164: How to Handle a Boss Who’s a Jerk, with Tom Henschel
Coaching for Leaders
Dave Stachowiak
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 27 October 2014
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tom Henschel: The Look & Sound of Leadership
Is someone you care about – or maybe even you – working for a jerk? My guest Tom Henschel from the Look & Sound of Leadership podcast helps us to navigate this difficult situation.
How to know if it’s just you
- Test the waters, but be careful
How to address it
- When you decide to talk, leave the emotion out of it
- Frame the business concern, not you as the victim
- Don’t take it personally
- Don’t speak for others
You are not going to change your boss
- It’s not your place to get coaching for your boss
- Nothing you will do will likely change your boss’s behavior
- If you can accept that, what do you want to do?
If it’s really a business issue, give the feedback
- Avoid being attached to the outcome
- Once the feedback is given, let it go
- Rehearse the feedback with someone trusted before you give it
What to do when the boss is chaotic
- Calm down with someone who is chaotic
- Take tons of notes
- Get clear agreements
- When they change something, don’t take it personally
- Consider sending a note afterwards to summarize what is said
How to deal with the narcissist
- Be a good audience and ask how you can help them to succeed
- “Narcissists crave attention and there’s not enough room in the spotlight for both of you.” -Tom Henschel
- “With narcissists, in order to succeed with them, you need to not compete with them.” -Tom Henschel
- Have support outside of work too, since you won’t get it from your boss
- When you can do it honestly, throw them a bone
- Always approach situations with collaboration and support
What do you do with the screamer?
- Don’t engage, wait it out
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | My friend Tom Henschel joins me today to take on this topic, |
| 0:04.0 | How to Handle a Boss Who's a Jerk. |
| 0:07.0 | This is Coaching for Leaders, Episode 164. |
| 0:11.0 | Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximize 1st |
| 0:28.0 | Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is coaching for leaders and I'm your host, Dave Stahoviac. This is a weekly coaching show to help us all be better leaders through improve communication, human relations, and |
| 0:36.8 | personal leadership. |
| 0:38.8 | All that stuff sounds so good, doesn't it? |
| 0:41.9 | And yet, the reality is in some organizations that we are struggling or maybe |
| 0:48.9 | our entire organization is struggling with a boss who is a jerk or any other number of terms |
| 0:56.8 | that we could use to describe a boss that we just don't get along with or |
| 1:01.7 | don't fire on the same cylinders with and this is a topic that really came forefront for me a couple months ago when I administered the survey of the coaching for leaders community. |
| 1:12.4 | This was something that was mentioned |
| 1:14.3 | a couple of times. And in addition, this is something that I have seen people run into throughout my |
| 1:20.7 | career. I've had many, many conversations over the years with clients and |
| 1:24.5 | you know even friends and family members about this very issue and it is |
| 1:28.6 | something that most of us if we haven't struggled with ourselves we certainly |
| 1:32.2 | know someone in our network or who we care about who has. |
| 1:37.0 | And so I wanted to tackle this topic, but frankly, this is a hard topic. |
| 1:42.0 | And so I wanted to call, I had to call in the big guns for this one because I |
| 1:46.7 | I certainly don't have all the wisdom on this and I know our guest doesn't have it all a hundred% figured out with perfect answers for this either, but my guest is someone who knows how to coach and help people to lead very effectively. |
| 2:03.3 | And Tom Henschel is an executive coach here in Southern California. |
| 2:07.8 | He works with lots of leaders, especially out here on the West Coast, |
... |
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