How to Deal With a Hands off Boss and Thrive

By Angela Wahome,
Our department suffers from my coworkers not pulling their weight and my when I talk with my boss about it he brings it up in meetings but nothing changes. She keeps getting involved in our work when it goes bad, (which it often does as she is not committed to working well on the job.  She always blames instead of assisting us with our work and keeps threatening to fire us on a daily basis. Many times the information that we give our boss is used by her to gossip. Rachel
Human Resource,
You are not the first person to approach me with this question. It is a good thing that you have focus and a good work ethic. To some employees, working for an absentee boss is a dream come true. But in reality, working for someone so “hands-off” (or absent) can hurt your career. This is especially true since a hands-off boss do employees a disservice when the employee is unable or unwilling to fulfill her responsibilities and the boss does not step in to work with the employee to diagnose the problem and improve performance.
The reasons that a boss hands off or absent are many. There are a few things that you can do to make sure that you do not get sucked into that negative work cycle. You may choose to resign yourself to working in that company that is somewhere poorly managed. You will need to figure out which elements of work other employees do in collaboration with you and see if there is a way you can encourage them to work well with you. See if you they need assistance. This way you are better able to achieve the work that you have been assigned. If you find that it is not possible to work well or that the overall input of the staff resembles that of the boss then you may need to make that decision to leave.
When you do so, keep working well as you look for a job. Remember as you leave not to bad mouth the organization that you are working for and do not criticize them. I wish you the best with in your career.