Indecisive Bosses Who Jerk You Around: Stop Changing Your Mind, Already!

Crina and Kirsten Get to Work

In this episode, we embark on a catharsis regarding bosses who change their minds, can’t make a decision or jerk us around.

When bosses change their minds it impacts us as workers. These changes mean we often redo our work or work we have done becomes unnecessary. This impacts the meaningfulness of our work - and what was useful work is often not meaningful work when we just need to redo it. The impact of mind changing can also make us feel disregarded and not valued - and demoralizing.

Implicit - and maybe obvious - in changing a decision is there is change and change is hard and lots of change can really mean chaos.

What are some approaches to managing situations when it seems like direction from those above us is changing? Harvard Business Review suggests a “tee-up” with what changes in process, events and decisions have occurred that led to how your team got to a particular place - through whatever circuitous journey. Another idea is to ask questions about the change, which can help us understand how we got to the place and may provide useful feedback to your boss. Bosses do not have all of the information we have and communicating that can be helpful.

And it may be you just need a cocktail or a hot bath - or both - because change and revisiting work can be exhausting especially when it happens again and again.