Dating Advice 101: expect your partner to never change, because he or she won’t, and if he or she does, it is the slow result of a lifetime of experiences between now and then.
Working Professionally 101: expect your boss or client to never change, because he or she won’t, and if he or she does, it is the slow result of a lifetime of experiences between now and then.
I’m phrasing and framing the parallel here on purpose half to attempt to be funny, and half because the parallel really does map to reality. This is a general “relationship” principle and applies to any and all types of adult relationships.
The reason why it’s useful to remember this is because we see bugs in our clients or partners all the time and think, “okay, if I do X, Y, and Z then they’ll improve and overcome this.”
Let’s jump to the end of the story: no, they won’t. (Very rare cases aside.)
Your boss or client will have good and bad sides since he or she is a human being. His or her good sides will hopefully be awesome, help the company, help you learn, and help create positive experiences and memories for you. Or at least, I hope.
But negative sides? Well, it’s different for everyone. Remember Anna Karenina’s opening: all happy families are happy in similar ways, but every unhappy family is unhappy in a unique way. Yup, applies to your boss or client, as well.
Given this sad truth about the universe, there are a few important consequences.
The first is, even trying to change him or her will result in frustration on his part towards you, and will most likely fail. You may not even want to try.
The second is, it will always make sense to invest your energy to figure out how to work around his or her flaws. The boss is really difficult or bad at A, B, or C? Maybe you should work with someone else on those parts. Maybe you should have your role focus more on D, E, or F.
The third is, it will always make sense to invest your energy to figure out how to minimize those flaws. That’s different than “working around,” working around is avoiding them when you can. But sometimes, you just can’t. Maybe the boss has communication challenges so he or she talks obnoxiously—okay, but since the boss human, there is some way he or she prefers being spoken to, so do it that way. Maybe the boss prefers more formality in documents, so you should write your documents more formally. (That’s certainly a flaw in my eyes, although most human beings would argue that’s a good feature, or at least a neutral preference. This is important because flaws are also often relative—so his or her flaws don’t necessarily mean anything deep about personality or morality.) In all healthy relationships and work settings, all team members from the boss down know how to minimize their own flaws.
And of course, the same applies in both directions: you need to deeply understand your own flaws so you can minimize them and, over time, overcome them. It is your Achilles’ Heel that will bring you down, eventually, so you need to start healing that heel now.
The fourth consequence is, if his or her bugs are too big, then they can never be fixed—in which case the work will be toxic. And in toxic situations there is one, and only one, strategy, which is to step down when it’s a little bit toxic. Every single time, the “little bit toxic” grows into “epic toxic” and that is what you need to avoid before it’s too late, while you still can.
