Almost everyone, at some point in their career, has had a manager they found genuinely difficult.
Different style. Different pace. Different expectations. A way of communicating that felt unclear, or demanding, or simply misaligned with how you work best. The kind of situation where Sunday evenings carry a particular weight.
It's real. And it deserves an honest answer — not a list of tactics, but a different way of looking at what's actually happening.
Here is what I have observed, consistently, in people navigating a difficult manager relationship.
The first instinct is to build a case. To catalogue what the manager does wrong — the unreasonable demands, the lack of recognition, the communication that feels dismissive or unfair. To find allies who agree. To make sure the story being told about the situation is the right one.
It's an understandable response. When something feels genuinely unfair, the impulse to be seen and validated is entirely human.
But watch what happens to the energy. Everything going into managing the narrative is energy not going into the work. And it is almost always the work — done well, consistently, without drama — that changes a difficult relationship faster than anything else.
When I moved from the Army into corporate life, something became clear relatively quickly.
One size does not fit all.
People work differently. They respond at different speeds, communicate in different styles, and operate from different assumptions about what good looks like. What felt like a lack of standards to me was often simply a different set of standards — shaped by different experiences, different cultures, different ways of getting things done.
The friction I sometimes felt wasn't always coming from the other person. Some of it was coming from the gap between what I expected and what was actually there.
That gap is usually where the difficulty lives.
As a subordinate, my approach was simpler than most people expect.
I chose to focus on what the manager actually needed — not what I thought they should need. I adjusted my pace, my communication style, my expectations — not infinitely, and not without limits, but enough to close the gap rather than widen it.
That's not deference. It's discipline.
Deference says — my manager is right because they're my manager. That's passive, and over time, corrosive.
Discipline says — I will focus on what I can control, do the work that needs doing, and not let friction become the story I tell myself. That's a choice. And it's a more powerful one than most people in a difficult manager situation have considered.
None of this means accepting genuinely poor behaviour — hostility, unfairness, or anything that crosses ethical lines. Those situations exist and they require a different response entirely.
But many difficult manager relationships — not all, but many — have at their root a misalignment rather than a fundamental incompatibility. Of style, pace, expectation, or communication. And misalignments can be worked with.
The distinction is worth understanding before deciding which situation you're actually in.
The question worth asking, before anything else, is not — "how do I handle this difficult manager?"
It's — "what am I actually finding difficult, and why?"
Because the answer to that question changes everything about what comes next.
If you're in the middle of this right now, a conversation might help you see it more clearly.