Your boss stinks. You never get any feedback to know how well you are doing. Your boss criticizes you, but not in a way you can use to improve. Your boss takes credit for your work and tells others you are a terrible employee. You are sick and tired of your boss. If your boss felt this way about you, you would be fired. It’s time to fire your boss.

How in the heck are you supposed to fire your bad boss? You cannot manage your bad boss. No matter what you do, your bad boss is not going to respond well to negative feedback from you, nor is your boss going to alter his behavior based on your input. Since you are a paid employee, your bad boss will probably take your praise as kissing up. Your complaints will be taken as whining or political maneuvering. Your bad boss can only be dealt with using one of two effective strategies:

• Grin and bear it, or…
• Resign

Most people apparently believe there is a third effective strategy:

• Complain and stay

While that is an option, is not not an effective one. Choosing complain and stay is choosing to be a poor performing employee who hates his work life and lets everyone know it. If this is the strategy you currently follow at work, don’t be surprised if it fails to produce happy results for you. It will not. You will not be appreciated for doing this, your skills at work will not make up for it, and you will go to work every day wondering when the axe is going to fall… on your neck!

Dare to be different! Choose one of the other two:

Grin and Bear It

The truth is that most bosses are bad bosses. They… ahem… we cannot help ourselves. We’re just not the same sort of person you are. We aren’t very skilled at considering others and not particularly interested in learning about ourselves, either. We’re at our job to get a paycheck. Maybe we don’t even really want to be the boss and have been secretly coming up with our own plan to change careers and get away from this company. Maybe we complain inside our offices where you cannot hear us, and we just don’t let you see it.

We don’t care about management books or management techniques. We pay you, and we expect that you will do perfect work in return for us without us lifting a finger or ever talking to you. We’re bad bosses: we believe that if we have to tell you anything, then it is “You’re fired.”

One of my good friends has a saying. Here it is:

The grass is always brown on the other side.

Guess what? When you resign and take on that new job that pays more working for the awesome person you loved during the interview, you will find within weeks that the really cool boss is leaving or being promoted, or that you are being moved to another department. Since 90% of bosses are bad bosses, your boss being bad at your next job is a fair probability.

When you get there, you will be just as miserable as you are here.

Thus, you might want to adopt the grin and bear it strategy:

1. Do not complain to anyone, ever, that you do not like your boss or your job
2. Do not show outward signs of discontent
3. Find out what your boss likes, and do that. Ask them directly if necessary. Ask their admin if that doesn’t work
4. Find out what your boss hates and never do that, no matter how tempting or necessary it seems
5. Dress nice for your boss - it makes them think you are trying harder
6. Perform: deliver results, document the results in easy-to-consume graphics and charts backed up by data that is available not not necessary to study.
7. Make your boss look good at every opportunity.
8. Ignore your boss’s weaknesses and grin as he steals your work, steps on you, and makes his career out of your unappreciated efforts.
9. Eventually your boss will leave, be replaced… or you will be moved, recruited from elsewhere, or promoted. Change happens - so meditate and let it happen.

The results of this sort of activity will have a high price, but that’s why jobs pay good money. If it were easy, anyone could do it successfully. You guessed right, by the way. The grin and bear it strategy is fairly successful whether or not your boss is a bad boss. You’d be surprised how many people think their boss is a really bad boss when in reality they are just a medium-class annoying boss.

But let’s say your boss is sure-fire bad - a ten on the scale of badness. Your boss, in front of everyone at a staff meeting, announces to the team something they learned about your from a third party that should never have been revealed publicly. Your boss tells your peers that you are worthless. Your boss tells you that you are worthless, calls you names, yells at you with a raised voice, curses (not in anger - but directed at you), or touches you inappropriately… not innocently… but such as slapping you right on the butt.

And extreme example, but let’s say that your boss is just down and dirty bad and must be fired. How do you do that?

Resign

Firing your boss is quitting:

1. Prepare your resume (print at home or professionally - never at work)
2. Make friends with anyone who works for any sort of recruiting or contract employment company
3. Build a network of friends around you and exploit it for employment opportunities
4. Tell NO ONE that you are preparing to leave
5. Slowly migrate personal things out of your office - don’t use a big box. Just grab something every night and pull it out of there. Replace photos with company certificates that mean little to you. Replace personal gizmos with company propaganda so that your cube does not go empty.
6. Back up all of your data, contacts, email, documents, templates, etc to multiple discs or USB keys - just in case one fails - and take it home. You’ll need much of what you used at work later on your next job, probably.
7. When you have interviews, your children are sick, you are sick, or there is some need to pick someone up from the airport. TELL NO ONE. Don’t tell your work buddy that you know you can trust. Don’t tell your cube mates. Don’t tell your boss. Don’t tell anyone other than your spouse behind closed doors after the children are asleep.
8. Find another job. Do not leave for money - find a job you like with people you like doing something you can believe in. Your next higher-paying yet soul-stealing job will destroy you, and you will end up having to come back home in shattered and humiliated ruin
9. Give notice. Most people give two weeks - I think two weeks is really lame because no one can hire a replacement and train them in two weeks. Often it takes two weeks to get an ad placed or recruiters spun up to full speed. Six weeks is nice.
10. Refuse all counteroffers. When you accept a counteroffer, you doom yourself. Usually, within six months, people who accept counteroffers are gone - fired or finally leaving anyway.
11. Decline any offer of an exit interview. If they corner you into one, say nothing negative. Find whatever positives you can, and emphasize those only.
12. Still tell no one. It is your boss’s right to announce you are leaving - not yours.
13. Arrange with your boss to move your remaining things out late at night so as not to raise a disturbance. You walking out to your car carrying a box mid-day smiling and laughing about what a bunch of jerks they are makes everyone else feel bad and you might need to return here in an emergency.

How to Resign

The guys at Manager Tools have provided three excellent podcasts that tell you exactly how to resign your job. You may be surprised at their advice. I highly recommend you heed their words. When you leave with style, whether fired or of your own decision, remaining professional can only help your situation and your reputation.

How to Resign Part 1
How to Resign Part 2
How to Resign Part 3

Some of you will have ethical problems with the above. Fine - do as you must and take your chances, but I believe that being more open and honest will not result in change in the organization. Correction: there will be change. They will change you out for someone else and lock the door on you after you leave. This way you still have a fallback strategy. I have seen a lot of people leave big companies, and after six months or so, some of them come back. They were smart - they kept their complaints to themselves and left their options open.

Here’s my best recommendation… if your boss really stinks, and you need a change, then start making the change. Do not keep a bad boss because you fear change, have become comfortable, do not think you can earn as much elsewhere, or that the grass is brown everywhere. Make the change. I have made the change before several times in my career when I saw things coming to closure of their own.

The day Lorna and I decided to leave Japan we talked about the people who had left. So many of our friends had moved to other cities, taken other jobs, become busy parents, or had moved on to other things. We were surrounded by new and different people, and it just felt like we were hanging around reminding everyone of a time that was no more. Sometimes, it is just time to leave.

Take a chance, rely on your friends and contacts, reach out to professionals for opportunities, and explore your possible options. Yes, you can fire your boss. Looking at poll numbers for how many people are unhappy in their jobs, lots of people need change in their lives, but seem afraid of it.

Frank Herbert wrote,

Without change, something inside us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken.

Find your next job without burning the one you have.