You have a boss who is hard on you, and you cannot decide what kind of hard it is. Some days it feels like he simply expects a great deal and you are being sharpened by it. Other days it feels personal, as though the standard exists to catch you rather than to grow you, and you drive home wondering which of the two men you actually work for. If you are trying to figure out how to tell if your boss is threatened or just demanding, you are asking the right question, because the answer changes everything about how you should respond.
I have led people in police departments, in agencies, and in church, and I have been both kinds of hard on people over the years, the good kind on my better days and, I am not proud to say, the other kind on a few of my worse ones. I have also served under both. The difference is real, it can be tested, and I want to give you the tests, because a demanding boss is one of the best things that can happen to your career and a threatened one is one of the worst, and mistaking one for the other will cost you either way.
The First Test: What Happens When You Succeed
A demanding boss wants the work to be excellent, so when the work is excellent he is satisfied, at least for the moment. He may not gush, and he may already be pointing at the next hill, but there is a settling in him when you deliver. He is pleased with the result, and he lets you know it, even if the letting you know is brief and dry. Your success is what he was after all along.
A threatened boss gets worse when you succeed. That is the single most reliable tell I know. The standard rises the moment you meet it, and not because the mission requires it. The praise arrives with a qualifier attached, or arrives to everyone except you, or does not arrive at all while a smaller win by someone else gets a public word. Do the honest exercise. Think of your last three clear wins and recall what he did in the week after each one. If he warmed up, you have a demanding boss. If he cooled down, you have something else.
The Second Test: Whether the Standard Is Public
A demanding leader has a standard he can state, and he holds everyone to it, including himself. You may hate how high it is, but you know where it is, and you can watch him apply it to your peers and to his own work. The hardness is impersonal. It comes from what the job requires, and it would fall on whoever sat in your chair.
A threatened leader has a standard that only you seem to trigger. Your peers turn in work at the same level and hear nothing. He excuses in himself what he corrects in you. The rules shift depending on who is being judged, and when you ask him to state the standard plainly, he becomes vague or irritated, because the true standard is one he cannot say aloud. Watch how he treats the person on your team who is least likely to outshine him. If that person lives under a gentler set of rules than you do, the difference between you is the threat you represent.
The Third Test: Whether He Wants You to Grow
The demanding boss is hard on you because he sees something in you and intends to bring it out. So he invests. He gives you the stretch assignment, sends you to the training, introduces you to the people you need to know, and puts you in front of the room when the room matters. His pressure has a direction, and the direction is upward. Years later, people who worked for that kind of leader speak of him with a strange affection, because he made them better than they would have made themselves.
The threatened boss withholds. The stretch assignment goes to someone safer. You are kept out of rooms where you might be noticed, or brought in only when you can be corrected. He does not develop you, because your development is the very thing he fears. Scripture gives the pattern in 1 Samuel. Saul had been glad to have David in his service while David was useful, but once the women sang that David had slain his ten thousands, Saul eyed him from that day forward and began working to keep him down. I have come to call this the spirit of Saul, and its clearest mark is a leader who cannot bring himself to raise the person he should be most proud of.
The Fourth Test: How He Handles Being Wrong
Every boss is wrong sometimes, and how he handles it in front of you is a window into whether he is secure. A demanding boss can hear a correction from below. He may push back, he may test your reasoning hard, but if you are right he will say so and move on, because his authority rests on the mission and not on his own infallibility. He is difficult, but you can work with a difficult man who is honest.
A threatened boss experiences your correction as an attack, even when it was offered privately and kindly. He punishes you for it later in some unrelated way, or he adopts your idea and presents it as his own, or he goes quiet for a week. If you have learned to swallow things you know to be true because of what it costs to say them, you have already answered the question this article is asking.
What to Do in Each Case
If the tests point to a demanding boss, stay and lean in. Ask him directly what excellent looks like in your role and write down his answer. Bring him problems with proposed solutions rather than bare problems. Take the hard assignments, thank him for honest criticism even when it stings, and let him see that you can be pushed. Leaders like that are rarer than the internet suggests, and two or three years under one will do more for you than a decade of comfortable management.
If the tests point to a threatened boss, change your strategy without changing your standards. Keep performing well, because lowering your work will not calm him and will only damage you. Route credit to him where it is honest so you remove the excuse that you are grasping. Keep a private record of the moving standards and the withheld opportunities, dated and specific, and keep your relationships with other leaders alive through ordinary business so your reputation is not held in one man’s hands. Then give the situation a season, and if the pattern hardens rather than fades, take that as information about your future under him and begin planning accordingly. A hard boss is a gift you should endure. A threatened one is a warning you should heed.
Go Deeper
I wrote a whole book about the leader who turns on the person he should be most proud of, following Saul and David from the day the singing started to the day David finally walked away. It covers how to recognize the insecure leader early, the disguised weapons he reaches for, and how to survive each one with your integrity intact: The Spirit of Saul.
Commissioner William Epps is an author and security leadership consultant with a background in law enforcement, fire service, private security, and federal government. His books are published through E.P.P.S. Method Publishing Co.
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