Are You Suffering From Abandonment in the Workplace?
Turns out romantic relationships aren’t the only place where we relive our childhood trauma!
“Abandonment issues.”
We’ve all heard the term.
When a lover is too clingy—abandonment issues.
When a child or pet exhibits extreme separation anxiety—abandonment issues.
When one partner in a relationship requires the other to parent them—abandonment issues.
But how does abandonment manifest in the workplace?
The Abandoning Leader — 6 Identifiers
The abandoning leader is an individual in a professional leadership role who is unable or unwilling to meet their employees’ needs. Here are the primary characteristics of an abandoning leader / boss / supervisor:
1. Is reactive, not proactive.
Rather than work alongside you to ensure the quality of your output, this individual reviews performance after-the-fact, or confronts you about issues after they’ve happened. When it comes to collaboration, advancement, or new ideas & implementation/deliverables, they expect you to take the lead.
2. Does not facilitate regular meetings to discuss performance or satisfaction on the job.
You often find yourself blindsided by performance reviews—even if they’re positive—because you’ve been given no clear, direct indication of how you’re doing.
3. Has no awareness of / interest in your professional trajectory, i.e. your performance goals or where you see yourself professionally in the coming months / years.
Where do you see yourself in 6 months? How do your personal values align with your employment, job description, and skills? What are you working on improving, both personally and professionally? This leader has no idea, and if they do, it’s not because they asked—it’s because you told them.
4. Does not provide mentorship.
This leader may answer your questions, but they don’t take an active role in mentoring you—aka, intentionally imparting their experience, wisdom, and insights to you through deliberate means like meetings, shadowing, or instructional classes and one-on-ones.
5. Does not seem to enjoy their role.
Whether this leader is a nice person or not, they’re clearly not passionate about the work. This is evident by their desire to leave early and vacation often, their efforts to shift their own responsibilities to you, and their willingness to bend the rules, miss deadlines, and slack off on their own deliverables.
6. Is not bringing their growth mindset to the workplace.
Whether this leader claims to be on a growth journey or not, it’s not evident in the workplace. These leaders have not shared their professional growth goals with their team, making it impossible to know whether they’re working toward achieving them or not (accountability). They don’t challenge themselves in the work environment, and they have not provided transparent metrics with which their team can track their performance as leaders. This quality is also strongly apparent in leaders who don’t think they need to grow or improve, or believe they have already reached the highest point of their professional growth journey and are content to stagnate, even if they claim this stagnation is temporary.
Abandoning Leaders in the workplace result in poor outcomes—on all fronts.
If you’re working under an abandoning leader—or under a team of abandoning leaders—the work environment is assuredly atrophying, and unfortunately, lack of leadership spells “doom” for the entire company/enterprise at large.
Irrespective of the service or product that your company, enterprise, or non-profit organization provides, all growth, including long-term financial growth, is staunched. While the company may not fold for some time, abandoning leadership means that the ultimate potential of the organization will never be reached.
Abandoning Leaders aren’t just neutral placeholders in a company—they’re vacuums.
It’s tempting to believe that having an abandoning leader in a leadership position is superior to having no leader at all, but that simply isn’t the case.
An abandoning boss or supervisor who oversees a team, no matter how large or small, brings out the worst in their associate(s).
If you’re an associate stationed under an abandoning leader, you know this to be true: the effect of working under an abandoning leader is akin to living in an unignorable ripple of low morale, stress, frustration, distraction, disorganization, and dissatisfaction.
“People don’t quit their job — they quit their boss.”
In human psychology, of the four types of parenting styles, neglectful/abandoning parenting produces the worst mental health and behavioral outcomes.
Is it so surprising that “children” (employees) of “neglectful parents” (bosses) would suffer similarly?
Abandoning leaders are worse than no leader at all, as they force associates to internalize failures within the company—and within their own performance—as their responsibility, and as a reflection of their skill and ability.
Just as in the parent/childhood relationship dynamic, however, it’s important to note that an employee’s failures and shortcomings are not exclusively their responsibility: they’re the responsibility of their direct overseer: their leader.
This internalized confusion, neglect, and guilt, which is cruelly built on a false premise that misdirects responsibility from leadership team to associate, ultimately breeds apathy, resentment, and poor performance within employees.
If you have an abandoning leader, get new leadership. If you are an abandoning leader, it’s time to tighten up.
If you find yourself under the oversight of an abandoning leader, it’s time to seek new leadership.
This means a departure from your current team, or perhaps more drastically, the entire company. Ensure that as you’re conducting your job hunt, you’re evaluating your potential boss as closely as they’re evaluating you—and beware of hiring teams that don’t evaluate and interview applicants thoroughly, as this is already a sign of neglect.
Keep in mind that choosing a boss is like being given the opportunity to choose your parent. What kinds of qualities do you want in a parent? What type of leadership do you need to thrive? Be honest with yourself—you will end up absorbing and emulating the same energy as your boss, whether you like it or not.
Pro tip: choose a boss that you wouldn’t mind being exactly like.
What if I’m an abandoning leader?
If you’ve just discovered that you are an abandoning leader, don’t beat yourself up about it—chances are, abandoning leadership is all that you’ve ever experienced (and you’re probably experiencing it now, even if you’re the head of your own company).
The good news is, you have an opportunity to break the cycle.
Immediately secure a mentor, a therapist, or a coach, and/or request to be moved to a new direct supervisor. Abandoning leadership is enabled by a lack of accountability, and is ameliorated by complete clarity and transparency.
Ask yourself a lot of questions, starting with these: “what am I really trying to achieve in this role?” “what does success in my life really look like?”
Be brutally honest with yourself—your own satisfaction and happiness depend on it.
The Holy Grail Remains the Same
Ultimately, whether you find yourself working under an abandoning leader, or being one, the holy grail remains the same: a healthy dose of self-love is required.
Remind yourself of your values, remind yourself of the type of day-to-day (not special occasion) existence you want to have in this life, and then take the necessary steps to change either yourself or your environment accordingly.
You deserve it.
