Use Your Crappy Boss To Make Yourself A Better Employee


We all know what it’s like to have a crappy boss, or at least a boss that leaves a little to be desired as a manager. Someone who never seems to have time to give you feedback, or is a micro-manager, or who completely underestimates the time and effort of all of your work.Still, a terrible boss doesn’t mean you have to be a terrible employee. Here’s how to use their mistakes to make yourself a better, more marketable employee.

Photo remixed from originals by Chimpinski\Shutterstock and schmetfad\Shutterstock.

Over at the AMEX Open Forum, they have a number of tips to help you transform the things that irritate you about your boss into ways you can grow and evolve as an employee. One of the ones that stands out the most to me however is how important it is to focus on specific, actionable solutions to problems instead of the problems themselves. The author of the piece and I have both had bosses who seem to never have time to sit down to talk to you, are too busy to remember anything you tell them, or who are overly focused on the problems they see around them without offering up any suggestions or direction on how to deal with them.

Instead, focus on the solutions to those problems and start putting them into action. If your boss complains incessantly that your team doesn’t have, for example, a good way to keep tabs on how much storage you’re using on your company’s storage arrays, instead of just doing your manual monthly counts and dropping them all into a spreadsheet, look for an application or service that will get the job done for you. That way you find a solution to your boss’s problem, a way to streamline your own workload, and a great benefit to the company overall. The Open Forum piece uses a restaurant that’s short on bread to illustrate the same point, but you get the drift.

There are some other great tips there as well that help you get around different types of bad bosses. What you may not know is that by coming up with creative ways to work around your boss, you’re learning how to be a good boss in the process. How do you work around your boss when they’re no help? Let’s hear your tips in the comments.

How My Bosses Taught Me To Be A Better Boss [AMEX Open Forum]


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