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Most of us will work for a really bad boss at some point in our lives, perhaps more than one. Research by the Harris Poll bears this out, showing that more than 70 percent of workers have had at least one such noxious manager in their career. These difficult managers can range from inexperienced and incompetent bosses to truly mean-spirited individuals who have little regard for human suffering. Researchers have found that when we experience incivility in the workplace, about half of people intentionally decreased their work effort, more than three-quarters said it decreased their commitment to the organization involved, and more than one in ten said they had left a job because of poor treatment/behavior. Whats interesting is that many people think Its all their [the bosses] fault when, in fact, we often play a role in the difficult relationship. When we have a less-than-ideal boss, its also helpful to look in the mirror, for there may be some things we are doing that contribute to the situation. In addition, its easy to mistake incompetence for ill intent toward us. Keeping this in mind may give us a bit more empathy for a previous bad boss because we learn our own leadership skills by leading others, just as that previous bad boss had to learn to lead by leading us. Really bad bosses can be soul-crushing and draining to work with. It helps us realize that when a boss, or any other person, treats us badly, their behavior may have very little to do with us and more to do with what is going on in their own world. But although we cannot control how others think or behave, we do have control over ourselves and our behavior. When you have an insecure boss, there are some things you can do to make the situation more palatable. First, let them know, and feel, that they are in charge. Dont challenge them, particularly in front of others. Keep track of your own contributions and successes so they will be top of mind when they tell you that you have not made any contributions. And learn as much as you can from them while youre there and network widely to expand your learning, contacts, and opportunities. Sometimes the biggest learning from these situations is that you never want to make anyone feel the way this boss makes you feel. Thats still a valuable lesson. If you work with a difficult person, keep in mind that you cannot change them and their behaviors. Only they can make these changes. Their own self-understanding and ability to self-manage is not up to you or even about you, but it can have a strong impact on you. When you have a really horrible, no-good boss, one that is demeaning or abusive, it may be helpful to remember that their behavior says more about them than it does about you. Although its never pleasant to have an abusive manager, remembering this may help you to not take their behavior personally. It doesnt excuse their behavior, but it may help you put it in perspective. You own your behavior; they own theirs. This advice may be helpful in not exacerbating an already difficult problem or avoiding having your behavior become what gets singled out for punishment. But if you continue to work with an abusive manager who diminishes you, it can negatively affect your motivation, confidence, mental health, and career. In these situations, you may want to take the learning and move on. Should I Stay or Should I Go? The answer to this question is, like so many others, It depends. It depends on what your goals are for your career, for learning, for experience; your appetite for comfort versus adventure; how you think about remuneration and learning; and how uncomfortable your current situation is. There is no promise that the situation you are in will get better, and theres no guarantee that a new job will have a better manager. Many of us have stayed with bad or even very bad bosses longer than we should have, and we have left other difficult managers whom we might have stayed with longer and learned from. Just as our boss can fire us, we can fire our boss by leaving them or the organization. Some helpful should I stay or should I go questions to help you assess whether its time to begin looking for another position and manager include these: What have I learned from this person, and in this position, so far? Is there still an opportunity for me to continue to learn and grow in this position, working for this manager? If so, what is it that I want to learn, and how might I go about obtaining this knowledge and growth? To what extent are the skills Ill continue to learn be transferrable to other jobs or careers I may want in the future? Do my reasons for considering leaving this man- ager have to do with ethical lapses in the manager or organization? Is working for this person negatively affecting my mental health? Are there people higher up in the organization whom I admire or aspire to be like? Even when your answers to the above questions point to I should go, there may be times when leaving a bad boss may not be a viable short-term solution. In these situations, it can be helpful to focus on what you can learn while you remain there, which may include taking on new projects or challenges, networking widely within the company, or practicing dealing with a difficult, demanding person. However, working with a bad boss comes with an emotional and sometimes physical toll, and the longer you continue to work with them, the larger the overall toll it will take. When leaving a bad boss or situation, as hard as it may be, plan to make a graceful exit. Rage quitting, including creating an ugly scene on your way out or leaving a mess for your manager, others on the team, and the person who comes in behind you, may feel satisfying in the moment or even justified based on the way youve been treated, but its rarely a good option for your long-term reputation. Making a graceful exit means making a transition plan to help the person who comes in behind you understand the relevant processes and know where to find key information, thanking your manager for what youve learned from them, tying up as many loose ends as possible, being constructive in explaining why youre leaving, and offering to answer some questions in the weeks following your departure. Excerpted from Manage Yourself to Lead Others: Why Great Leadership Begins with Self-Understanding. Copyright 2025 by Margaret C. Andrews. Available from Basic Venture, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here. Bland AI outputs grow stale quickly. Instead of just speeding up routine tasks, what if we used AI to slow down, challenge our thinking, and build new tools, dashboards, and experiments? Read on for creative approaches that are changing how I think about AI. 1. Create your own devil’s advocate assistant Get thoughtful pushback on decisions. Challenge ideas. The tactic: Use AI as an intellectual sparring partner to stress-test your thinking, explore alternative perspectives, and identify potential blind spots before making important decisions. Try this: Present a plan, idea, or decision to an AI assistant with instructions to challenge your thinking constructively. Identify risks you haven’t considered, consider secondary impacts, and add nuance to your analysis. Get your AI assistant to stop kissing up to you and start challenging your ideas. [Generated Photo: Jeremy Caplan/Ideogram] Prompt template “I’m planning to [decision/plan] because [reasoning] and with a goal of [objective]. Play devil’s advocate, give me multiple perspectives on this, be bold, surprising, creative, and thoughtful in your reply, and address these questions: What are the strongest arguments against this approach? What alternatives should I consider? What risks might I be overlooking? What questions should I be asking myself? What challenges should I expect to face? What could I do to gain more insight? What could I do to increase the chances of success? Pro tip: Try asking your AI assistant to role-play. It can respond as a financial advisor, family member, or competitor, for varied viewpoints. Or ask it to act like a person you admire, living or dead, real or fictional. Limitation: Your AI devils assistant will be generic if you dont provide detailed context. And you may get a predictable response if you dont instruct it to be bold. Suggested model: I have found ChatGPT 5 to be excellent for this. Gemini and Claude also work well. If youre considering anything sensitive, you may want to use a free offline private AI tool like AnythingLLM or Jan. Ill write more soon about private AI tools like these. If you have input on those, add a comment below. Example: I described a new planned morning schedule to GPT 5. The subsequent exchange got me thinking about several new issues. The conversation helped me clarify my own thinking. It pushed me to organize and deepen my own analysis. As a bonus, GPT 5 produced a tangible artifact for mea PDF with tables. 2. Learn something new Map out a personalized curriculum. [Generated Photo: Jeremy Caplan] AI tools let me try out skills I thought I was too late to develop, like coding simple applications, designing graphics, analyzing large data sets, and exploring complex docs in other languages. You can also lean on AI assistants to help you develop offline skills, like learning about photography, improving your Greek, understanding crypto, sharpening project management skills, making bread by hand, or prepping for any new coverage area for a project or team. AI assistants excel at creating structured learning and practice plans tailored to your schedule, style, and goals. Try this: Give an AI assistant context about what you want to learn, why, and how. Detail your rationale and motivation, which may impact your approach. Note your current knowledge or skill level, ideally with examples. Summarize your learning preferences Note whether you prefer to read, listen to, or watch learning materials. Mention if you like quizzes, drills, or exercises you can do while commuting or during a break at work. If you appreciate learning games, task your AI assistant with generating one for you, using its coding capabilities detailed below. Ask for specific book, textbook, article, or learning path recommendations using the Web search or Deep Research capabilities of Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. They can also summarize research literature about effective learning tactics. If you need a human learning partner, ask for guidance on finding one or language you can use in reaching out. Add specificity Mention any relevant deadlines. Note budget, time, or other constraints. Share info about your existing schedule so the assistant can help map out optimal learning time slots. Making the plan concrete increases the likelihood youll follow through. ChatGPT recently generated a calendar file with a list of appointments I could easily import into my Google calendar. Pro Tip: Ask for help setting up a schedule, setting learning targets, measuring progress, choosing resources, motivating yourself, and implementing backup plans when you fall off track. Ask for a learning plan you can print out, charts you can fill in, interactive apps to track progress, resource lists you can look up, experts you can follow, and strategies for avoiding common pitfalls. 3. Stretch your creative design muscles Try this: Use AI image generation tools to experiment with visual ideas. Start with simple concepts and iterate to add nuance or complexity. Practice describing visual concepts in text, then see them realized instantly and iterate on your prompts. Try MyLens or Napkin for creating mind maps, flow charts, timelines or various other infographics out of detailed prompts or source docs. Use Ideogramdetailed in this postor ChatGPTs new image generatordetailed in this postto describe any style of illustration, infographic or other visual. For creative video generation, try Hypernatural, which lets you turn text into moving images. Use this to: Add creative images to presentations, experiment with social media graphics, or generate infographics for teaching, publishing, or project work. Limitation: AI image generators are improving rapidly but still struggle with precise text placement, detailed charts, and maintaining brand consistency across multiple images. Most dont let you select specific image dimensions, though Ideogram does. Examples: I generated the images in this post with ChatGPT and Ideogram, and Ive used Hypernatural to make video versions of past posts, like this 2-min video about Raindrop, which I wrote about last week. 4. Create a personalized dashboard Build custom tracking tools and mini-applications Without knowing anything about code, you can generate simple web applications for tracking anything important to you. Prompt your AI assistant to help you keep tabs on reading or eating goals, fitness metrics, project progress at school or work, or stats for Wordle or your game of choice. Try this: Ask AI to create a dashboard or tracking tool tailored to your specific needs. Experiment with Claude 4 Artifacts, Gemini’s code canvas. Also try vibe coding tools like Lovable or Bolt that specialize in creating apps and sites based on prompts. For advanced projects, consider Windsurf Cascade. Pro tip: Plan to iterate. It almost always takes multiple attempts to get something workable, because you realize your needs when you see the first prototype. Start with simple tracking before requesting complex features. Ask for additional functionality with follow-up prompts. Herea a Prompt Example. Limitation: The simplest versions of these mini applications work in your browser only. To use an application on multiple devices, youll need to save the code and host it with a service that allows you to create a database. For that, try Lovable, Bolt, or Windsurf. Example: Im working on a content planning and workflow app to organize and track my newsletter work. This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.
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People often say that a single spark can light a fire. In careers, that spark is often a person. It might be someone early in life who cracks open a door, offers encouragement, or quietly shows what success can look like. Whats less obvious is how profoundly that very first connection can shape everything that comes afterward. Consider 23-time Grand Slam tennis champion Serena Williams. Williams has often spoken about the crucial role played by her first coachher father, Richard Williams. His belief in her abilities and his willingness to expose her to competitive tennis from an early age ensured she gained experience long before most of her peers. In this, shes not alone: In sports, a first coach can recognize potential before anyone else does. Or consider Misty Copeland, the American Ballet Theatres first Black female principal dancer. When Copeland was 13, a Boys & Girls Club teacher, Cynthia Bradley, recognized her potential and brought her into formal ballet training; within four years Copeland earned a spot in ABTs Studio Company. In 2015, she became ABTs first Black female principal, a milestone built on that early mentorship. Those first advocates opened doors to elite training, scholarships, and professional networks that sustained a long, barrier-breaking career. Anecdotes like these are powerful, but they also raise questions. Do early connections cause long-term success, or do they simply come more easily to people already positioned to succeed? After all, a young athlete with supportive and affluent parents might have access to better training and competition regardless of who their first coach is. This chicken-and-egg problem is hard to untangle, unless you look at a setting where chance plays a role. Thats where my research comes in. Real estate as a natural laboratory Im a professor of real estate finance, and I noticed that the residential real estate brokerage industry can mimic a random experimental setting. Since only a small number of people are active in housing markets at any given time, agents cant choose exactly who they work with. That means a new agents first counterparty brokerthat is, the agent on the other side of the deal depends on who happens to be representing clients at the same time and place. In many cases, that first connection is essentially a matter of luck. So my colleagues and I analyzed more than 20 years of home sales data from Charlotte, North Carolina, covering more than 40,000 unique real estate agents and 417,000 home sales from 2001 to 2023. We found that new agents who land their first deal with a well-connected power broker are about 25% more likely to still be in the business a year later. Since many agents struggle to close a second deal within a year of their first, this significantly boosts their chances of building a lasting career. The first handshake and lasting spark What makes these first encounters so powerful is not only the transfer of skills but also the shaping of confidence and identity. A young musician invited to join an orchestra by a respected conductor begins to see himself as part of that world. A student encouraged by a scientist to enter a national competition begins to imagine a place for herself in research. An athlete who trains with an Olympic medalist begins to visualize competing at the highest levels. In each case, the first connection changes the sense of what is possible. Our study also found that new real estate agents at the greatest risk of leaving the field (those with fewer early sales) benefit the most from starting out with a well-connected partner. The same dynamic appears in sports, where struggling athletes often flourish under coaches with deep relationships and credibility, and in education, where students on the verge of disengaging can be reenergized by respected teachers who open doors to programs, competitions, and networks. These mentors do more than teach. They change trajectories. The lesson for those just beginning their careers: Seek out people who are respected and generous with their experience. Observing how they work, think, and solve problems can shape your own professional identity. For those who are more established, the takeaway is equally important: Offering a hand to someone new, making an introduction, or simply offering encouragement can set in motion a sequence of events that shape a life. Soon Hyeok Choi is an assistant professor of real estate finance at the Rochester Institute of Technology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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