The usual advice on dealing with a bad boss is to look for a new job. I’m not so sure.
If your boss is truly abusive, you have no choice–you need to move on, and move on quickly. But if your bad boss is at least bearable, it might be that he or she turns out to be a blessing in disguise.
Most middle-class workers today earn enough to acquire a good measure of financial freedom early in life. Few make much of an effort to do so. Why? It’s not a priority. Most of us are caught up in our day-to-day activities, and never stop to give much thought to the question of how to save enough to overcome paycheck dependence.
Suffering with a case of Bad Boss Syndrome could be just the incentive you need to get off the dime. I never had to deal with a really terrible boss. For me, it was a job loss that caused me to stop in my tracks and begin questioning how much longer I wanted to continue through life dependent on “The Man” to cover the costs of my groceries and housing and health insurance. It was a painful experience to lose that job. But that painful experience turned out to be the kick in the butt I needed to make some important changes in my money management habits.
Pain Produces Drive
I’ve heard similar stories from a number of others in conversations I have sat in on during my six-year posting career in the Financial Freedom Discussion-Board Community. What separates good savers from poor savers? Drive. What provides drive? In a lot of cases, it’s a burning desire to escape some bad experience. A lot of long-term good can come from short-term pain that is put to constructive use.
Say that you follow the conventional advice and escape your bad boss by finding a new job where you get along with the boss just fine. That solves the problem for a time. But for how long? New bosses come into our lives all the time in this age of corporate restructurings. The workplace environment is just not stable enough in this New Economy to insure you that you won’t be facing another case of Bad Boss Syndrome not too many years down the road.
It’s going to be harder to find a new job the next time around. As you get older and move up the pay scale, it gets to be a complicated thing to leave one job and find another at which you do the same sort of work for at least equal pay. It might be that by finding a new job all that you are doing is putting off dealing in a permanent way with the bad boss problem to a time when it will be harder to do so.
Paycheck Dependence Is the Root Problem
The root problem is not the bad boss. The root problem is your paycheck dependence. It is your need to rely on a regular paycheck to cover your costs of living that makes you vulnerable to bad bosses and all others sorts of problems that arise in the modern-day workplace. How about aiming not to solve the problem of just one bad boss, but of getting on track to solving all the problems of paycheck dependence holding you back from realizing your potential for far higher levels of life and work satisfaction?
Try to look at the bad boss situation as an opportunity. The benefit that comes from working for a bad boss is that he or she makes it painfully clear just how high a price you pay for not attaining financial freedom early in life. That gives you an edge over all those who have been lulled by working for good bosses into thinking that attaining one’s financial freedom early in life is not so critical a goal to pursue. Endure some bad stuff now, and you can get yourself into a position where you will be reaping benefits for many years to come.
It Doesn’t Take As Long as You Think
The problem with the advice I am giving here is that most view financial freedom as something that can only be attained with decades of effort. It’s not so! It’s true that it takes a long time to accumulate enough assets to be able to leave the world of work behind you for good. But you don’t need to achieve complete financial independence to gain a good measure of control over what sorts of work experiences you will accept and what sorts of bosses you will be willing to work for.
Each dollar you save makes you more free to do the work you love. Save enough to cover only the most critical costs of living (housing expenses, food expenses, health insurance expenses, and so on) and you gain a greatly enhanced ability to call the shots in the work you do.
You don’t even need to save enough to cover all of the critical expenses. Cover a good bit of them with the earnings from your expenses, and you can cover the remainder with whatever work you will be doing when you are doing the work you truly love. The work that you truly love may well pay less than the work you do today. But it is not at all likely that it will pay nothing. Apply some creativity to the task, and my bet is that you will be able to come up with a plan that will get you on the road to winning a significantly higher level of financial freedom than you possess today in five years or so.
I am sympathetic to bad boss stories. Even those of us who have never had truly terrible bosses can imagine what it must feel like to have to endure being under the thumb of a tyrant eight hours of the day five days of the week. I feel better about permanent solutions than temporary fixes, however. Running to a new job to escape a bad boss strikes me as being in many circumstances a temporary fix. Getting serious about putting together a plan to win financial freedom early in life strikes me as being a permanent solution to the core problem in evidence when a worker complains of a bad boss–dependence on a paycheck to cover the critical expenses of life.
No one enjoys having to endure a bad boss. But there is wisdom in the idea that living well is the best revenge. Win financial freedom early in life, and you will be living well. Use visions of your bad boss to inspire you to save like a demon, and there will come a day in the not-too-distant future when you will bless the day that bad boss came into your life.
Escaping a bad boss is one of the New Luxuries available today not through spending, but only through saving.