I actually thanked my micromanager and people think I'm crazy

Last month at my call center job in Phoenix, my supervisor Sandra stood behind my chair for 10 minutes timing my bathroom breaks. Most of the team hates her guts for it, but she's the only reason I learned the skip-tracing trick that cut my handle time by 45 seconds per call. That one change got me off the weekly performance improvement plan after 8 months of threats. I told her thank you in front of five other reps and they all stared at me like I grew a second head. Sandra just nodded and walked away, but the next week she stopped hovering and started sending me the good leads from the overflow queue. Makes me wonder if acting grateful actually changes how they treat you, or if I just got lucky. Has anyone else gotten a weird benefit from playing nice with a boss everyone hates?

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kelly.keith4mo ago

And I completely agree with you, I found out the same thing with my old manager at the insurance place. Everyone wanted him fired for counting our keystrokes, but he was the only one willing to show me how to use the shortcuts in the claims system. Being nice to him turned out to be the smartest thing I did, because he eventually stopped watching me and started letting me take the easy claims instead of the hard ones.

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leo_mason4mo ago

Yeah "being nice to him turned out to be the smartest thing I did" really stuck with me. I read somewhere that people who are hard to get along with usually have something to offer if you can see past the rough edges. You got better at your job AND made a friend out of it, that's a win win.

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