Coaching & Leadership
When Your Manager Is the Problem: What Part Is Still Yours to Influence?
Seeing your part is not the same as blaming yourself
Core question
In this situation, what part is still mine to influence?
In brief
When the manager is genuinely part of the problem, focus on what remains within your influence: clarity, boundaries, requests, assumptions and choices. Seeing your part does not excuse the manager or erase power differences.
01
Seeing your part is not the same as blaming yourself
“My manager is the problem.”
I hear versions of this sentence often in executive coaching sessions.
A manager who does not give feedback. A manager who controls too much. A manager who does not seem to notice the work. A manager who is unclear in decisions. Or a manager with whom conversation has become so difficult that distance feels easier.
Sometimes the manager really is the problem.
Coaching should not reduce every harmful behavior to “the client’s perception.” Nor should it ask someone in an unequal power relationship to take responsibility for their manager’s behavior.
But there is another question as well:
In this situation, what part is still mine to influence?
For me, this is often where a conversation can move from focusing only on the other person’s behavior toward seeing the choices that still belong to the individual.
02
The relationship with a manager has been one of the recurring themes in my sessions
In a review of recurring patterns across a subset of coaching sessions, the relationship with a manager was one of the recurring themes.
The issues differed: a demanding manager, a controlling manager, feeling overlooked or treated unfairly, lack of feedback, conflict, difficulty setting boundaries, or not feeling seen.
But in some of these conversations, as the issue opened further, the question was no longer only:
“What is wrong with my manager?”
Other questions also entered the conversation:
Have I clearly said what I want?
Am I holding an expectation we have never actually discussed?
What do I do when I disagree?
When I do not feel heard, how do I respond?
Where have I set a boundary, and where have I only stayed dissatisfied?
And sometimes a more important question takes shape:
“What pattern am I repeating in this relationship?”
This has become one of the notable patterns in my coaching sessions. In my own internal notes, I have called it “Manager as a Mirror.”
It is not a scientific model or a psychological diagnosis. It is simply a recurring observation from my coaching experience.
03
Seeing your part does not let the manager off the hook
That may be the most important point.
Seeing your part in a difficult relationship does not mean overlooking the other person’s behavior.
It means finding, among all the things you cannot control, the part where you can still choose:
A clearer request.
A firmer boundary.
A conversation that has not happened.
An assumption that needs examining.
A behavior you have repeated.
Or even a decision to leave a relationship that is no longer repairable.
In my experience, growth in our relationship with power begins where a person neither places everything on the manager nor places everything on themselves.
They become able to hold both at once:
What is genuinely the problem outside them, and what remains open to choice in how they respond.
Sometimes seeing that gap between “what I cannot change” and “what I can still choose” is an important part of what happens in coaching.
Not so that someone hands us a ready-made answer.
So that we can see the issue with more clarity and make our own decision.
Research sources
Questions to carry forward
- 01What specific behavior or event is creating the problem for me?
- 02What has still not been discussed clearly between us?
- 03In this relationship, what is within my influence, and what is not?
- 04In meeting this situation, what kind of professional or manager do I want to be?