How to Deal With a Toxic Boss Without Quitting | Do These 3 Things | Advice from Engineering Manager

If you work for a bad boss in a toxic work environment for too long, it will destroy your confidence, your mental health, and your career.

But quitting or finding a new job isn't always a realistic option, which is why I'm gonna show you three ways to take control over the situation and how to use your bad boss to your advantage.

Stay tuned.

Hey everyone, and welcome to my YouTube channel. If you're new here, I'm Doug Howard and I help engineering leaders increase your impact at every level of your organization by showing you how to combine EQ with IQ so that you can leverage people's skills as your biggest asset for advancing your team and your career.

Why You Need to Take Action

Today I'm gonna show you how to reframe your relationship with your toxic boss so that you can use the situation to your advantage. Now, let's dive right in.

First, I wanna stress why it's important to take action If you do have a bad boss. Now the easy thing to do is to avoid the problem and just avoid conflict altogether. That feels good in the moment. We don't really like confrontation and we don't really want to have these negative interactions in our workplace, but if you do this, it's just gonna make the problem fester into a bigger issue that's, a lot harder to deal with later on. 

Because if you have a bad boss, odds are the more you avoid the problem, the more they're gonna continue walking all over you, which will just make the problem feel bigger and worse. This gets even worse because eventually this starts messing with your confidence and your self-esteem, and then it starts spilling into problems outside of work as opposed to just being a work problem.

This really has a big domino effect when you have a toxic boss like this. From there, you know when this is messing with your confidence and your self-esteem. Now it's gonna start messing with your professional growth. Now you're not gonna be growing anymore in your role, and it's gonna start making you question if you're in the right role, if you're in the right industry, when really the only real bad problem you have is a bad boss.

Doesn't mean you're not qualified to do the job or anything like that. But I've seen this happen a lot with engineers earlier in their career. When they have a bad boss or a bad mentor, they start feeling like they're on the wrong path or they feel like they should switch careers and that's not really the problem. The problem is they don't have the right boss. 

The other bad problem for you when it comes to having a toxic boss is you end up developing a lot of their bad habits without realizing it. The longer that goes on, the harder it is for you to break those bad habits. 

Now when I say this, you might not notice these bad habits in the moment because just rub off on you organically and their bad behavior sets the tone for the team and the culture that bad behavior is acceptable. Before you know it, you're starting to do some of these things without even realizing it. This is why if you work for a toxic boss, you need to take action right away. You can't just passively sit by and let this situation continue as is cuz it's only gonna get worse.

Use Them as Motivation

So if you have a toxic boss, the first thing you need to do is use them as motivation.

Now when I say use them as motivation, I mean use them as motivation for you to leave and to find a better opportunity. As engineers, we get caught up in this whole sense of right and wrong or black and white or rules versus not following the rules. We think I'm in the right, the bad boss is in the wrong, so they're going to change. They're gonna get better, or someone else will see this and fix it. 

This is how I used to think about these situations all the time. But here's the reality. Tigers don't change their stripes. If this is a bad manager, then odds are, they will never change. And the longer you stay, the longer it's just gonna mess with your mental health and continue stunting your professional growth.

I know from personal experience, earlier in my career, I worked with so many terrible managers that by the time I finally worked for a good manager, she pointed out to me all these bad habits that I developed and I never even realized it. And it's because when you're in it, you can't see it.

There's one specific time that I remember this coming to a head with me having an aha moment that I wasn't aware of all these bad habits I developed. 

As an engineering manager, I was having a lot of issues with another team, a cross-functional team. Basically, they weren't giving my team what we needed to do our job. Every project they submitted to us was incomplete. It didn't have the level of accuracy and completeness that we needed. I t was causing a lot of downstream impacts for us in keeping up with our end of the production schedule and delivering our projects on time. Created a lot of stress for our team.

So I went to my boss to help me with fixing this. I explained the whole issue to him in detail. And what he told me to do was, this is my original boss, the bad boss. What he told me to do was, document everything that they were doing wrong, but not fix it and not discuss it with the other team, just document it.

He asked me to have my whole department document every single mistake that the other department was making. They were supposed to submit this to me. Then I was gonna basically collect all this documentation for three months and then review it with my boss to figure out how to proceed at that point in time.

So taking a step back, what he was asking me to do was, gather evidence and build a case against another cross-functional team in the company. 

Now a month and a half into me tracking all this information, I switched bosses. I got a new boss. He left the company and I got a new boss who stepped into the role.

The new boss then asked me to get up to speed on everything I was in the middle of. And then I explained this issue to her and she looked at me like I had four heads when I told her what I was doing. 

Why? Why would you do this? This is just gonna create a divide between you and this other department. This is just gonna make you get more frustrated with them. This is gonna make your team get more frustrated with that other department. This isn't gonna. Build a bridge.

This is just gonna create a bigger wall between you and the other team because now you're just emphasizing and calling attention to every single thing the other team is doing wrong, which is not gonna make you wanna work together with them to fix it.

When she told that to me in the moment, it made sense. Duh, why would I do that? But I didn't even notice how bad of an idea that was when my other boss gave it to me. His toxic habits were rubbing off on me without realizing it. 

There was a bunch of those bad habits that I developed just cuz you don't know what you don't know when you're in it.

It takes a long time to break those bad habits when they form. So just emphasizing, that's why you wanna leave that situation or create boundaries with it as soon as you can.

On that note, another way to use your bad manager to your advantage is if you are in a leadership position like I was, or even if you're just an aspiring leader, you can use your bad manager as an anti-role model.

Now, when I say anti role model, I mean you want to be the opposite of what they are. So what you can do is just take a mental note of all the frustrations that you have towards your manager and all the frustrations that you've noticed other people have towards your manager. You can make it your goal to be the exact opposite of them in your leadership style.

For example if you don't like the way they treat the people on your team, how can you treat them differently? How could you treat people in a different way that is more acceptable? Or that stands closer to your core values as a leader? If they're a poor communicator, how can you change your communication style to be better? If you think they micromanage too much, how can you change your leadership style so that you give more freedom and autonomy? 

Basically everything that bugs you about your manager, everything that you disagree with about them. Take a step back and figure how can you do something the opposite in your leadership style. Use them as your anti role model or your anti muse.

Now if you're not in a leadership position, and if you're not in a position to leave the company anytime soon, here's what else you can do.

Don't Take it Personally

Number two is don't take anything your bad manager does personal.

If you have a toxic boss, they most likely have issues that have nothing to do with you. So you need to separate any personal connection between how they treat you and your own personal value, because it's not personal. Like I said, this person has their own issues that they're dealing with and they're basically taking it out on whoever happens to cross their path when they're having a bad day or a bad moment.

It's the same as your husband or wife snapping on you after they've had a bad day. Even though it's not your fault and the reason they're frustrated has nothing to do with you, you happen to be in the crosshairs and you ended up suffering the wrath of it.

So when your boss snaps on, you stop taking it personal. It's, again, it's not a judgment on you or your personal value as an employee, but that's easier said than done. Instead of letting yourself take it personal, I challenge you to empathize with your bad manager. Now, to be clear, I'm saying empathize, not sympathize.

We're not trying to give your boss a pass or anything like that, but what I want you to do is consider why are they acting this way? Everyone does something for a reason so challenge yourself to just brainstorm. Why are they so unhappy? Why are they so stressed out? Why do they think it's okay to act this way to you?

You're not asking these self questions to vent. You're just trying to take on a curious mindset towards your bad manager, and you're trying to understand where they're coming from.

As you're brainstorming, you might think of things like, maybe their boss is putting a lot of pressure on them, or maybe they've been working a lot of extra hours lately and they're just really tired and exhausted. Maybe they're having personal trouble at home. Maybe they're dealing with health issues.

When you're doing this, you're not trying to make excuses for their behavior. You just wanna understand so that you can disassociate their actions with your value as an employee. In other words, we're trying to get yourself to not take it personally.

Kill Them With Kindness

The third thing you wanna do is kill them with kindness. Now, this is my personal favorite way to get back at a bad boss because if you really wanna drive a toxic boss nuts, kill them with kindness. Because miserable people hate it when you're positive, happy, and friendly.

This is why it's the single most effective way to make bad managers become a win-win for you. First when you're positive, that's gonna make other people gravitate to you, like you, see that you're confident. It's gonna only help your reputation when you're staying positive in the face of a toxic bad manager.

It is a lot easier to do this after you've done step two, which is not taking it personal, but when I say kill them with kindness, here's what I mean. When they say something rude to you, or if they give you an unfair order, respond with comments like this. 

I can't believe I missed that. I'm sorry. I won't let you down again. 

I'm really sorry you feel that way. I never wanna disappoint you. How can we fix this?

How would you like me to do it next time?

Why These Techniques Work!

Now, as you're listening to some of these responses, you know your ears might be cringing. You're probably thinking, what the heck? My boss doesn't deserve a positive reaction like that. You're right, if he's a toxic boss, he doesn't deserve that, but that's not the point. 

When you react to your boss's behavior by getting frustrated, anxious, or upset, you're giving your boss control over your attitude, energy, and your emotions. But when you kill them with kindness, you're guarding your emotions by creating a positive barrier between their energy and yours. You're basically intentionally remaining calm and you're showing them that you're calm at the same time.

If you think this sounds difficult, try this simple technique the next time you go into a meeting with your toxic boss. Before the meeting, I want you to brainstorm how you expect them to behave in the meeting. 

Consider things like, what types of things do you expect them to say? How do you expect them to react to the idea you're gonna bring up or the topic you're gonna discuss? What issues do you think they'll create or bring up? I want you to picture every possible scenario in as much detail as possible. 

Why? One of the main reasons it's so difficult to stay calm in these situations with a toxic boss is because you don't know how to react to the unexpected. But now, if any of those particular scenarios actually happen, you won't be surprised because you literally saw it play out in your head the same exact way a few minutes earlier.

This way you're not caught off guard. Instead, it's almost like you're watching a movie you've already seen a million times, and just by knowing that you've accurately predicted their behavior, it actually provides you with a sense of calmness and comfort in the situation. 

So to quickly recap everything we just discussed, if you have a bad toxic manager, you wanna do three things.

One, use them as motivation. Two, don't take their behavior and their actions personally. And three, kill them with kindness.

But there's also one more thing you need to do, which is set clear boundaries by standing up for yourself. But there's a specific way to do this, and it's all in how you deliver your message. If you wanna learn this simple framework for setting boundaries with your boss, go and watch my episode called How To Deal With Difficult People. Thanks for watching.

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