The 3 Office 'Monsters' You've Likely Encountered At Work
As the leaves change color and the nights grow longer, spooky season begins. Halloween marks a day when people dress up as vampires, ghosts and other evil spirits for fun ― but if you work long enough, you will encounter new monsters the rest of the year, too, at your office.
What’s frightening is that these corporate demons are actually real, and in too many workplaces, they are thriving off of the life energies of their colleagues.
At some point in your career, you will be face-to-face with a workplace monster backing you into a corner. Career experts shared tips on how to identify these harrowing monsters and how to defeat them:
Energy Vampires
Energy vampires feed off of your time and attention. Their techniques may vary, but the biggest sign of an energy vampire is how drained and tired you feel after interacting with them. You might dread bumping into them at work as a result.
Perhaps they are complainers who never stop venting their gripes and woes. Or maybe they are always having a horrible day and want everyone to join them. They might overshare unwanted details of their personal life in one-sided conversations.
“This person treats stress like a virus: As soon as they feel it, they can’t wait to find someone to spread it to. It doesn’t matter if you have a big meeting coming up or you’re clearly ‘in the zone,’” said Tessa West, a professor of psychology at New York University and author of “Jerks at Work: Toxic Coworkers and What to Do About Them.”
“They will interrupt you to tell you all of the ways in which their meeting was a disaster or the boss doesn’t appreciate them,” she said.
Your best defense against an energy vampire is to set boundaries on your time. The good news is that you will always have the excuse of work deadlines to get out of talking with an energy vampire in the office.
Or try saying you can chat but only for a few minutes, and make it only at a time that works for you. “Give them a time that’s convenient for you. Preferably when your brain is fried and not much will be lost in terms of deep work,” West suggested.
Understand that energy vampires often do their draining techniques out of loneliness. This might give you more patience and compassion when dealing with them, too.
As psychologist Ryan Howes previously told HuffPost: Energy vampires “are often people who have unmet needs for attention and approval that could stem from any number of difficult or even traumatic issues from their past.... Thinking of them that way may help you see they are a person, just like you, but who had some speed bumps and poor guidance that resulted in this unfortunate interpersonal style.”
Ghost Managers
More than micromanagers, you are most likely to be haunted by a ghost manager as an office employee. As one 2010 study found, the most common type of destructive leadership that employees endure is the hands-off leader who is not involved in career development.
In other words, they might as well be ghosts for all the good they can do for you. They are reluctant to stand up for you when it matters, they refuse to give you any specific feedback on your performance and, in some cases, they might outright ignore you and your accomplishments.
A 2015 Harvard Business Review survey of 1,000 working U.S. adults found that a boss’s absentee leadership was the top preoccupation that troubled employees. This included bosses who did not recognize employee achievements, bosses who did not give clear directions and managers who never had time to meet with employees.
To defeat these ghostly managers, you need to make them show up. Elaine Lou Cartas, a business and career coach for women of color, advised name-dropping important stakeholders and documenting your explicit requests for help in emails.
“I used to name-drop a lot. That’s how people would pay attention to me when I was first starting in my career,” she said. “Often people think, ‘Oh, it’s just for so-and-so. I don’t care.’ But then when it’s a big stakeholder or a prominent figure in the company, then people perk up and pay attention more.“
In emails, you could say, “We have a meeting with the board. I’ve been doing A, B and C. Needed to loop you in. I know you’re presenting tomorrow,” Cartas said as an example to document your contributions and remind your manager of them.
And if you are not finding the career development you need, seek sponsors or leaders in different departments who can offer you high-profile assignments and advocate for you behind closed doors.
Werewolf Co-Workers
Like the creatures who turn into aggressive monsters under the full moon, werewolf colleagues are collegial one day but then you feel like they could bite your head off the next. These co-workers create an environment of anxiety and fear in those who are stuck working alongside them and their mercurial moods.
Cartas advised keeping a journal to track their behaviors and see if they are tied to certain events. “If you notice that they’re always agitated after a board meeting, then you know not to respond to them after that,” she said.
In some cases, pointing out the change in mood with a curious and compassionate tone can help: “Hey, you seem a little uneasy. Is everything OK? Do you need space? I know we’re supposed to meet about this. Maybe it’s better to meet in an hour,” Cartas said as an example.
Meanwhile, West said, the only way to defeat these kinds of werewolves is through transparent communication, planned in advance, with a clear goal of an interaction “that is about clearing up different interpretations of their behavior.” Focus on the specific things they’ve done, not on how they make you feel bad, she said.
For example, if your boss was particularly terse with you in a client meeting, you can bring it up in a neutral way and ask to understand the meaning behind their actions.
“Most of us have a transparency bias ― we think it’s obvious why we did what we did. But you can’t really know unless you ask,” West said. She said some co-workers may “have a wolverine boss of their own micromanaging things, which you won’t know about unless you ask about the underlying causes of their behaviors.”
Enforcing boundaries on your time and energy are helpful ways to limit a monstrous colleague’s influence on your workday. But ultimately bad behaviors are contagious, and you can “catch” the moods and judgments of others, research has found. In fact, a 2016 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that the more that people saw and were the victims of rudeness, the more likely they were to become hostile, too.
In some workplaces, the best option for your mental health is to start strategizing an exit plan and quit if your office monster is draining you and turning you into something you are not.
Once you have tried everything in your control to negotiate or collaborate with a workplace monster, “then the question is: Do you want to continue being in that type of culture where you truly do turn into a monster?” Cartas said.
