Everyone wants to avoid a bad boss, and yet 6 in 10 people report being stuck with an unreasonable toxic manager, according to a May poll of workers.
To avoid these workers’ fates, you might want to start assessing your boss’s body language ― it might reveal their toxicity long before you see it in your performance review.
Off-putting body language doesn’t automatically mean your manager is toxic, said Mary Abbajay, president of the leadership development consultancy Careerstone Group and author of “Managing Up: How to Move Up, Win at Work, and Succeed with Any Type of Boss.” But Abbajay said there are definitely telltale signs you may be dealing with a toxic boss.
“We all have these neuropsychological needs to feel seen, to feel heard, to feel connected, to feel valued –– and when we pull that away from people, that is a deliberate way to demean them, to devalue them,” Abbajay said. “And those are two of the big signs of toxic bosses.”
Here are the most common subtle tells of how this bad behavior often shows up in a boss’s body language:
1. Your boss doesn’t look at you.
You’re far more likely to encounter an avoidant bad boss than an angry bad boss, said Tessa West, a professor of psychology at New York University and author of “Jerks at Work: Toxic Coworkers and What to Do About Them.”
“It’s often the absence of the pro-social behaviors or the behaviors people need to move forward” with their career that employees deal with, she said.
West noted behaviors such as bosses looking at phones, not remembering your name, or clearly not paying attention while you are talking as common avoidant behaviors these bad bosses do.
2. They constantly interrupt you.
“Bosses who insist on always being the loudest voice in the room and speaking first, and controlling the tone and tenor of the conversation” can be a toxic behavior, West said, because interrupting direct reports shows a lack of self-awareness that is difficult to change.
These constant interruptions can belittle your ideas in front of decision-makers and make it hard for you to advance. “Behaviors that are displayed in front of other employees in important settings are the ones that I see as the most toxic because they really hinder you from climbing up in your career and from being respected and heard by other people,” West said.
3. They loom over you.
Watch out for bosses who ignore your personal space and loom closely over you. A common subtle bad behavior is when a boss uses their physical presence to intimidate you, Abbajay said. “You can feel people’s energy, and when that energy is aggressive and it’s too close to you, that’s not a good sign,” she said.
4. They are visibly repulsed by your ideas.
Pay attention to how your boss reacts to your ideas. If they show mocking facial expressions like demeaning smirks or someone rolling their eyes, then that’s a troubling sign of their broader behavior.
“Those facial expressions are really intending to belittle the person because that’s really what toxic people do,” Abbajay said. “They want to make sure that they are belittling you.”
5. They subtly dismiss you while you’re speaking.
If your boss is waving you away, or physically turns away from you while you are talking, this dismissive behavior is also a red flag, Abbajay said.
“They either have so little self-control that in the moment they cannot make good choices ... or they simply don’t care,” Abbajay said this dismissive behavior could mean.
Bottom line: Take these behaviors as a signal, but don’t take them as gospel.
Of course, what a boss says with their body language doesn’t automatically mean they are your office nemesis.
“We don’t know what we look like, and sometimes we look pissed when we’re not,” West said. “It’s always better to ask someone, ‘What did you mean by that?’ and ‘What are you thinking right now?’ than it is to read the tea leaves.”
Look for patterns over one-time incidents. Bringing this up with the bad boss offender is not always psychologically safe, but if you feel like your boss may be open to it, name the behavior with “I” statements, Abbajay suggested.
“‘Here’s what I’m noticing,’ is a much better way to go about this than saying, ‘You know, you look angry,’” Abbajay said.