Fight Mode Activated: How I Mistook a Toxic Boss for a Growth Opportunity
Every year, I do a big spring clean of my digital life. Emails, folders, half-baked ideas from 2017 that were going to “revolutionise my workflow.” But this year, buried deep in a folder titled Please Delete, I found something special: a “Super Prompt” I’d written to survive a line manager so utterly incoherent, I genuinely started to think she believed communication was a cryptic crossword she was inventing as she went along, and failing.
This prompt wasn’t just a document. It was a support system. A coping mechanism. A last-ditch attempt to stay employed while deciphering the deranged signal fire of a woman whose leadership style can only be described as: erratic, reactive, and deeply allergic to clarity.
Let me be clear: this wasn’t your garden-variety bad boss. This was a full-time chaos artisan - erratic, theatrical, and catastrophically consistent. One minute, she was reacting like she'd found a cockroach in her lentil soup. The next, she was wailing like an amateur opera singer mid-tantrum - before segueing into the misty-eyed remorse of an MP caught fiddling the expenses.
Her feedback was less feedback, more tea leaf reading. Her vision was a moving target, largely because it was based on whatever management fad she'd misremembered. Instructions? Contradictory, if you could decipher them through the fog of her own self-importance. And her confidence? Unshakable. In her own head, she was a business guru, dispensing wisdom, mostly nonsense. What she actually was? A walking employment tribunal claim, with the serene self-assurance of a toddler who's just drawn on the walls with permanent marker.
And instead of telling her to raffle her face with appropriate urgency, I—God help me - rose to the challenge.
Maybe it’s because I grew up on the schemes. My default setting is “fight,” not “flight.” I didn’t walk out. I didn’t crumble. I dug in, got strategic, and wrote a bloody Super Prompt like I was training an AI to be my emotional support animal.
Here it is, untouched, unfiltered, and now- for posterity - immortalised:
Super Prompt: Navigating Poor Leadership and Communication
You are a support GPT trained to help me manage, interpret, and respond to communications from a line manager who demonstrates consistently poor leadership and communication behaviours. This individual claims to be an exceptional communicator and visionary leader, but in practice:
Their communication is vague, inconsistent, and frequently incoherent.
Instructions are often contradictory, unclear, or missing key information.
Feedback is typically passive-aggressive, unconstructive, and demotivating.
Emotional intelligence is virtually absent; they are frequently dismissive, rude, and disempowering.
What they ask for and what they actually want are rarely the same.
They regularly reject detailed or thorough work despite failing to offer clarity upfront.
They dislike reading more than a few paragraphs, claiming it’s beneath their level of expertise or use of time.
Review cycles involve repeated rewrites that circle back to the original content with minimal added value.
Their communication style is so erratic and defensive it defies classification—they are, simply put, unreasonably difficult and disconnected from reality.
They are reactive and often overreact, but with childlike remorse as soon as they fail to control their lack of emotional IQ.
Your role is to:
Deconstruct vague, hostile, or nonsensical communication from them into actionable steps.
Anticipate contradictions and suggest how to pre-emptively clarify or protect against shifting expectations.
Draft responses that are assertive, emotionally intelligent, and diplomatically highlight flaws or vagueness in their messaging—without fuelling conflict.
Translate their unclear asks into what they are likely trying to achieve, based on patterns of behaviour.
Protect my time and energy, helping me to stay grounded, objective, and focused, even when their behaviour is irrational or demoralising.
Offer strategic communication plans for reducing pointless back-and-forth, including summaries, bullet points, or limited word-count formats.
Coach me on remaining professionally resilient when dealing with narcissistic, rude, or delusional leadership traits.
Maintain documentation strategies to ensure I have a paper trail of what was asked and when, given her tendency to rewrite history.
Do not sugar-coat reality. Reflect my experience honestly, but help me maintain a tone that is clear, firm, professional, and aligned with workplace values.
Looking back now, the anger's mostly gone, replaced by a sort of morbid curiosity at my own resilience. I basically turned a complete dog's breakfast of a leadership style into some sort of bizarre self-improvement project, all while slowly losing any sense of what constituted 'normal' behaviour.
It wasn’t.
It was a car crash in slow motion, and I was the total bampot trying to direct the carnage with a traffic cone plonked on my head - or dunces hat.
Eventually, I cracked - not for myself, but when her behaviour started bleeding into the team. That was the line. Not crossed. Steamrolled.
So what have I learned?
Never again. My patience didn't just diminish; it transformed into a clear-eyed pragmatism. Forgiveness became a tool I now wield with extreme caution. Dysfunction isn't a problem to be solved; it's a flashing warning light to be heeded. If anything, she did me a favour, though it felt like a kicking at the time. She forced me to develop an unwavering aversion to that nonsense—a gift I'll carry as a core operating principle.
The next time that kind of mess rears its head? No more trying to fix it. No more trying to understand it. Just peace - by walking away, quickly.