CA(SA) - The Ultimate Defence Against The Antics Of Your Narcissistic Boss.

Meet Thandi. She is quiet, reserved and possibly even insecure. She has a sharp intelligence and has a calm grace that is engaging and trusting.

When it came to her career, she felt confused and disappointed. She was a chartered accountant (CA) who had six years of post-qualifying experience.

All the expectations she had as a professional CA had dismally fallen flat!

She felt throttled and was now regretting wasting all those years studying her life away. Maybe she should have done something different.

Thandi was progressively losing confidence, and she realised that she needed to do something done before it was too late.

Ring a bell?

Many young CA's find themselves in this situation, and it can linger on for some time.

The question is: is there something wrong with Thandi, or is her work environment the cause of her woes?

So, before you attempt to answer the question, let me tell you a story.

As a CA, there are two distinct places that you be in the workplace. Either you are a manager (and the waterfall), or you are an executive. The thing is that there is an exponential difference between the two domains, a yawning chasm of extremely contradictory behaviours.

Is this what executive presence means, you might ask. It does, except that it is more about being an executive than looking like one, And it is hot about gravitas. It's about being accepted as an executive by your company's existing team. QED.

The next obvious question is, how does one do this. The answer is quite simple: you need to be trained by another executive. But, executives don't have time to mentor and train their managers and very few do.

It's up to you to manoeuvre yourself into a space that is close to the executive you to whom you report. And, you do this by becoming her/his 2nd in charge (2IC).

Simple, yes. Easy, no!

How do you get yourself into the 2IC position? You cannot get promoted into that space as usually there is no such job description. Nor can you ask to be put there because your boss will burst out laughing!

So, what is the answer?

Let me continue with the story.

There are two reasons for this massive canyon between manager and executive:

• There is a particular type of personality that bubbles up into the executive space. I call them I-I-Me-Me type people, others call them narcissists and still others refer to them as corporate psychopaths.
• The ethos in the executive space goes like this: "I come first; the company comes second (to the degree that it suits my share options and bonus; and everything else is a commodity for me to use and dispose of as I wish, including the people".

The manager space is vastly different, and the ethos goes like this: "The people come first; the company, second; and I come last, not because I think any lesser of myself, but because I have a more principled/value-based leadership style".

To this is added the more grubby side of the whole problem:

Executives control managers by keeping them guessing about their value-add. In the process, they create this fascinating construct called The-Approval-Seeking-Drama. The manager, not knowing what value s/he is creating, is working harder and harder for, the same amount of money, to get boss' approval. The boss is sitting with a big grin on his/her face because they are getting maximum value for the least amount of money.

That's the game!

But, that's not the end of it. Thandi's story was far more profound. When she realised all of this, it was though she connected to a deeper part of herself, unshakable and substantial. It seemed that what she had seen in herself all along had finally been confirmed and she liked it a lot.

There is much discussion around the narcissistic personality. There is a growing body of evidence proving that this personality-type infest the executive domain. The alpha-type character has no defence against the pure honesty of the spirit, a virtue that looks like: "I know who I am, and I like it!" The power that came through for Thandi was her calmness, a tranquil immovable self-confidence that could not be punctured. 

She accident she discovered an overwhelmingly powerful weapon to neutralise the manipulations of her narcissistic boss: Self-connection!