You Think Your Boss Is Bad?

"Some people are more than willing to change," Miranda says. "Other people, quite frankly, are jerks. And employees need to vote with their feet."

Katy says she took suggestions for improving the workplace to her boss but nothing changed. She ultimately filed a grievance and hired a lawyer after her boss falsified performance-related information in Katy's file. She began documenting her boss's actions in hopes of getting the boss reprimanded, or at least getting herself transferred, but she only felt worse.

"I had migraines. I felt sick to my stomach," Katy says. "I used all of my sick leave just because it was so horrible."

In the end, she did vote with her feet and resigned before her grievance was resolved.

"It was so bad that I left before I vested in the pension," she says. "It was worth it to leave and give up that money rather than stay and be around those people."

The Silent Treatment

When Dawn took a job with an Alexandria nonprofit group in 1991, she was a recent college graduate eager to build a career in communications. She loved the organization's mission and had completed a successful project there as a consultant. The environment fostered discipline and teamwork, and Dawn had a good working relationship with the boss. But when Dawn became an employee, the boss's behavior changed.

"It became a command-and-control environment," says Dawn, who now lives in San Francisco. The boss "was constantly over my shoulder. She'd occasionally listen to my phone calls. I was forbidden from having conversations with board members. I was seeing a dynamic that was really counterproductive to the organization."

Dawn says she thought the boss had confidence in her abilities, which made the dynamic all the more confusing. And, eventually, there was no hope of clearing up the confusion after the boss stopped communicating altogether.

"I'd come in the office, and she wouldn't even look up," Dawn says. "In a small office with only three people, it's a little awkward."

Fathelbab says the situation reminds him of a place where he worked years ago. "This was the boss's style of saying, 'I'm going to punish you, but I can't do it verbally.' " In such cases, he says, it's critical to restart the communication. A 360-degree evaluation system, in which everyone reviews the people they work with and for, can uncover the problem and get people talking about how to solve it.

For Dawn, the lack of communication reached a head one day when she borrowed a friend's car to drive to work and her boss had it towed from the company lot. "As opposed to walking in the office and just asking, 'Is that anybody's car?' she made a decision to call a tow truck and have the car removed," Dawn says. "Hours later she said, 'I didn't know that was yours.' She offered no recourse, no reimbursement, no help to drive me down to get it."

At review time, Dawn and her boss agreed on the need to communicate better. But Dawn felt they were going through the motions.