My Boss Hated Me — Until I Showed Him He Was Mistaken

This is a story about changing someone’s opinion of me.

Bad Job, Bad History, Don’t Repeat

I started a job in a Scrum shop, and within about a month I realized the Scrum Master didn’t like me. So I spent the next several weeks trying to show him my worth — I went above and beyond expectations to support test, to ensure code quality, to fix problems that other developers caused and were not interested in fixing. I worked with some really lazy developers; they didn’t believe in testing, automated or manual, and would push code as soon as it might work. Most of the time, this broke other features or only partially worked because they did not test edge cases. They also “believed” in continuous integration, but did not believe in monitoring the build, much less fixing build errors — Oh, the build’s broken, well someone else needs to fix that. So I fixed the builds, I fixed their bugs, I became the go-to person for the QA department when something wasn’t working, because I got things done.

After a month of this, two sprints, I thought the Scrum Master would surely see my value and be happier with me. But if anything, things got worse. After one particularly painful sprint, where I had worked two weekends in a row trying to make sure QA could do their jobs, I noticed the Scrum Master was avoiding eye contact with me more than usual, that whenever I spoke in a meeting he zoned out and completely stopped listening (even if he had expressly asked me to contribute). These are normal occurrences for me in the workplace — as a person of the female persuasion, I am accustomed to being ignored and treated rudely by my colleagues. However, in this case it I could tell it was something more— my co-workers began treating me with the same disregard the Scrum Master showed, where they had previously been neutral. Having been in this situation before at TechGiant, I knew I had to do something.

At TechGiant, I let the situation go. When people started treating me like an idiot, with disregard and disrespect, I “tried harder” and worked myself into burnout. And ultimately they kicked me to the curb still convinced I was useless. I knew that I couldn’t let the situation go again; I didn’t deserve to be treated like that, and I didn’t have to. I got some good advice from a friend:

If he formed this, clearly wrong, opinion of you in a matter of a few weeks, it’s only going to take a few weeks to change his opinion around. It’s not too late. You have nothing to lose by trying, and everything to gain.

Scrum Master from Saturn

So I asked for a few minutes of his time, which he avoided and put off, but I wouldn’t go away, so eventually we sat down. I don’t think he looked at me once in the entire meeting. I told him that I noticed that we weren’t communicating well, and I felt that I wasn’t meeting his expectations, and asked what I could do differently. It took about half an hour to ply the information from him, and when I finally did it shocked me. Here were the things I was doing “wrong”:

• I wasn’t a team player.
• I wasn’t contributing.
• I wasn’t good at my job.
• I was always sick; of the two months at the job, I had been sick for 20 days.

These all shocked me, but I think the sick days shocked me the most. I had a horrible encounter with a respiratory and then a stomach illness that lasted nine days, of which I was out of the office exactly five. It did take me several weeks to recover my energy, since my digestive system had actually stopped working (which is physically draining), and I was sickly while I was at work but definitely present. How did five days turn into a month in his mind?

I very firmly corrected him on this point, then moved the conversation along — I didn’t want to argue, but I definitely needed him to know that his perception was inaccurate on that point. In fact, his perception was orthogonal to my own on all the other points as well, so I thanked him for his honesty and asked, “What am I doing that indicates to you that I am not team player, that I do not contribute, and that I’m not good at my job?”

After some encouragement, we ended up having a conversation where he (still not looking at me) revealed that his entire negative perception was centered around three things:

• My illness
• My working late and the weekends
• My work not getting done as quickly as I said it would

I pressed him on the second point, saying, “I don’t understand how my working late and weekends is a problem; in my understanding, that shows that I’m committed to the project and I’m willing to put in the time necessary to ensure its success.”

He said:

If you can’t do your work in 8 hours, it shows me you’re bad at your job. Working nights and weekends shows me that you aren’t a good enough developer to get your job done in a normal amount of time.

I was floored. What crazy place had this man hatched from? I gently tried to explain that I was supporting the build, enabling QA to do their jobs, so that we could finish the sprint on time, but he just kept repeating those lines. I also gently tried to help him understand that all of this additional support was why my features took a little longer than I estimated. But he couldn’t hear these things. So I stopped trying to get through to him and acquiesced.

“How can I show you my commitment, that I’m a team player, and good at my job?” I asked at the end of the meeting. He told me I needed to do only two things: 1) do what I said I was going to do, when I said I would do it, and 2) work exactly 8 hours a day, no more.

Becoming a Saturnite

So I did. Over the next two months, I completed overhauled my investment in the project. I stopped fixing the problems other people caused, even when they were to features I was responsible for — instead I just trotted over to his desk and reported them, so he could do something with them (I didn’t want them to stay in the code base, I didn’t not-care that much). I stopped helping QA out, and referred them to the developers whose features were broken as points of contact. I hated having to turn them away, having to tell them I couldn’t help them out over the weekend, but I did. I clocked in at 9 and left at 6 on the dot. I took exactly one hour for lunch — where I usually did a phone interview. I stopped contributing in meetings, stopped giving them an opportunity to gang up on me and tell me I was wrong. I stopped offering opinions, stopped mentioning how the actions being suggested were going to cause other problems down the line. I just shut up and smiled.

And, two months later, when I gave my notice, the Scrum Master seemed genuinely shocked. “You’ve made such progress, you’ve completely turned yourself around since we talked! You’ve really taken my advice to heart, and you’re doing so well.” (Thank goodness I was prepared for him taking credit for my “improvement” or else I would have been angry.) I didn’t correct him, didn’t try to educate him. I didn’t say anything about how the inability to deliver at the end of a sprint had exactly corresponded with my “improvement.” I didn’t point out that the fact that his job was so much more stressful and time-consume corresponded to my “improvement” as well, nor that QA’s overload and consistent failure to complete their work also, somehow, aligned with that happy event. I didn’t mention how the bug rate skyrocketing and customer complaints increasing had, in fact, a direct relationship to my contribution level.

I didn’t need to say any of these things, because he would be unable to fathom how that was the case. He thought so ill of me when I was over-performing, and so well of me now that I was doing (what I considered to be) the minimum, that there is no way his mind could grasp anything I might have said. I knew the truth, and that was enough for me.

I had won. In a few weeks, he had formed his horrible opinion of me. In about the same amount of time, I had turned that opinion around. And it had grown increasingly positive. So positive, in fact, that he offered to write me a letter of recommendation as I was tendering my resignation. He was positively gushing about me. Instead of repeating the same, terrible path from TechGiant, I had stopped the negativity in its tracks and turned that crazy train around.

What I Learned

I still don’t understand him. The way his brain works is a complete mystery to me. But I’m so glad I had that job, as terrible as it was, because I learned that perceptions CAN be change, they’re not fixed, they’re not insurmountable. Now, the next time someone doesn’t like me, I know what to do:

• Have a frank conversation to identify their concept of what the problem is. This is a one-sided communication where they tell me all the terrible things about me and I just listen. I don’t defend, I can offer scenarios that I think refute their point, but I present them in a way so that is it a question: You’re saying I should work exactly 8 hours, but what about when the build is broken over the weekend and QA needs help to do their jobs? Isn’t that a time to work extra? My goal is not to prove them wrong, but to understand their thoughts, to get inside their perception. The answer was, No, you should never work more than 8 hours. So now I know.
• Be gentle but tenacious to draw out things that they may not want to talk about. If they are beating around the bush or talking around the issue, or choosing their words carefully, I say, “I value your feedback and really want to hear what you have to say.”
• Tamp down on my own feelings; this is a requirements-gathering meeting, it’s purely informational. Feelings have no place. Any feelings I express will just interfere with my ability to get data. I grit my teeth, do some math, think about frolicking kittens, whatever I have to do to get past the emotion to hear and ingest the words.
• Bluntly ask how I can improve their perception, how I can show them my investment. Once I’ve gotten here, none of these should be a surprise to either of us, but it creates an unofficial agreement between us. If I do these things, you will know that I have done them, and I can expect your opinion to improve. If I have any questions about how to implement their suggestion, I ask it here. How can I show you I will say what I mean and mean what I say? What steps or actions can I take? What does that mean to you? … I still don’t understand, can you give me an example?
• Follow up in a week to see if they are noticing the effort on my part in each arena of improvement. If not, have some more conversation.
• Keep following up on a short cycle until I hear positive feedback; then the cycle lengthens. I followed up with the Scrum Master every week for about three weeks, then only once in the following sprint. Of course, I was trying to leave the company, so I can’t say how often I would have followed up if I were interested in staying.