Hello and welcome to Radical Cander, a podcast from Panoply and Gretchen Rubin's Onward Project about how not to hate the boss you have or be the boss you hate.

I'm Kim Scott, co-founder of Canter Inc., former executive at Google and Apple, and CEO coach at a bunch of great companies, also the

author of Radical Kander. And I'm Russ Laraway, also co-founder of Kander Inc. and career-long

operational manager across the Marines, Google, and Twitter. A few episodes ago, we were talking

about one type of incredibly frustrating boss, the micromanager.

Today, we're going to talk about the other end of the spectrum, the absentee manager.

Oh, man. These are, these are the bosses. You know, we know who they are. They never have time to

meet with you. They don't know what you're working on.

They don't care. Sometimes they don't even care. They don't seem to be aware of the overall goals of the team or some of the problems or issues that are merging on the team. They're just really out of touch. And so today, we're going to talk about how not to hate the boss you have when the boss that you have is an absentee manager.

And so along the way, we'll share some stories about working for absentee managers ourselves

and wanting to pull our hair out because of it.

We'll also answer a listener question about whether absentee managers are really so bad.

And as always, we'll share our tips for working with absentee managers in this week's

candor checklist.

Here we go.

So for my money, I would actually bet that absentee management is a much more prevalent

problem than micromanagement.

I would agree with that.

Yeah.

Certainly, it comes up a lot more when people are writing in into the podcast, the people who ask

questions in our workshops, and also some of the candor coach app users that we talk to.

And trust us, we feel your pain if you have an absentee manager.

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