I’ve recently walked away from a fairly well-paid job because my boss was utterly lacking in human empathy and her behaviour was so toxic it was making me feel ill. Think accusing me of not doing enough work when I was clearly overworked, telling me I had made other people look foolish in meetings with colleagues by completing reports that I had to send to senior management and that everyone else was more than happy with, telling me in online meetings that my offer to record/transcribe (trying to help her out) wasn’t needed and that it was not my meeting. Critiquing and pulling apart all my work in supervisions, telling me that other people had done the reports (not me) and speaking to me in like a four year old. Never asking how I was or bothering with any of the “wellbeing” questions that were a vital part of the supervision records.
This is someone who clearly disliked me from the start, & set out to make my professional life hell. Unfortunately she was also my line manager. Never praised pieces of work, heaped a load more on me and then sat in a handover meeting with the Snr manager (her boss) and when asked if she knew about all my pieces of work said “Nope. News to me.”
Just for context, everyone else I’ve ever worked with professionally has been great and I’ve never had any issues like this before. But she made me so uncomfortable and unsafe in her company that I handed my notice in - after trying to amicably address it directly through her and subsequently her manager when my attempts failed.
I sometimes feel angry that I’ve had to walk away from a steady job because of this toxic management culture. And then I think perhaps I did what was necessary in order to dodge a bullet. Maybe it was a wise move. I was struggling to eat, struggling to sleep, struggling to be present with my family. And physically, I felt very ill as well as mentally. But because of the ok salary I have moments where I wonder if I did the right thing.
Has anyone else done similar and not regretted it?