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agonyaunt2022-02-07 04:26 pm
minoanmiss) wrote in agonyaunt2022-02-07 04:26 pm
Entry tags:
Ask a Manager: My Lovely But Bumbling Boss Is Driving Me Crazy
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.
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I could say more but I will refrain. But I suspect the responses will mostly be from one of two perspectives: people who have had to work around people like the Head Teacher, and people, possibly with ADHD/executive dysfunction/other issues, who will identify with Head Teacher.
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and since the problem is escalating, I have to wonder if there's some underlying health/mental health reason for that. it's not as common as with other people, but folks in middle age can definitely begin showing signs of executive function failure.
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I wondered the same thing about the lost parking ticket, but it could be that she didn't know she'd lost it until she got up to the pay window, and by that time she was first in a line of cars and nobody could leave till she did - infuriating but understandable. But the coat zipper puzzles me.
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If it's not LW's job to act as admin assistant, then she shouldn't do it. But she might suggest that HT get an administrative assistant for such a purpose.
And, yes, the incident where nobody else can leave because she gets her zipper stuck? that's confounding me, too.
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My work has a rule where at the end of the day, everybody has to walk out together for safety reasons, so if someone has, say, lost their car keys, it does delay everybody. But if it's more than a couple minutes, the next-highest-ranking person volunteers to stay as the second person, and sends everyone else home. And a stuck zipper shouldn't even cause that, unless she was like, trapped inside the coat and couldn't move her arms, or it was so cold it would be literally dangerous to walk to the car with an open coat. The most likely explanation is that she could have gone to her car and fixed it later, but that this kind of solution just doesn't occur to these people.
(I had a manager who would make everybody wait after clocking out every day while she used the bathroom because 'she had a long drive home'. It simply did not occur to her that this was not a suitable solution to that problem.)
It seems like there's an unusually long list of things where the manager being a bit off her game disproportionately inconveniences everybody else. That's stuff you can fix in the interests of general office efficiency without becoming her assistant. The advice about getting copies of the keys is a good start. One person losing their parking ticket shouldn't delay the whole line for half an hour, either - either there's something wrong with how the garage is managed, or she was deliberately delaying everything because she didn't want to pay the fine. Deal with it and move them along!
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"Oh no, I can't get my coat on! Everybody has to stay and help me deal with it" instead of "Oh no, I can't get my coat on! Everybody head out and I'll fix it when I get home."
"Oh no, I lost my parking card! Everybody has to wait in line behind me while I spend half an hour searching my entire vehicle" instead of "Oh no, I lost my parking card! Let me pay the fine real fast so the line can move on, and learn my lesson".
"Oh no, I lost some papers! Everybody has to spend hours searching for them and lost the whole day" instead of "Oh no, I lost some papers! I will deal with this, work extra time to fix it, and take the blame."
"Oh no, I forgot about a meeting! I guess everybody just has to wait around hoping I remember it" instead of "Oh no, I forgot a meeting! Luckily someone at the meeting can call/text me real quick and I'll be there."
Like I am absolutely the person who lost their parking pass, but I can't imagine being the person who holds up the line for half an hour because of it. :O
This is either someone who is inconsiderate as well as thoughtless, and LW should maybe reassess her opinion. Or it's someone who isn't used to being scatterbrained and clumsy and doesn't have any coping mechanisms for it, in which case they should definitely see a neurologist, and probably also an occupational therapist to help them develop strategies to deal with it (not you.)
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I have an aunt who until recently worked for a university as a fundraiser for various departments. At some point someone really really should suggested she get screened for ADHD. Because it doesn't matter how good she was at her job, her disorganization was detrimental in a lot of small ways to her whole office. (Afaik she never lost important paperwork.) Her primary coping mechanism of literally writing everything she had to do for the day on her hand and up her arm worked! for decades! but also got her snotty comments about professionalism that bothered her. One of her rules was she wasn't ever to be in charge of any keys there weren't at least two other copies of.
One of my sisters or I asked if she'd been screened for ADHD at a family dinner a few weeks before she retired. No one in 30 years had ever suggested it. A quick online questionnaire got a "well that explains a lot". Out of the same conversation she learned the phrases "executive dysfunction", "delayed sleep phase disorder", and "clutter blind spot". In an email she said that her exit interview with her department heads were very eye-opening for everyone involved and they might start promoting screening for learning disabilities on campus.
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Like, it sucks when I can't get my zipper done right for whatever reason, but that's why my coat has snaps as well. I don't make my dogs wait inside the house for 20 minutes for their walk while I fumble with the zipper, and unlike humans, they love me unconditionally.
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I was going, doesn't this institution have a school secretary/secretarial assistant, even if only part-time, whose actual job it is to keep tabs on important paperwork and where the keys are, track meetings etc.
Speaking as someone whose late mother was thus employed.
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No explanation of why the stuck zipper prevented her getting in the car and driving anyway, why they didn't put stuck zipper woman in passenger seat while someone else drives her car, or why anyone is allowing this woman to be the single point of failure when there is any alternative.
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