This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘Best of: So, your boss is a narcissist…’
Dr Ramani Durvasula
Narcissistic personality is a personality style that I think, I believe, it’s a very maladaptive, rigid style. And it’s characterised by things like a lack of empathy or variable empathy, meaning that the narcissistic person can sort of turn on fake empathy when they want something, but they don’t have empathy really, when the rubber meets the road. They’re deeply entitled. They tend to be grandiose. They are validation- and admiration-seeking, very egocentric, controlling, unaware of the needs and wants of other people. They are very reactively sensitive to criticism or feedback and will often lash out when anybody gives them that kind of feedback. They can often be very jealous, they’re very thin-skinned and all of that, all of what I’m listing out there is kind of the sort of suit of armour around a deep internal insecurity. These are people who are very, very impacted by shame. They don’t have a strong sense of self. So it’s almost like they steal other people’s senses of self and like you exist for me. And that’s really how narcissistic folks go through the world. It’s something that develops in childhood into adolescence and then adulthood. And as long as the forces are around that kind of support it, reward it and shape it, then it’ll turn into a full-blown, narcissistic personality in adulthood.
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Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It with me, Isabel Berwick. Today we’re talking about narcissists at work. It’s a huge topic because these people ruin many lives. And the definition of a narcissistic personality type you just heard comes from Dr Ramani Durvasula — known as Dr Ramani — who’s an expert in the subject. But before starting her career as a psychology professor and clinical psychologist, she worked for a narcissist boss.
Dr Ramani Durvasula
This person had tremendous, tremendous power because this was an internationally recognised superstar. That person was stealing work. Misrepresenting the work of other people as their own. Not giving people opportunities to advance. And in fact, silencing the careers of other people and would deliberately hire powerless people knowing that they wouldn’t have much recourse.
Isabel Berwick
This toxic boss made her physically and mentally ill.
Dr Ramani Durvasula
I became horribly depressed for the first and only time in my life. I went on antidepressants thinking that that would change things. I developed horrible, horrible headaches. I went to numerous medical specialists thinking it was me. I couldn’t sleep. It caused me major problems in a relationship I was having. And when I went to other senior-level people, they said, “Oh yeah, no!” If you try to get justice in this situation, your career is going to die before it even began. Everyone around this person was almost acknowledging this person is a monster without saying this person’s a monster. Instead, what they said was, “You will never win at this. You need to get out”. So they were willing to sacrifice me rather than take on that person. It really brought my life crumbling down. And many, many years of work had gone into that position. And I thought, oh, my gosh, I did all this work. And now what?
Isabel Berwick
Dr Ramani ended up leaving her job for one with a lot more autonomy but at a less prestigious organisation.
Dr Ramani Durvasula
I had to do my entire job search in secret, which was really hard to do because there was a huge hole in my resume. “Why aren’t you getting a recommendation from this person?” Had I known what I know now, I’d be like, “Oh, I just work for someone toxic,” and now I know what it is. So, girl, you have no excuse to not smell the coffee and get the hell out of dodge.
Isabel Berwick
Dr Ramani turned this damaging experience into a strength. She now teaches others to understand and deal with narcissist and high-conflict and entitled personality styles, and has a popular YouTube channel and podcast on narcissism. And according to the Harvard Business Review, some 18 per cent of CEOs can be considered narcissistic against 5 per cent of the US population. So while we don’t know exactly what percentage of people have had experience with a narcissist boss, the numbers in leadership positions are quite high. But ultimately what puzzles me is if these people are so difficult to be around, how do they keep becoming bosses?
Dr Ramani Durvasula
Because the way we make decisions about leadership tend to be based on performance and not on what I call process. Basically, the leader is somebody who’s shown great sales performance or great outcomes or great numbers. Too often what we don’t do is look at what process got them to those numbers. And if you look at process, compassion, empathy, respect, supporting the workforce, it may very well mean — if they did that well — the workforce can end up really getting harmed in the name of making those big profits. That’s the game narcissists are best at because they don’t have empathy. So they’re not really looking at the workforce as “let me care about them”. They’re looking at them as cogs in a wheel for the narcissist to get to their next goal. That strategy often works quite well because in the short term it will often create more profits, more productivity, whatever the benchmark is. And then what ends up happening is, by all objective indicators, people will say, “Whoa, they turned this company around this quickly, or they made this much, let’s make them our leader”. That’s how it happens.
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Isabel Berwick
Dr Ramani highlights something important there about the way people get promoted into leadership for the wrong reasons. And once narcissists and bullies become bosses, how should we deal with them? To find out, I’m joined by Naomi Shragai, a psychotherapist and author who writes for the FT on workplace psychology issues. Naomi, are you called in by the people suffering or by the narcissists? And how common is it?
Naomi Shragai
Well, it’s not common at all that narcissists would seek my help. You know, normally these are people who lack insight, lack self-awareness, and they typically don’t imagine that the problem resides in them but with other people, of course. What I tend to see in my practice quite a lot are victims of extreme abuse from narcissists in the workplace, and I’m also called on by organisations to help tackle bullying and narcissistic behaviour in the workplace.
Isabel Berwick
And how do you approach these cases? Are there different types of narcissism? Is there a good kind of narcissism, for example, because sometimes a slightly bullying but charismatic boss can really, you know, there are upsides to that for staff. Sometimes it’s . . . I hesitate to say it, but you must have seen lots of different types of narcissism.
Naomi Shragai
Well, that’s such an excellent question, and that’s a question people don’t ask themselves enough. Narcissism is terribly misunderstood. In fact, it’s a personality trait and it runs along a long continuum. We, all of us, have an element of narcissism. In fact, we wouldn’t be able to function in our jobs without some narcissism. It helps us promote our ideas. It helps us to believe in ourselves, to express our opinions. Without narcissism, we couldn’t function. There is an issue for people who lack narcissism, the lack of capacity to assert themselves, to be creative, to be outspoken. In the workplace, these people are often good team players, but they’re rarely the game changers. So it could, of course, be a problem. Of course, if we move along the continuum, we have what I call productive or healthy narcissists. These are people who are charismatic. These are people who are intelligent and creative. And what they’re especially good at is getting people behind them. Now oftentimes, people will accuse narcissists of being, well, a narcissist, as if that’s a bad thing. Somebody could just simply be charismatic, intelligent, very good-looking, and even maybe arrogant and will be accused of being a narcissist. Now, that person may have some narcissism, but that doesn’t imply that they’re necessarily pathological, malignant narcissists that’s necessarily harmful. So we really have to go to the very extreme of the continuum where we get the type of personality disorder. That’s bullying, that’s vindictive, that’s harmful, that we really have to look out for in the workplace. But in fact, I believe it’s less common than people assume.
Isabel Berwick
So when you in your practice come across an actual sort of malignant narcissist, how receptive are they to your work? How do you approach them?
Naomi Shragai
Well, I have to say, they don’t approach me and I rarely see them in my practice, of course. I see the victims of narcissists, and I also work with the companies that have employed narcissists and really don’t know how to manage them.
Isabel Berwick
Are they trying to get rid of them or are they trying to tame their behaviour? And is that even possible?
Naomi Shragai
It is possible to tame the behaviour of a narcissist if they’re not too extreme. And that’s really what I look for when I go into an organisation. Is this individual somebody who has a capacity for insight? Is this somebody who’s willing to listen to feedback, can take some criticism and open to opposing views? Really what I’m trying to find out is, can this person change? That’s what I’m looking to assess.
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Isabel Berwick
So we’ll come back to that later. But I just wanted to bring in Dr Ramani, who has a whole list of steps we can take if we find ourselves stuck in a toxic situation at work.
Dr Ramani Durvasula
First of all, it’s obviously a sort of document, document, document, and that means saving every email, every text message, voicemail, anything you need. Because if you intend to sort of run this up the flagpole and attempt to file any form of grievance or work with any other institutional entities like HR or even a labour attorney, you’re gonna need documentation. You don’t just get to Roland and say, “Yo, my boss is a narcissist”. It doesn’t work that way.
Secondly, I’d say, pay attention to how it’s affecting your life. Are you ruminating? Are you having trouble sleeping? There’s some really interesting research showing that it’s this workplace emotional abuse that results in more significant sleep problems than many other forms of emotional abuse. You sort of take your job home. Is it pulling you away from children, from family, from other things in life that give you joy? Pay attention to that because that’s not normal.
Number three, structural things. If you can avoid meeting with the narcissist alone, try to do so. Try to have a third party available. Try to have recordings of meetings. Anything that will give you documentation because invariably, a narcissistic boss will try to gaslight you.
Another piece to consider, too, is building mentorship for yourself, ideally outside of your own company. It definitely helps to have friends within the company, but nobody really, really wants to sort of behead the king, so nobody’s going to be willing to speak about it. But having a mentor in your industry that’s not located in that organisation can sometimes be a reality check to say, “Yeah, no, that’s not how this is done”, or “That’s not okay”, or “This isn’t good for you”. But I’d also say build allyship at work. There’s some interesting research that came out about this idea that if people work in a toxic workplace setting, sometimes amazing things can come out of that because those people coalesce with the united sort of revulsion around the narcissistic boss, but they themselves sometimes come together and may actually start their own very interesting ventures.
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Isabel Berwick
Naomi, I’m really interested to hear these dysfunctional situations described as emotional abuse. So, I had a situation like that with a boss many years ago, and I remember talking to you about it at the time, and it impacted me exactly as Dr. Ramani is saying. I doubted myself, I had to go into therapy, I wasn’t present for my kids, I was sick and anxious, all because of a boss who was making my life a misery. But it’s only now that I can think I can give it that name. And I felt very alone and isolated as that person particularly picked on me. So what’s happening there? What was I buying into in that relationship?
Naomi Shragai
What’s happening in those situations is the narcissist is attempting to rid themselves of unwanted feelings in themselves. So, they’re working quite hard to make you feel very small so that the smallness, the inadequacies, the feelings of shame and guilt and badness then reside in you. There’s a sense somehow that it relieves the narcissists of those feelings.
Isabel Berwick
Wow! And is the sort of isolation that I felt and Dr. Ramani was talking about, is it common or is it more common that teams can ally against a boss? Because there is that phenomenon of nobody wanting to call out the narcissist.
Naomi Shragai
That’s right. And for that reason, it can be very isolating and it is for many people. So that’s why it’s so important in that situation to find your allies, to share your experience, to find somebody who can acknowledge your experience and can share your perception of events. Otherwise, the difficulty is you start to believe that the badness, the wrongness, the inadequacy lies with you. And there is a sense somehow that you really cannot leave, because if you were left, who would have you? So a sense somehow that you have to resolve the problem. What’s really important is to find somebody who can shift that mindset and help you to acknowledge that the problem really is located in the bullying, extreme narcissistic boss and not in you. Now that’s a piece of work, and it’s really difficult for people to do on their own.
Isabel Berwick
Yeah. Is that something that you can do internally or do you need to find a mentor outside the company, or do you need to find a professional, you know, psychotherapist to talk to?
Naomi Shragai
Well, I think whoever you find, whether it’s a mentor or it’s a psychotherapist, you need to find somebody who understands this dynamic, the wrong thinking that occurs because it can really begin to distort your reality. You start to read things wrongly. And so there needs to be somebody else that can correct that self-destructive monologue that revolves in your mind and correct your thinking and correct your perceptions. That’s very difficult to do alone.
Isabel Berwick
I think what’s fascinating is that we’re strong in many ways. But, you know, I felt very fragile by constantly being told I wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t there enough. You know, it doesn’t take very long before that impacts you and actually makes your life collapse. I mean, this must be happening all the time.
Naomi Shragai
It happens a lot. And there’s something else you’ve just said right now I think that’s very crucial. You start to lose your confidence. You begin to feel inadequate. And because you’ve lost your confidence, you start to perform badly because you’re more anxious. And then suddenly you have the evidence. You think, “Ah! I’m not performing. Here’s the evidence. I really genuinely am inadequate”. And you can see how that can spin out of control very quickly.
Isabel Berwick
Yeah, it’s quite worrying. So, we talked about finding allies. What about the tactic of talking directly to the narcissist? What’s the best course of action there? Here’s Dr Ramani again.
Dr Ramani Durvasula
If you go in prepared knowing like, okay, this person always does this, this and this in these meetings, it’s a willingness to acknowledge that that’s what’s about to happen. I’m about to be unfairly criticised. I need to have my documentation. I need to just sit there and let them hold court. But prepare yourself for that. So when it’s happening, you’re not so surprised. After an encounter with them, you need to calm down. If you were in a workplace where you could take a walk for a minute, do something, even splash cold water on your face, something to almost sort of bring you out of that toxic situation, it can really, really help. It may mean that that night you plan on having dinner with friends or a loved one or your partner, that you may go to the gym after work, that you may do something pleasant and very intentionally say, I am off-gassing this toxic encounter. And then finally — and I always have to end on this note — you may have to go. I have worked with so many people who say I am going to try to outlast this and I say, in trying to outlast this, you may destroy yourself.
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Isabel Berwick
Naomi, in your experience, do people actually manage to do all the things Dr Ramani suggests? I’m sure you’ve written that confronting a boss like this may achieve nothing and might leave you more anxious.
Naomi Shragai
That’s right. It could make things much worse. I mean, she’s absolutely right that oftentimes the best solution is to get as far away and distant as possible. Restructuring is often the solution. Leave your job is usually the best solution, but of course not always possible. So oftentimes what I suggest is damage limitation. How are you gonna survive this job? One thing that needs to be understood is that you don’t want to put yourself in a position that the narcissist themselves experience you as a threat. This is really crucial. Sometimes by simply disagreeing, challenging, confronting — all of those ways will oftentimes leave the narcissist feeling threatened by you. Essentially, they’ll feel bad. If they feel bad inside, immediately they’ll think you’ve intended to make them feel bad and they feel justified in attacking you. So they’re vindictive, they’ll retaliate, they’ll do all sorts of things to undermine you professionally, to undermine your self-esteem, because they’re convinced somehow that you’ve intended to harm them. So you have to bend over backwards not to be that person. So in your mind, you might think this isn’t harmful at all. I’m just giving my feedback, I’m just disagreeing, I’m presenting important and crucial information. But if that information makes them feel somehow threatened, they’ll feel justified in attacking. So you have to be super cautious about how you frame things. Very simply, find out what their agenda is and just go along.
Isabel Berwick
And how would you describe yourself as a leader, Naomi? Do you recognise any narcissist tendencies in yourself? Should we all look for them?
Naomi Shragai
Well, I think we all have narcissistic tendencies. I hope I have narcissistic tendencies. Otherwise I wouldn’t be writing for the Financial Times and I wouldn’t have (laughs) on this podcast, which I’m hugely enjoying (laughs).
Isabel Berwick
So they’re not. So the FT is full of narcissists.
Naomi Shragai
(Laughs) Well, look, we all have some narcissism. And if we can all acknowledge it and also use it to our benefit, why not? We wouldn’t be able to get ahead without narcissism. It’s not a bad word. I guess that’s what I wanna get across. We all have it. We all need it. We all thrive on it. So enjoy it and use it to your advantage.
Isabel Berwick
So this has been really interesting because I’ve always thought the term narcissist in a completely negative way. But actually I’m gonna have to admit, obviously, I’m the host of a podcast. I’ve been a journalist on a national paper for 20 years. You know, you don’t do either of those things unless you are quite interested in promoting yourself and, you know, talking to other people from a position of, I don’t know, authority, power. I mean, as a leader, I haven’t had massive leadership roles. I’ve run small teams and I’ve really enjoyed it. But I think my fundamental downfall is that I’m a massive people pleaser, as many women in my Gen X generation are, and it’s quite hard to really indulge your inner narcissist to the full when you really care what people think about you. So, I’m actually going to try to be a bit tougher in future. That’s been my resolution for some time. Say no, set boundaries, all that kind of stuff. And so actually learning from the more positive parts of what we’ve heard today is gonna help me and enormously. And I hope it helps you too.
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Isabel Berwick
Thanks again to Dr Ramani and Naomi Shragai for this episode. If you’re enjoying the podcast, we’d really appreciate it if you left us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And please get in touch with us. We want to hear from you. We’re at workingit@ft.com or with me @IsabelBerwick on Twitter. If you’re an FT subscriber, please sign up for our Working It newsletter. We’ve got behind-the-scenes extras from the podcast and exclusive work and careers stories you won’t see anywhere else. Sign up at FT.com/newsletters. Working It is produced by Novel for the Financial Times. Thanks to the producer Anna Sinfield, executive producer Jo Wheeler, production assistance from Amalie Sortland and mix from Chris O’Shaughnessy. From the FT we have editorial direction from Manuela Saragosa. Thanks for listening.
