, just thinking.”

“About Irving?” There were no secrets among assistants. She typed a few more words. “So, is it a good offer?”

“It’s a lateral move.”

She tilted her head and looked into the hall to see if anyone was coming. “Don’t take it.”

“But you know how difficult it is to be here.”

“I know that they pay me. And I know that if you don’t get more money when you change jobs, then you’ll never get a raise.”

“But maybe Irving is different.”

“When you’ve been here as long as I have, ‘different’ is a relative term. Do you remember when Thaddeus first got here?”

It was true—he’d been different then. He’d given several employees gifts of shoelaces and polish.

“He was expecting a promotion to the 34th floor. Then his boss got moved to Rangoon, and Lisa took the top job.”

I realized she was right: When the Commodore had lost hope for his own career, he’d become the downward-focused micromanager who loomed over our days.

“Bosses come and go,” she said. “In the meantime, it’s a job. Do it well and go home. I do, and so should you.”

Suddenly we heard the sound of footsteps in the hall, and Marissa strode in. I quickly excused myself, explaining that I had to work on a revised dashboard.

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“Make sure shipping gets a full page!” she shouted after me.

That night, as I put the baby to sleep, I thought: Should I stay with a known bully? Or go to Irving, who seemed better—but perhaps only because I hadn’t yet worked for him. And what about that offer? It implied that Irving wanted my dashboard, not me, and as a result I wouldn’t get any more pay or respect. • • •

At 5:30 Monday morning, my phone rang.

“David, why haven’t you answered my e-mails?” the Commodore said.

“I, uhhh…”

“Don’t worry about it. I just wanted you to know I was looking through your latest dashboard again. It’s good work. Really good.”

A compliment? Even at this hour it was nice to hear.

“Can you be here at 6:00 to walk me through it?”

Gini Graham Scott ([email protected]) is a consultant, motivational speaker, and the author of numerous books, including Want It, See It, Get It! (Amacom, 2009) and A Survival Guide for Working with Bad Bosses (Amacom, 2006).

David should stay where he is, at least for now. The lateral move that Irving offers sounds like a dead end, and taking the job would be the equivalent of announcing, “This is the level where I’m supposed to be.” Besides, there are a lot of crazy bosses in the world, and the Shrek-bedecked Irving sounds a bit eccentric, to say the least. Furthermore, the Commodore may see a lateral move within the organization as a personal slight; David could find that the bad blood of their relationship trails him to his new position. If he absolutely can’t tolerate working with the Commodore any longer, he should look for an opportunity outside the company—though that may not be a viable option in this economy.

So how does David make the best of a bad situation?

First, he should, in a subtle and nonconfrontational way, try to get the Commodore to change some of his crazy-making behavior. One approach would be to initiate an exchange that focused on David’s work rather than on his boss’s actions. In a memo or a face-to-face meeting, David could describe what he thinks his boss wants from him. If the Commodore confirmed these expectations, David could state his desire to better meet them and offer some ideas on how that might be achieved. Changes in his working relationship with the Commodore could be implicit in these suggestions. David might say, for example, something like “I believe my dashboards would benefit from your high-level strategic guidance on how to maximize their impact throughout the organization”—and, by implication, would also benefit from less second-guessing about font color.

David should also build on the relationship he seems to have with Steve. An informal support network of colleagues who are all suffering under a bad boss is one of the best ways to help everyone survive. It should start small—Steve and David could each invite one coworker they trusted to join them for a drink after work—and grow slowly. (Marissa might not be an immediate candidate for membership.) And this network should be more than a gripe group. In addition to giving people a chance to blow off steam, the group ideally would generate collective coping strategies for dealing with the difficult supervisor.

If David decides to stay in his job for the time being, it’s important that he acknowledge the decision, so that he can mentally and emotionally accept the situation instead of feeling victimized and constantly frustrated. Acceptance isn’t a sign of defeat; it’s a strategic move. It generates a more positive attitude, which causes others to respond to you more positively. For David, it could actually lead to a more enjoyable relationship with the Commodore—and would certainly yield a better recommendation from his boss when he finally does decide to move on.

Acceptance is easier if the relationship you have with your boss doesn’t dominate your life. Make a special effort to find pleasures outside of work that you can look forward to during the day. Even seemingly trivial actions—such as adding favorite pictures or fun objects to your work space—can offer moments of relief from the stress of dealing with your boss. Who knows? An amusing photo on your desk might elicit a laugh or serve as a conversation starter sometime when he or she stops by to offer advice—or criticism. In short, if you decide to stick it out in your current job, find little ways to make staying on more enjoyable.

Brad Gilbreath, a former human resources manager at Ford and Westinghouse, is an assistant professor of management at the Hasan School of Business at Colorado State University-Pueblo.

David needs to think about more than his career; he needs to think about his health. Much of my research has focused on the effect that supervisors have on the people who work for them. With a few qualifications, I’d advise David to seize this opportunity to escape from his boss.

Sure, he needs to perform some due diligence. Through safe and informal channels, he should quickly learn what he can about Irving’s reputation as a boss and his standing in the organization. (One existing piece of evidence: When David ran into him coming out of the elevator, Irving didn’t lose his temper—which may more than counterbalance that stained Shrek necktie.) But unless David gets seriously negative reports on Irving, he should accept the offer. He will be surprised at how good it feels to work for even a mediocre boss after suffering under a bad one.

Although most organizations offer wellness programs and other initiatives aimed at employees, it’s amazing how few of them pay attention to the health effects of their supervisors’ behavior. A colleague and I studied employees in several work sectors and found a strong correlation between bosses’ behavior and their employees’ depression and other psychiatric problems. In fact, supervisors’ behavior was more strongly associated with employees’ psychological well-being than was social support from family members, friends, or coworkers. In a study by other researchers, nurses with difficult bosses had dramatically higher blood pressure throughout the day than those with considerate and empathetic bosses.

Thaddeus manifests some of the negative management traits that correlate with job stress—such as creating confusion by failing to communicate needed information—and none of the positive ones. Yes, he’s a bit laughable, even pathetic. But as David’s boss, he undoubtedly affects David in ways that he may not even be aware of.

That said, let me take David to task, as well. It is easy to make fun of someone like Thaddeus. But such caricaturing can create a distorted picture of reality and put you in a permanently negative frame of mind. Some humorous harping about the boss can ease stress, but it can get out of hand. David risks replicating one of a boss’s worst sins: treating other people like two-dimensional sitcom characters instead of fellow human beings.

It’s clear that Thaddeus isn’t particularly likable, but I suspect he knows that. This, along with having been passed over for promotion, undoubtedly fuels some of his annoying behavior. Without being sycophantic, David might have tried to get to know his boss a bit better. For example, if the shoelace incident truly was the highlight of Thaddeus’s career, David might have used one of his retellings of the story to find out something new about it. I wonder, for example, if Thaddeus would have stopped repeating the tale if David had at some point asked what, exactly, Thaddeus did to save the day. In any case, this humane expression of interest certainly wouldn’t have hurt David’s relationship with his boss.

In the end, though, David should accept Irving’s offer. Working for Thaddeus is clearly taking a toll on his psychological well-being—his boss even haunts his dreams—and probably on his physical health, as well. The strain is undoubtedly spilling over into David’s home life, too. Research indicates that employees’ work-related stress has a measurable negative effect on their families. The strongest reason for David to get a new boss may be to protect his wife and child from Thaddeus’s influence.

Lauren Sontag ([email protected]), a former head of development at JPMorgan Chase, is the president of Sontag Associates, a consulting firm specializing in executive coaching, leadership development, and talent management.

Before offering advice to David, I’d want to clarify my understanding of his situation by getting to know him a bit better; to be honest, some of his behaviors and perspectives seem a little extreme. Most people at some time in their careers run into a boss with whom they can’t get along. But it sounds like David has a rocky history with his supervisors.

For one thing, he seems unwilling to discuss with a supervisor the small things that bother him—so they turn into bigger things, and when he finally reacts, he’s out of control. (Throwing Red Hots is hardly professional behavior.) Has David ever explained to Thaddeus, diplomatically but directly, that he’d prefer not to be called at 5:30 in the morning except for a work crisis? Some good leaders I’ve known have done rude things—such as repeatedly taking phone calls in the middle of in-person conversations with me—but our interactions improved when I politely expressed to them my frustration with their behavior. Learning how to have difficult yet important conversations with your boss in a socially acceptable way is a critical career skill.

Another red flag: David’s discomfort with the fact that Marissa calls the Commodore by his first name. In business today, at least in the United States, you don’t call even the CEO of a Fortune 500 company Mr. So-and-So.

Now let’s look at David’s options. By learning how to set boundaries, David might be able to improve his relationship with Thaddeus, who seems at least to appreciate the quality of his work. But even if things improve, staying in his current position, rather than making the lateral move that Irving is offering, may not be David’s best career option. It may, in fact, represent the dead end that Helen warns David of. That’s because Thaddeus himself seems to be stalled in his career. And if your boss isn’t moving up, you aren’t either.

Irving’s offer, by contrast, may eventually lead to advancement. Of course, David needs to do some intelligence gathering: He needs to find out from others what Irving is like to work for, and to find out from Irving himself what it will take to be successful in the job and what growth opportunities it offers.

But the lateral nature of the move is obscuring what may be the primary appeal of the offer for David. Because Irving is at a higher level in the organization than Thaddeus, presumably with several levels of people reporting to him, the new job should give David more room to maneuver and advance. Irving has direct reports at a higher level than where David is now, which doesn’t appear to be true for Thaddeus. In short, Irving doesn’t have to get promoted in order for David to get promoted. And that’s important, especially in the current environment, in which bosses’ potential for advancement is reduced because of companies’ reluctance to move people—especially senior people—up the salary scale.

Let me suggest a third option for David—one that people too rarely think about. He should consider carving out a new role for himself, one that capitalizes on his expertise in creating useful project-management dashboards. Irving needs David’s skills, and so does Thaddeus. Why not propose to them that he set up a dashboard “center of excellence” that—with the addition of a junior employee who would report to David—could meet the needs of both of them more cost-effectively. This would give David his promotion—and offer him the new challenge of being a good boss himself.

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