I’m not officially a manager myself, so I protect people in the ways that are available to me. I try to be a safe ear and sometimes a shoulder to rest on. I listen, empathise and, when someone is doing good work, I say it — to them, but also to others. I also try to give people visibility: bring more junior colleagues into meetings, include them in email chains, give them credit for their work and create opportunities for them to be seen and heard. One way I try to go through life is by focusing on the positive. So when management becomes toxic or demoralising, I try to create a small space around me where that toxicity doesn’t have to dominate everything. A space where people can still feel valued, supported and good at what they do. I may not be able to protect someone from the person above us, but I can make sure they don’t feel completely alone underneath them.

@Christina Tkalec great analogy !

Above me. My manager. Green and clearly a first-time manager. Moving the goalposts. Building a performance evaluation out of half-accurate facts. Fishing with other team members for information about how I «worked ». That created two main problems for me. First, it made me feel like I was being made to look bad in front of colleagues I had barely worked with. They now had a perception of me that came from them and not from actually interacting with me. I started feeling like everyone was talking about me behind my back and that I had no allies. Second, I started doubting everything I did — every interaction, every comment, every work task. Green managers who micromanage may be the worst kind. They suffocate you, yet they don’t know how to/ where to lead you - they are still figuring it out for themselves. What made it particularly difficult was that I had been hired because I had a different profile. I was excited to be given some autonomy to create and manage my projects and clients. But, day to day, those differences increasingly became a problem for them, almost as though I wasn’t making enough effort to fit in or work the way they expected me to. They would make comments like « feels like you’re more part of that xyz client team, rather than ours ». My performance evaluation was traumatic experience. I had never received anything like it in my career. And I literally felt like I had been hit my a truck. The irony was that my clients were happy — several had independently sent appreciation emails at different times and on different projects. That’s when I realised that they weren’t really evaluating me based on my work or my contribution to the team and organisation. They were evaluating how well I could do things the way they wanted, follow their lead and, at times, make them look good and feel powerful (even removing me from management meetings for projects I had been handling A to Z,and going instead even though they had little knowledge of the project). The most damaging part wasn’t even the evaluation. It was how quickly daily micromanagement made me start questioning myself; every comment felt like a microagression, I had no allies. It’s a lonely place to be.

@Lisa Carroll I’m still very much figuring out the second part. The doubt is still there, and I’ve realised it has made me hypervigilant — not only about the advice I give or the work I produce, but about completely ordinary interactions within the team. If everyone goes for lunch, can I just not go because I don’t feel like it, or will that be interpreted as me not making an effort or me not fitting in? It is pervasive. It starts taking over everything. When I tried to speak out, I realized how micromanagement takes the form of micro-aggressions: each incident on its own can seem so small that, if you explain it to someone else, they might genuinely think you’re overreacting or being difficult. But when you experience these things repeatedly, the cumulative effect is completely different. At the beginning, I confided in a few colleagues and was basically told to take the “path of least resistance.” I thought that was good advice at first — adapt, choose your battles, don’t react to everything. Now I’m wondering where the line is between adapting and slowly losing myself in the process. I’ve also become much more careful about what I share with my closest-colleagues as I’ve realized that things travel. “If you are silent, they will kill you and say you enjoyed it.” How do you address a pattern of behaviour towards you when each individual incident seems too small to raise without sounding dramatic or difficult? Especially when that person is more established within the team. My approach: (try to) keep my head down, do the work, and document my efforts and contributions so that when feedback comes, I can respond with facts and concrete examples rather than trying to reconstruct everything afterwards. But I still struggle with the bigger question: when does adapting stop being resilience and start becoming self-erasure? And if the answer is eventually to leave, is that protecting yourself — or does some part of you inevitably feel like you let the other person take the opportunity from you?