At one time or another, most of us work for a crazy person. Crazy-weird, crazy-psycho, or crazy-ha-ha, just about everyone has a story about a boss whose particular brand of insanity made work a living hell. How do I define a crazy boss? While there are thousands of ways in which bosses can be crazy, perhaps they can all be summed up as a refusal to accept or consider the realities of the work place. Crazy bosses try to control the uncontrollable by creating tortuous protocols to micromanage future projects in response to past problems. Crazy bosses misuse human and material resources, pressing for greater and greater returns while depleting the assets from which those returns flow. Crazy bosses are always looking for someone else to blame. The buck never stops with a crazy boss, it stops when the crazy boss has found a scapegoat. Crazy bosses are liberal with praise and rewards when they are in a good mood and they're hypercritical, oversensitive, and uncommunicative when they're under pressure. Crazy bosses don't know when to stop. They press on past the point of diminishing returns. Crazy bosses are unpredictable. The only thing you can reliably expect from a crazy boss is more craziness. I know a lot about crazy bosses because I am one. In fact, I'm here to tell you that there's nothing like self-employment to bring one face to face with the prototypical Crazy Boss. That may seem like bad news, but it's really just a fact of life. When I think back over my lifetime of working for others as well as for myself, the pivotal source of craziness at any given moment has always been between my own ears. I'm not claiming that outside people, places, and things, do not present challenges. I am reporting that I've never found an outside circumstance that did not accurately reflect my inner state. My old feline friend, Boodle-Anne, was well aware of this. If I stomped into my office in the grip of a particularly evil mood, Boodle backed away. She knew I would project the problem I was creating on everything around me, including her, until I stopped. Boodle would never believe that my problem originated in a client or a vendor. She never wondered about my checking account balance or the state of my hormones. She had a direct experience of Molly-as-Crazy-Boss and knew enough to get out of the way. These days, I'm happy to report that I can get out of the way, too. Not always, not instantly. But more and more often I can notice that I'm insane and I can laugh at the drama and trauma I raise around me. In my worst moments I can't help but finding the humor in my complaints, and in my best moments I can't find my complaints. This article isn't long enough to go into all the ways I've learned to defuse the Crazy Boss within. It will have served its purpose if it evokes a knowing smile, a momentary spark of recognition. After all, it's not being crazy that hurts, it's pretending that I'm not. Self-employment is a gift. It forces me to get cozy with the Crazy Boss within, with the fears, projections, and resentments that shape my reality and determine my responses. Thanks to self-employment, I can cozy up to the exact ways I make myself nuts and begin to make peace with the fact that wherever I go, there I am. |
