Have you noticed your boss treating you in some odd manner that leaves you questioning their motives? Maybe your boss wants you to quit or is trying to belittle you to satisfy his ego.
Nevertheless, these 8 major signs will uncover the truth, so keep reading if you want to find out,
In the professional world, your relationship with your boss can greatly influence your job satisfaction. Some bosses foster a supportive and healthy working environment while others prove to be poles apart.
They seem to have all sorts of problems with you, may treat you harshly and might even secretly desire your departure.
If it looks like something you, keep reading as you are in the right place.
Why Your Boss Wants You to Quit
There could be various reasons your boss is trying to get rid of you.
Let’s explore the potential reasons:
Your boss doesn’t see you as fitting for his team due to the differences between both of you in terms of values and preferences.
Your boss is insecure about his position, and you pose a threat to him. He sees you as someone talented and can replace him. That’s why your boss wants to push you out early on before your capabilities get noticed by others.
Your boss is prone to getting his ears filled by other people. If one of these people happens to be someone who has personal problems with you, he could be pulling the strings behind the scenes.
There could be other reasons as well, however, those are not our concern right now. So let’s get straight to our main issue and recognize the signs your boss wants to set you up.
Signs Your Boss Wants You to Quit
First, let’s be practical. When your boss wants you to quit, it’s not something that will happen out of the blue and come off as a surprise. It’s rather a process of slow manifestation and will start showing signs early on.
If you are smart enough to pick on these signs early on, you will be able to navigate the situation wisely and make decisions timely to take control of your professional future.
Look for the following telltale signs your boss wants you out:
1. Lack of Appreciation
One of the clear-cut signs your boss wants you to leave is you’ll begin to notice the lack of appreciation towards you.
You had been pouring yourself in and out lately on that one project and gave your 110% but all your efforts seemed to have reduced into thin air.
It doesn’t matter how well you keep delivering, it just never feels enough to your boss.
Your colleagues and teammates seem to be collecting all the achievements and recognition for the work similar to the one you delivered.
It is a deliberate attempt on your boss’ end to undervalue your work and not appreciate your presence in the organization.
An attempt to force you out of the organization if you pay attention.
So next time you find yourself not being appreciated despite delivering tasks and meeting deadlines, chances are your boss is trying to get rid of you.
2. Exclusion from Key Projects
This is a red flag and if you come across this, be cautious, as it could be the beginning of your end.
Key projects are actually the gateway to career progression. However, if you constantly find these doors getting closed to you, thanks to your boss, you should know something is wrong.
It’s quite a strategy as well to get you thrown out of the workplace. When you have no extensive project to work on, your list of accomplishments will be severely limited.
If done long enough, you will have nothing significant to your name, hurting your KPIs big time.
The upper management is likely to take notice of it. Being unaware of what is cooking inside, they will deem you to be an under-performer and get you out of the workplace.
Sigh, your boss won.
The next time you notice you are being excluded from key discussions, it’s one of the clear signs your boss wants you to quit.
3. Increased Micromanagement
Who likes to be micromanaged? Well, no one.
Increased management is a failed struggle to bring perfectionism and is very much contrary to a healthy and flourishing working environment.
If you find yourself to be a victim of this loophole, it could either mean two things.
The first one is you are so bad at doing what you are doing that your boss can’t help but micromanage and dictate to you literally everything. But this possibility is highly unlikely as you would know this already had it been true.
The second is your boss is doing it on purpose just to make things miserable. He is trying to give you the impression you are not good enough and thus degrade your performance ultimately or he is trying to damage your self-esteem.
Either way, the intentions are obvious: your boss wants you to push.
4. Heightened Workload
Again, a trap to make you fall to your professional death.
It’s no surprise that all of us have to do some extra work and late sittings when the team is lagging behind the deadlines. That’s quite normal and not our concern.
But the problem starts when you find yourself loaded with heaps of tasks when there is such a rush for any upcoming deadline.
Why would your boss do such a thing? The deadline is far away, so that can’t be the case.
Let’s burst the bubble for you. Your boss is trying to get rid of you and wants to exhaust you, flaunt you and prove you to be an ill performer.
Really? Well, sadly, yes.
It goes like this.
Your boss assigns you some tasks with a deadline that is clearly biased. You couldn’t complete the task in time, obviously, but that’s what your boss was seeking all along.
Now he got a chance to flaunt you and when pulled off consistently, you will get a reputation of an underperforming individual, something not good at all for one’s professional career. Until one day when you got thrown out of the workplace for being a liability.
If you someday notice you are being overloaded with the tasks specially with an unrealistic deadline, chances are your boss wants you to quit and is setting you up.
5. Undermining and Criticism
This one is a big one.
It is completely impossible to avoid criticism all the time and you shouldn’t be trying to dodge it altogether as well since constructive criticism can play an instrumental role in your professional growth.
But here we are talking about the constructive criticism that helps you to grow.
But things begin to go out of hand if your boss begins to criticize you in a way that he belittles your efforts or discredits your achievements.
This constant, without any reason criticism not only chips away at your self-confidence but also make the working environment very toxic.
You will begin to feel a dip in your abilities and may lose motivation. These ingredients are very much capable of triggering you to quit the workplace, something your boss wanted all along.
So if you find yourself constantly being a victim of relentless criticism, chances are your boss wants to push you out.
However, you should prioritize your mental. You should also keep in mind that your skills and talents are worth appreciating, not diminishing.
6. Lack of Professional Development Opportunities
One thing about great workplaces is that they provide their employees with constant opportunities to grow themselves. It’s a sort of investing in employees.
When your boss constantly denies you professional development opportunities, it tells a different story.
It means your boss doesn’t want to invest in you as he doesn’t see you working for the company in the long run.
Getting passed on for opportunities for professional growth can be very damaging to one’s professional career as it will stunt your growth big time and strip you of chances of learning new skills. You will also lose the chance of exploring new challenges.
If that’s the case, it’s best to pick this sign early on before it’s too late.
7. Increased Monitoring
One of the telltale signs your boss wants you to quit is increased monitoring and surveillance.
If you find yourself under constant measures of scrutiny, it can easily lead to an uncomfortable working environment.
This heightened level of scrutiny is actually a strategy deployed by most bosses to exert control over their employees.
It signals a lack of trust in you from your boss.
The actual message lying underneath is even more dangerous. They want to keep a close on you, which will make the work culture very suffocating for you.
You can’t help but leave the organization on your own accord, which is something your boss is secretly aiming for.
8. Denial of Well-Deserved Promotion
The most hurtful thing you can face in your company is the denial of a well-deserved promotion.
Despite all the hard work and consistent performance, your boss seems to overlook your achievements and turn a blind eye to them.
The denial of a deserved promotion not only demotivates you greatly, but also sends you an obvious message that your services are not valued over here.
It can be massively disheartening and demoralizing if you are consistently looked down on for promotions. and of course, all of us have certain limits and you can only take so much.
When it becomes too miserable for you when you see your colleagues rising the career progression ladder while you are still at the bottom despite having temperament, you are bound to leave, something your boss was always looking for.
What to Do When Your Boss Wants You to Quit
Coping with such a situation where your boss is trying to get rid of you can be challenging and emotionally draining too.
Dealing with such a situation requires determination, strategy, and a lot of patience.
Nevertheless, you can make use of the following tips if you find yourself in such a situation. You will not only improve your situation but also impress your difficult boss.
1. Find A Specialty to Be an Indispensable Asset
If there’s someone you resent with everything you got, but still depend upon him a big deal, how are you going to treat him?
Of course, you will treat him well as you don’t want to cross him, otherwise, you’ll be running the risk of shooting yourself in the foot.
That’s the key.
Your boss may dislike you for any personal reason, but if he depends upon you in some way, he will make sure to keep you content, let alone play a scheme to get you out of the workplace.
You should look into yourself and find out what you can do effortlessly, then capitalize on it.
Soon you’ll become an asset to your boss and he’ll be sure to drop any Machiavelli tricks against you.
2. Focus on What Matters
One great way to destroy your mental health and go into depression is to care a lot about the things out of your control.
Not only does it overload your mind with unnecessary burden but also reduce your resources to spend on what actually matters.
How are you going to invest the energy into your work when you have emptied your tank caring too much about your circumstances?
When your boss wants you to quit, one trick he could be deploying is to distract you from your KPIs. It will drop your performance significantly and you’ll fall to your professional death yourself.
However, you can turn it around and buy into the trap your boss is laying.
Shift your focus to your work and strive to make yourself better than yesterday. Stay determined to meet your KPIs and maintain your performance.
3. Maintain a Winning Attitude
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the negativity and toxicity of the environment that is projected on you consistently.
But how you choose to react to them is under your control.
You may find the circumstances to be intimidating and it’s natural to feel bad about them.
However, develop a habit of looking at the solution end rather than the problem end.
Focus on what you can do to make your situation better. Lift yourself from the negativity, and look at what can you do at a given time.
It will steer away all the depressive thoughts and make you embrace a fighting attitude.
Always remember, you can’t be a loser until you think of yourself to be a loser.
So think like a winner to be a winner.
Conclusion
That brings us to the end of the article.
Let’s have a quick recap of what we could find in the article.
First, we talked about different signs your boss wants to push you out. We’ll now have a brief look over them:
The most evident sign you should look out for is the lack of appreciation towards your work. You have been delivering all the work within time but can’t find any acknowledgment while your teammates are collecting the praises for similar work as yours.
You may find yourself out of key discussions or some key projects. It may be an indication your boss doesn’t want to have you a significant feat to your name.
You may notice increased micromanagement from your boss. It’s a toxic behavior and your boss might be doing it on purpose to give you a harsh time.
A heightened workload could be another potential sign your boss is trying to get rid of you. As he needs a reason to prove you are an underperformer and heightened is a perfect way of degrading your work quality.
If you consistently find yourself at the edge of relentless criticism, chances are your boss is venting out to you about what he feels about you inside him.
Restricting professional development can harm your career. It will make you lag behind your peers in terms of expertise and day lose the race.
Want to annoy someone to the core? Invade his privacy and monitor him to death. That’s exactly what your boss could be doing to annoy you and make your life miserable by monitoring your every move. One day you’ll leave such a place yourself and your boss will win.
And last but not least, you find yourself run over for a well-deserved promotion.
After discussing the signs in detail your boss wants you to quit, we could see different brief tips you can follow if you find yourself in such a situation.
We could see how you can turn the tables and be an asset to your boss.
Nullify the ill intentions of your boss by focusing on what matters.
Carve your own path toward success by maintaining a winning attitude.
So that concludes everything we could find in this article.
We hope you could find this piece beneficial. Share the words with your friends for what they think about it.
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where your boss wanted you out of the workplace? Let us know in the comments below!
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