Introduction

Twenty years ago, I was a senior leader at a Fortune 100 company. My success hadn’t meant everything came easy. I worked hard, drove great results, built a strong team, and had to manage many of my own demons. I was no different than any other successful leader.

My biggest challenge at the time was not telling my boss exactly what I thought of him. I recall spending hours scouring every bookstore I could find for a book to help me manage him. It was the dawn of Amazon, so I typed in every title I could imagine. The Holy Grail would have been a magic wand that would help me improve my professional life—but a great book would have worked, too. I typed:

How to deal with difficult bosses…
How to win when your boss is bigger than you…
How to build a relationship with someone you don’t respect…
How to work with assholes.

You get the idea. At the time, there happened to be one book on managing difficult people. It was small with a glossy binding and I hoped that book was the answer. In those pages, I held hope for a solution and—more importantly—redemption.

Spoiler alert: I found neither.

I had been through some life altering situations early in my career, but my new boss and his trusted sidekick were a challenge the size of Kilimanjaro. I was no quitter, though. I’d figure it out, book or no book. I strapped on my hiking cleats and started the climb. Twelve years and quite a few significant setbacks later, I still held on to my job and unfortunately… my frustrations.

Looking back, I had successfully learned how to respect what my boss and his sidekick did bring of value. I also learned how to drink scotch in the shower after a long day at the office on those days when their good qualities were…let’s just say… a little less evident. I am thankful that at my level, I only had to interact with my boss every two weeks. My coping strategy may have landed me in rehab had it been more!

So, why did I stay?

I loved the company and I was intensely loyal to my teams. I had an average of three thousand employees that worked for me and I never wanted to let them down. That was what I told myself. Truth was, I hated to lose. Quitting because they were difficult would have meant I had lost.

Finally, twelve years later, my love for the company dwindled and my frustration toward these two men was now powered by jet fuel. They wanted me gone as badly as I needed to go. I have never been able to play poker because I’m too easy to read, and they read me. So, as you’ll learn throughout the pages of this book, I may have let them in on what I really felt about them on a few occasions over the years.

The biggest problem was… I had become just as toxic as they were.