I’ve always considered myself a badass. That’s because I managed methadone clinics for many years. Any kind of crazy patient interaction you can imagine, was part of my daily routine. Once a patient lunged over my desk in an attempt to choke me; once I jumped between a man and his battered and pregnant wife, he was trying to hit her again. I once had a cop (gun and all) lean over my desk and tell me that if I didn’t give him an address I was going to jail. I also had to fire people dozens of times over the years, and mostly I was the kind of manager that if I was firing you, you knew you deserved it. Every once in a while, I would fire someone who jumped up and started yelling or lean in and start threatening. It’s part and parcel of being a good manager, you don’t leave the difficult patients to staff: you manage them. Don’t get me wrong. Working in clinical care is tremendously satisfying. There is nothing better than helping a sick person get well.
At some point I got tired of it and I went to work for the “back of the house”. I got a job at headquarters for a large company with clinical services throughout the state. I was hired as a manager in accounting and was extremely lucky to have an excellent and professional staff. What a gift they were. They knew how to manage every facet of the business and had institutional knowledge about my new job. I was so confident that I accepted a promotion, even though I would be working for “the witch”. I had already been working for a witch, so I thought “what the hell”.
I began with some anxiety, but only temporary stuff. I was unsure about the job and there were some complex problems in place that I needed to resolve. I actually enjoyed the work and my intellect started humming. My brain gives me good strokes when I meet and resolve challenges. Any challenge was welcome to me and I quickly became the go-to for staff. Part of that was my helpful attitude, but the other part of it was that my boss dumped everything on me. Supervisees were transferred to my supervision and large projects became my projects.
When given a project, I naturally assumed that decisions about the project were my own. After all my position as a senior manager made me a decision-maker. I soon found that “the witch” considered me a typist and not much more. After I made one such project decision, she decided I needed more supervision and began requiring me to meet with her daily. She once told an entire department that they could not assist me on a project. A few of them confided in me that they were scared for their jobs and didn’t even want anyone to know that we were talking. (I was just wondering why everyone was acting so weird?)
I was literally becoming sick because of the way that she treated me. I started calling in sick too. I had a perpetual case of nausea and soon found out that I suffered from ulcers. I had ulcers because I was taking ibuprofen on the daily to help with the pain. And still…
Every morning I had to meet with this woman. She never allowed me to meet with my staff alone. She invited herself to every meeting. Often, she would tell me that I was wrong. She always sought an audience when telling me I was wrong; she said it in front of my staff and once she said it in front of the entire administrative department of the organization. Other staff members grimaced and shook their head. They said to me “glad it’s not me”.
After a couple of years, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. No wonder I was taking ibuprofen so much, my central nervous system was back-firing. Every bit of pain I felt was magnified. The nausea would not go away.
And still…I had to meet with this woman every morning. She told her supervisor that my achievements were her own, and reported every error I made as my own. I was presented as a problem child. Her supervisor never figured out how incongruent her words and actions were. I did the work, I reported in on the work and yet I was “the problem child”. I was evaluated highly and given a raise, but those facts were not revealed to anyone else. My boss did not want anyone to know the good work that I did.
This woman was not adept at facing/confronting me (or anyone) on her own and so would always use a third party to communicate with me. One such meeting occurred with her supervisor, who told me “I don’t care if she knows what she is doing (referring to designing a process), do whatever she tells you to do.” This meeting was the beginning of the end. I realized that my boss was very skilled politically and that no amount of me doing the job well would be good for me or give me a positive outcome. There would always be a counter-attack to my stellar performance. I was being humiliated often and it had affected my body so much that I was now ill. Every day she found a way to frustrate and insult me. Sometimes it was a sneak attack via a meeting, but often it was just a condescending email.
I know I am still a badass; that doesn’t mean that I have to take unlimited abuse. There was no way that I could figure out how to make this woman stop insulting me in public. She was so calm about it. Often, only subordinates recognized her bad behavior. Senior management staff never even directly saw her bad behavior. That’s how I knew what a pervasively cruel campaign she was running. If it was just ignorant bad behavior, she would engage in it all of the time, however, no senior manager ever saw her bad behavior. She turned it on and off like a faucet. I do blame senior management. It is my belief that a manager must be held accountable for their own staff. When star performers leave an organization, it’s time for senior managers to investigate behaviors. I have always held myself accountable for my staff and I expect all managers to do the same. Often, senior managers hold themselves “above all that” and that is a shame. They lose the opportunity for genuinely effective staff management.
I never saw myself as a bad manager, but what did happen to me is that I began seeing myself as someone who could not take it. As much as I did not want to admit it, as much as I hated it, I had to realize that I needed to get out of there. My sanity and my physical body were giving way to the poison of her control of me. This damaged me in ways that I could not even identify.
Who knew that humiliation and degradation would be the key to hurting me and eventually getting rid of me? Who knew? (Not me.)
