Jennifer Selby Long
speaker
698 appearances
14 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Jennifer Selby Long’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
A third one is creating an emotional sinkhole by making it personal or taking sides in political battles. We get this little dynamic, right? Your ineffective boss leads to lower performance on the team, which leads to stress, which leads to making it personal and taking sides in what we might call a backside covering political battle.
So when you find yourself thinking about your boss in these kind of sweeping terms, and again, you feel your judge coming on...
you're recognized that you're only feeding the intensely negative energy that's there and it does nothing to help you and does nothing to help your teammates the people around you so instead there are really five things that i think you can try to view the situation from a different perspective
and then handle it in a way that's going to work well for you, whether that's staying in it or making that leap toward another job or toward starting your own business. The first one, step back from that situation and first size up the degree to which his or her incompetence is truly affecting you.
It's disappointing when your boss routinely lets you down, but maybe slowing down your professional growth for a few months because they're new to the role and they're not good at it yet. That's one thing. But that's not in the same league as your entire bonus being on the line or even worse, your personal reputation being put in jeopardy with people you respect because the boss is ineffective.
So size it up. It's a reflective exercise. It's subjective. It looks different for you from someone else.
and even for you in different situations at different times in your life but it helps you calibrate that situation a little bit quiet down those nasty saboteurs so that you're calibrating it to your unique needs right is it short term and you just want to let it stop bothering you before you make a big change
or is this something that's really added up and you need to go and you just need to do that secondly assess if you're in a politically messy situation oh i hate this tip but if you do think you're in a politically messy situation you do have to begin some basic defensive action right employees have lost their jobs due to ineffective managers who failed to protect them
right so if you sense that level of risk and you feel it's important to keep your job oh it pains me but you got to start documenting conversations agreements you got to document open items and follow up emails after conversations Try to have more group conversations.
Oh, God, I just want to gag when I say this, but look, if you objectively size it up as politically messy, start doing those basic defensive actions. And no matter what, you must maintain your composure in a politically messy situation, no matter how absurd it becomes. The most absurd one to date is one that happened to a client about 24 years ago.
He found himself receiving the wrong performance review from his general manager, who mixed him up with another direct report and launched into the review she'd prepared for the other man. Now, I will admit, these two gentlemen were both Scandinavian. They looked a lot alike, but come on, they weren't twins.
So he just maintained his composure, told her that the objectives she was covering were for the other man's projects. He also made sure he paid more attention to having accurate data about his performance in writing, which did prove to be helpful later. And please don't become ultra paranoid. Please don't stop trying to build a positive working relationship, even in this situation.
It is still good to try to build a positive working relationship. A couple more, consider multiple ways to deal with the situation, right? Is the ineffectiveness entrenched? Or is the boss just having a bumpy transition? Look at options like going out of your way to ensure that the team achieves its goals while the boss gets up to speed on new responsibilities.
Or if there's something that you recognize the boss is always going to be ineffective at this part. offer to help out in an area that your boss doesn't enjoy and doesn't do well. I had one client who's great at team building, initiated team building outing. This boss just isn't good at that.
I had another one who is great, has an eagle eye on a project plan, just offer to validate that project plan because she could see she's always going to be better at it than the boss. And then
honestly this one's a little touchy but honestly ask yourself is it that the boss is completely ineffective or are you resisting adapting to a change that the boss is implementing so gosh it's painful to admit right that it might be that the strategy is sound but you hate it or you just don't buy into the direction
And if that's the case, at least you're recognizing you're resisting adapting to this change. You don't want to go along with it. And so in that situation, you have a choice. You can either say, you know what, I'm going to voice my concerns and I'm going to commit to making it successful for as long as I'm here because that's my job. That's what I'm here to do, right?
Or you're going to decide from a healthier, more grounded place, this change just isn't for you and you are going to leave. And maybe that's when you are going to go to build that business, but you're going to do it in a way that is very positive and constructive for those people around you and for yourself.
Because you'll have made a more intentional, informed choice rather than a choice that's driven by unexamined and unconscious feelings. That's when you wind up just working for a different flavor of a bad boss. Does that help?
Absolutely. Politics can exist for a couple of different reasons. And I think it's important to recognize which of those situations you're in. So politics can exist for extremely unhealthy reasons in all seriousness, because you have a leader at the top, who quite literally has a personality disorder.
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