Pros & Cons of Having a Bad Manager

0:00Welcome to the Romani Talks podcast. I'm your host, Romani Talks. In this podcast, I'm helping you level up your five soft skills, public speaking, storytelling, social dynamics, emotional intelligence, and creativity, five soft skills for you to change your life forever and scare extra confidence along the way. In today's episode, I'm going to be talking about the pros and cons of having a bad boss. By a bad boss, I mean a disengaged boss. I'm not talking about a micromanager. Surprisingly, a micromanager will be one of the best things for your career in terms of progression. A micromanager is going to push you. They are going to make sure that you understand all aspects of the business, and they are going to battle test you. You're going to be sharp. But with the bad manager, they are so disengaged that they don't really try to teach you anything. They just expect for you to figure things out. And the rare times they do teach you, they're not doing a good job at all. As a matter of fact, their teaching is actually doing more harm than good.

1:05They're teaching you a lot of the bad practices, and overall you just end up worse than before. Now, surprisingly, there are some good sides to this, but let's first talk about the bad. The bad side is that you are going to have to learn a lot of things by yourself. The good thing is that you are going to have to learn a lot of things by yourself. I recall there was this one manager that I had who was super laid back, and he did not even try to teach me anything. And there was this one tool that he was trying to teach me one day, and this tool was super important. Basically, our clients required the numbers from this tool to be valid. And if it was not valid, then I could get in a lot of trouble. Well, instead of my manager teaching me, one day I contacted the guy who actually built the tool. I asked him, hey, can you walk me through this? And surprisingly, he said, yes.

2:07I thought he was going to be busy, but he said, go ahead and book some time on his calendar. That lesson taught me a lot of things. One, it taught me that I should not always rely on my manager. And two, if I asked, then I shall receive. Not all the time, but plenty of times for me to take note. So when you have a bad manager, it's not always a bad thing. Instead, it teaches you how to be more slippery. It teaches you how to be harder to kill. Now, you know how to ask different people for different things. You start to build courage. This is something that will help you throughout your entire career. So do not let a bad manager destroy you. Instead, let a bad manager make you more battle-tested. Thank you very much for joining me and I'll catch you next time.