My boss is a moron... How to cope?

Question

I work in a sales office where quotas and performance are paramount. During my 5 years at this company, I've always exceeded my targets. So I have this manager now who is always trying to find a new way to bust my chops, just because she has to or else it will look like she's not busy. Anyway, it's getting to the point now where I consider it a personal insult. I went above her today and talked to our branch manager and told her my concerns. The response was: "this is a tough job, but I know you can do it!!"

Honestly, this boss of mine gets in my way more than she helps and it's irritating that I have to yield to her all the time. If it were every once in a while, I would be OK with it, but it's an hourly game with her and I'm already being asked to do more than I can reasonably do.

How do some of you cope with this? I don't want to leave the company, because it's a Fortune 500 company and I am young with the opportunity to grow within this company. Any suggestions? Thanks!

Answer 1

This is tough.  Marie G. offers some sound, conservative advice, and I don't disagree.  However, I have little patience for incompetence, and it is possible that your manager is incompetent.

Please also consider that you don't know all there is to know about your manager.  She may have some outstanding qualities that you have yet to see.

Since you can't transfer out of that office, try some of these tactics while you "wait it out."

1)  Try proactively making suggestions that may improve sales.  Make these suggestions to your manager, but also be sure to document them well.  Send a copy to Human Resources and ask that they file it in your folder.

2)  If you know what kind of requests are coming, have the answers ready ahead of time.  That way, you'll prove yourself more valuable to the manager while minimizing your personal contact with her.

3)  Try befriending your manager.  If you can get closer to her, without choking her or throwing her off a building, you may gain some insight into the pressures she's enduring.  This may help you decide whether or not you want her job when she burns out.  Also, it would give you the chance to express how unreasonable or counterproductive the demands are, without sounding like a whining, lazy office grunt.

Answer 2

Unfortunately the only thing you can do is wait. She won't last long. I was in outside sales, my territory 1 hour and 15 mins away from the office and 20 minutes from my home. I had one boss who would call me all the time at 3:00 and say he wanted to see me in his office before the end of the day! I was a top producer and felt like “just leave me alone”. He also would want to go on sales calls with me and EVERYTIME killed the sale. He was let go and I survived. I just waited! I feel your pain!! She’s probably hurting your numbers, not helping!

Be careful about going over someone’s head. Only do it once especially after the response you received.

Sorry new to this site, just figured out how to respond to your question. I just said to be careful because I didn't like the response you got. I'm in management now and if a rep came to me who has been with the company for 5 years and does well I would have said a lot more then "this is a tough job". Sometimes there's a different agenda behind the scenes and you don't know what they are. I guess I think you deserved a better answer then what you got therefore I, myself, would be careful with the situation. Now that I you wrote more, I don't think that any longer. I was just going by "this is a tough job".

Answer 3

I had to put up with an incompetent boss for years.  He spent most of his time reading the Wall St Journal and trying to calculate how much he would get when he retired.  He would spend about a week figuring his income tax, then ask me to check it.  I always found errors he made.  He was supposed to be an expert on gas contracts but didn't know the difference between a wet BTU and a dry BTU and didn't realize that govt regulations overrode contract terms.

He had to retire when he was 65.  About a year later, they changed the rules and allowed people to wait until age 70 to retire.  Fortunately they waited until he left.

There was nothing I could do but put up with him.  My pay was too high to give up in order to move to another company.