At a certain point, this disregard may greatly affect your psyche. In a survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management, 84% of American employees said that incompetent managers create a lot of unnecessary stress, and the biggest recommendation for employees on what their managers should improve was communication skills.
Ideally, great managers take the lead and ask questions in their meetings with everyone on the team about what's going well and what's not. However, when your boss won't listen, you have two choices: Either do nothing and hope they notice your dissatisfaction, or do something to make them listen to you.
Jennifer Tardy, a career coach and diversity and inclusion consultant, says she often encounters employees who avoid their managers and don't feel comfortable speaking to them in a direct or timely manner.
“Employees have been waiting too long to have a courageous conversation, and now the situation has escalated, and at this point, instead of having a logical and rational conversation with their managers, they get angry, and the message they want to get across is often lost in the heat,” Tardi says. But there are helpful steps you can take to get your boss to listen to you long before you get to that point.
3 Things to Do If Your Manager Doesn't Listen to You
Here's what you can do to salvage a relationship with a boss who won't listen when you decide you can't take it anymore:
1. Knowing if they are not listening to anyone or is it just you
Gorick Ng, a career counselor at Harvard University and author of The Unspoken Rules: Secrets to Starting Your Career Off Right, says: “Employees deal with managers who don't understand them, and they may immediately quit as the quickest way to get peace of mind, but one way to see if you can salvage the relationship is to slow down and understand your manager's position.”
To do this, first try talking to people who work with your boss or have worked with them before. Jurek says, “Whatever you're facing, someone else has faced it before you.” He also suggested asking questions about your boss's preferred way of communicating, such as, What's the best way to deal with it? Do you prefer to communicate via messages? Does he like long reports outlining the pros and cons? Does he want a prototype or a draft? Does he feel comfortable communicating with a specific person?
“What you're trying to find out here is whether you can solve this problem,” Jurek says. “After this simple research, you have an idea of what catches your manager's attention, whether it's project deadlines or influential colleagues, and if your boss is listening to what a certain colleague says, ask him to be the link between you and your manager at work,” as he says.
2. When you discuss the problem with your manager, make sure you have a solution in mind
Once you've analyzed your boss’s character, you can start a conversation with them, but don't complain. Instead, be specific about the actions that made you feel ignored by them and offer solutions to address the problem.
“You have to ask yourself what specific actions my boss took that led to this? And what specific actions should my boss take to address this issue?” Tardy says. That way, when you discuss the issue with your boss, you can be clear about their role in the problem and the solution, and then, after you have expressed why you feel unfair, come up with a solution that facilitates and improves communication with your manager.”
Tardi also says, “Often, when we have courageous conversations, we leave it up to the other party to figure out what action to take to reach a solution, so the more specific you are about the action you want from your boss, the clearer you are in articulating it, and that’s it.” This enables the other party to take appropriate action.
“You can present the solutions in the following way: ‘I know we are trying to achieve this, and I was thinking about the first, second, and third options, and these are the pros and cons, and my suggestion is to study the second option; what do you think?’” Or the solution can be presented simply as follows: “Would it be useful if I did that?”
3. If the discussion and proposed solutions fail, it is time to change your manager or job
If you've exhausted those options and nothing's changed, it's time to think about changing, perhaps outside of the job entirely. “First, you can try leaving your boss if you still want the job,” says Tardy. “That means leaving the boss but staying in the department or the company. If you want to escalate, talk to your manager's manager. Oftentimes, leaders understand the issues between employees and managers.”
But if leaving your negligent boss isn't an option, it might be time to start looking for a new job that respects you and your opinions, and then, in this new job, discuss your communication techniques with your boss first and foremost.
“If you clearly explain your overwhelming need to feel your opinions matter and you know what it would look like otherwise, it will be easy for you to discuss your issue with your manager three or six months into your tenure; you have to discuss it more than once,” says Kaitlyn Buckheit, a professional coach who specializes in career transitions.
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