Difficult Manager Playbook

Separate abuse from ordinary difficulty, write down what actually happens, diagnose the pattern, and try the cheapest fixes first, so you either repair the working relationship or leave it on your own timeline.

Abusive supervision is strong research (Tepper, 2000; meta-analysis: Mackey et al., 2017): the advice for it is records and escalation, not repair. The fixes for ordinary difficulty are practice from the managing-up tradition (Gabarro & Kotter, 2005), ordered with help from the strong research on employee voice (Detert & Burris, 2007). Gallup figures are vendor data. The three-to-six-week trial period is a rule of thumb.

Use it when:

• The relationship with your manager regularly makes your work worse, and one conversation has not fixed it.
• You keep reacting to your manager instead of deciding what to do about the pattern.
• You are weighing whether to escalate or move, and want to do it on a clear record.

Skip it when:

• Your manager's behavior involves harassment, discrimination, bullying, threats, or asks you to do something unsafe, illegal or unethical. That is not a relationship problem to manage: keep records and go to HR, a more senior manager, your union or employee representative, or an external advisory service now. Use only Steps 1 and 4 below.
• It is a single incident or a fixable habit: use 9.3 Upward Feedback Planner.

The first move here is triage, and it is the best-evidenced part of the page. Sustained hostile treatment by a manager has been studied as abusive supervision since Tepper (2000), and the findings point one way: the costs are serious, and the sensible response is records and escalation, not repair. Below that line, the page works on ordinary difficulty. Its working assumption comes from the managing-up tradition (Gabarro & Kotter, 2005): your manager is a fallible person under pressures you may not see, and pressure explains more of the behavior than malice. The order of the fixes leans on voice research. Detert and Burris (2007) showed that people judge the risk of speaking up from their leader's behavior, which argues for starting with moves that take no courage before the ones that do.

So Step 1 builds a dated, factual record that every later step uses. Step 2 asks about your manager's pressures before anything else, and Step 3 runs from cheapest to costliest so the relationship is not spent before it has to be.

First check the severe signs. Then write down what happens, with dates, without labels or guesses about intent.

Strong answer: "12 May: my manager rewrote the whole quarterly report the evening before the board meeting without telling me. Impact: I presented figures I had not checked." Not: "My manager is controlling."

• ☐ None of these apply: harassment, discrimination, bullying, threats, or a request to do something unsafe, illegal or unethical. (If any apply, go straight to Step 4.)

Is this a pattern or a few incidents? ☐ Pattern ☐ A few incidents ☐ Not sure yet

Illustrative example: the roles and the company are made up.

An accountant at a municipal housing company in Sweden has a new manager who rewrites every report and asks for updates several times a day.

Step 1: none of the severe signs apply. Three dated incidents, all rewrites close to a deadline: a pattern.

Step 2: micromanaging. The manager is new to managing and was criticized by the finance director for an error in last year's annual report. The accountant's part: updates only when asked.

Step 3: Adapt: a short end-of-day update before being asked; requests for updates dropped within two weeks. Clarify: a draft review at the halfway point of each report, so the manager can steer early instead of rewriting late. Feedback, after a month: "When reports are rewritten at the end, I do not learn what you want differently. Could we keep the midpoint review instead?"

Step 5: the line was "rewrites stopped by the end of the quarter". Rewrites stopped after six weeks. The relationship did not become close, but it became workable, and Steps 4 to 6 of the fix table were never needed.