Ask a Manager: My Lovely But Bumbling Boss Is Driving Me Crazy

[minoanmiss]

I’ve worked for a small educational institution for two years. The job is an excellent fit for me, and I don’t consider moving on.

The person I report to is the head teacher, who has worked here for 20 years. She is a gifted teacher and is justifiably loved by her pupils and their parents. As an educator I greatly respect her, and I’ve learned a lot from her.


The problem is, she is so scatterbrained and disorganized that I’m starting to lose my mind! And it just gets worse all the time. In the past few weeks alone she has:

– lost the office key

– lost the supply closet key

– lost a bunch of application papers containing sensitive personal information (we spent hours searching for those papers, and in the end had to ask the applicants to resubmit them)

– lost her parking ticket, thus trapping everyone else at the gate for half an hour and incurring a hefty fine

– somehow forgot to show up for an in-house meeting that she herself had initiated

– somehow got her coat zipper stuck, making everyone else late to leave by 15 minutes until she managed to disentangle herself

Stuff like this happens all the time. To her credit, she’s always very apologetic and never blames other people or circumstances for these mishaps. Everybody else manages to shrug it off, but they don’t work with her as closely as I do and don’t suffer the effects as much as I do.

Recently she has been hinting that she wants me to make up for her shortcomings by somehow smoothing the way for her, by providing daily reminders. That is NOT the job I signed up for, and I absolutely refuse to do it (thanks for teaching me about boundaries!).

I keep hoping that she’ll get her act together, but I doubt it will happen any time soon.

Considering that I’ll probably be working under her for the next decade until she retires, is this something that I’ll just have to learn to live with? Or should I leave this otherwise wonderful job because of an incompetent boss?

Yes, it sounds like if you want to stay at this job for a while, you’ve got to find a way to live with it.

There might be some practical steps you can take that will mitigate some of this, but not all of it. For example, you could advocate for someone other than your boss having a copy of the office key and supply closet key. But there are no mitigation measures you can put in place against losing her parking tickets or getting her zippers stuck.

If you were her assistant, you’d have more room to step in, and you could do things like remind her of meetings or create automated reminders and be more active in tracking paperwork that comes into her possession. But that’s not your job and you shouldn’t do that work. (The exception to that is you’re in a position where it wouldn’t be weird to have that type of involvement, even though you’re not her assistant, and you’d find it satisfying/enjoyable and would see some professional benefit from it. There are some jobs like that, where you can make yourself indispensable and become a sort of high-level advisor. But from your letter, it sounds like the opposite of what you want, so don’t get sucked into doing it.)

So assuming your boss isn’t going to get her act together and you can’t get her act together for her, can you live with the situation for however many years you’re both there, knowing that it’s not going to change?

Sometimes it’s easier to that if you can mentally reframe what’s happening to see it as funny rather than irritating. Can you see her as an amusingly bumbling character from a book or movie? An Inspector Clouseau? (Piglet from Winnie the Pooh also keeps coming to mind.) Can you find a way to just find it entertaining? I don’t mean to downplay the very real inconveniences she is causing you and others … but when you don’t have the power to change that, humor can be a weirdly effective way to cope.

If you can’t really get there and you feel like jumping out of your skin every day, I do think you should probably consider whether it makes sense to stay — both because that’s terrible for your quality of life and because you’re not going to be the best version of your professional self and over time that can have ramifications you don’t want.

But there’s some comedy gold here if you can get to it.