Welcome to the Squiggly Crees podcast. I'm Helen one of your hosts and this episode is part of a special series that Sarah and I have created to bring to life some of the ideas and insights in our new book, You Coach You. In this series of six episodes all out in January, we'll be talking to some experts to get their thoughts on how we can all help ourselves

through some of the nottier moments in a squiggly career. And that could be coping with a

challenging relationship at work. It could be finding more meaning and connecting to your

purpose. It could be, help me progress. I feel a bit stuck. Help you to progress in my job.

They have got insights and expert advice

just for us. So each of these episodes relates to a specific chapter in You Coach You.

Today, the focus is on our relationships chapter and very specifically how you can build a good

relationship with your manager. So you're going to hear me talking to our expert, Thomas Erickson,

who is the author of Surrounded by Idiots and Surrounded by Bad Bosses. I hope you're not surrounded

by bad bosses, but we probably all have experienced bosses or managers that maybe didn't always

feel like the easiest relationship at work. Today we're going to talk about that a little bit more and work out what we can do to respond to it. So in the conversation, we'll

explore how you can understand what might be driving your manager's behaviour and when and how

to adapt your approach to work effectively with them. So I hope you find this conversation as insightful and interesting as I did.

Here we go. So today in our conversation, I wanted to focus on, I think, one of the most important

relationships at work, or the one that can really work for you or can also work against you. And that is the relationship with your manager or your boss, as you refer to it in your book.

And my first question, I was wondering whether it was binary,

whether you have good bosses and bad bosses,

or whether everybody could be a bad boss to somebody.

Everybody is an idiot in someone's story. That is kind of the case.

We can do our best and we can try to adapt our behavior and leadership skills and, you know,

all these things that we try to do as when we manage people. But some people don't like to be

managed what's natural for me, let's say.

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