I joined a mid-sized company as a senior operations lead supporting a division with a very small leadership footprint. The person I worked closely with on the day-to-day had been with the company for over a decade and was deeply entrenched.

At first things were fine, but over time, she began making increasingly negative comments about the organization, its executives, and then eventually about me. It started subtly, undermining my hire, implying I wasn’t a “cultural fit” due to the way I looked (I have long hair for a man, and something that can be seen as unusual in the corporate world), and suggesting leadership had chosen me for arbitrary reasons. Then it escalated into repeated attempts to push me out of the role, framed as “helpful career advice”: telling me the job wasn’t worth the commute, implying I should find something that “paid better,” and questioning whether I belonged in the role at all.

I later learned this was a pattern. She had driven out multiple people in my position before I arrived, one by one, each leaving because the working dynamic had become intolerable. Why did she do this? Who knows. Maybe she liked the power of manipulating people? Maybe they thought they would pay her more if they couldn’t keep someone in my position?

The situation continued for months (I’m patient to a fault) until it reached a breaking point. Constant belittling, dismissive comments, and a full day of criticizing my compensation and future at the company. When she left for the evening, I finally picked up the phone and informed senior leadership what had been happening for nearly a year.

Within a week, they gave her the option to resign or be terminated. She resigned.

I stepped into her role shortly after.

In a previous role leading a large, multi-department team, things deteriorated quickly when a new senior manager below me was hired to bring together teams and work on project management. She was outwardly warm and a huge hit amongst most people socially… but she treated the workplace like a “dating game”. She would assign projects, tasks, even client work and client meetings based on who she thought had “chemistry” would make “cute babies”, etc. It escalated when she made an “innocent” comment to a client directly, about dating one of the executives because they looked good together, and the client dropped our company entirely. She was fired, and absolutely devastated, and truly thought she had done nothing wrong at all.

I worked directly with a senior leader who could not operate without my presence. A decision to be made? I had to be there to nod and encourage him. An email to be sent? I had to read and then reread it… even if it was only a sentence or two long. He would hold me hostage on calls for hours on end, putting me so far behind on my own work that he then put me on a performance improvement plan for my “poor performance history”. It was the only job I ever quite where I actively spoke loudly and negatively to a leader in front of everyone, and knew I could never ask for a recommendation from them. It was worth the release of pressure.

I was promoted internally to become Director to a cross functional team I had worked with in the past. Granted, it was an odd promotion, since I had only ever worked with this team in a skip level or cross functional way, but I was excited to get the opportunity because I was comfortable with the work, the company, and happy to lead a new team. One of my reports was less than thrilled… he would consistently ignore my direction, roll his eyes during meetings, snicker with peers (who, in their defense, looked uncomfortable). Originally I thought he was upset because he got passed over for the promotion and I called him in to chat about it, and see if there was something I could do to assist with the transition, or if he was interested in another senior position I could help him obtain. Turns out? He was actually angry because he didn’t want to be told what to do by a “little girl”. Immediately clear the issue wasn’t the position or the leadership. I immediately took it to HR, to which he tried laughing off like a joke (because who doesn’t love making misogynistic jokes in the workplace?) and he was pretty much fired on the spot. I shouldn’t be cocky about it… but I definitely am.

One of my direct reports agreed to every request across the organization that was asked of them… even ones far outside their org, their scope, their team, their education… it didn’t matter. They were the epitome of the “yes man” and everyone loved taking advantage of their goodwill. They were drowning, missing deadlines, working way over hours but never actually getting anything done. Whenever I tried to delegate or prioritize, they insisted everything was “manageable.” It wasn’t.

My CEO loved “spontaneous innovation.” He’d call me at 7pm with a brand-new idea and say, “Let’s present this tomorrow”. He’d even leave these as voicemails and expect that I’d come ready, since he had left the message, even if I hadn’t answered. He was completely unaware that he was halting and essentially destroying months of work from our team. Every time he walked into a meeting unannounced, people visibly tensed.

We had an engineer who was absolutely brilliant and absolutely toxic. She hit every KPI but talked over everyone, dismissed thoughts, suggestions, opinions, even stakeholders on the projects. She actually had made junior staff cry at one point or another. Leadership refused to intervene because she was “critical path.” Eventually after the turnover rate was too high to ignore, she was demoted to a non-leadership role in order to keep her expertise but limit her ability to have “power” over others. It didn’t work and I ended up quitting just to get away from her.

An old manager of mine used to brag about being a bully in high school. The guy was a piece of work, and I didn’t stay very long.

My old boss lied.. like, a lot. She was constantly putting random numbers in the reports and manipulating the data to make things look better than they were to her superiors. Someone eventually noticed and she was fired, but I was surprised at how long she lasted.

Yelled for any tiny mistake, and never praised you when you did something right. It’s probably not the most original story, but working for someone like that is a nightmare. It was the worst few years of my life. My mental health plummeted and my self confidence was nonexistent. I got a job offer from an old friend that I am super grateful for and am doing much better now.