Where and when did you stand at your crossroads and etch your worldview on the inside of your forehead? Where did you make the decisions that now inform your attitudes about fairness and meaning in the workplace? Many people never wax nostalgic for the days when their personal context was framed and their professional foundation was laid. Yet, that's where your current attitudes toward work and play, duty and destiny, and family vs. career are anchored. Developmental arrestment means unfinished business. If we don't successfully complete our developmental phases, we won't fully mature. More specifically, people who do not successfully complete their developmental phases can develop nasty habits rooted in their unfinished business. Those nasty habits will drive others insane (in the non-clinical sense). It's never too late to finish unfinished business, and the world will be forever grateful. It is thus a good idea to poke around and learn what really makes you tick. Once that's done, you will know how to become an asset rather than a liability, a friend rather than a foe, and a truly strategic partner to your Idiot Boss. Like everything else, you go through this exercise because he won't.

Stuck in Adolescent Rebellion

Engaging in denial and avoidance of real issues, which is the cultural paradigm of far too many working environments, creates a population living in a state of ignorant dysfunction. Lacking the knowledge or courage to adopt a better plan, many of us resist and even refuse to replace denial and avoidance with healthier thinking and behavior. Among the first things middle-aged idiots realize when entering recovery is that they're stuck in adolescent rebellion. To become unstuck, we must first realize and accept we're developmentally arrested in a stage when a child's mind occupied an emerging adult body. It's childish to believe that the answer to every problem or discomfort is to blame authority, no matter how our bodies have aged. Back then we blamed our parents, teachers, the police, and the president. Now, we've either forgiven or stopped talking to our parents,

still blame the president, and project responsibility for the rest of our grievances on our bosses. Now for the bad news: Your Idiot Boss won't accept your responsibility to get unstuck. Not because he has a highly actualized respect for relational boundaries (he's still an idiot). Your I-Boss wouldn't know what you're talking about if you brought the subject up. Just as well. You shouldn't be shopping around to find a host for a parasitic sense of responsibility anyway, no matter how available and enticing a host your Idiot Boss is. To paint with an admittedly wide brush, most of us who call ourselves Baby Boomers, and many of our offspring, are stuck in adolescent rebellion. Being developmentally arrested in the adolescent rebellion stage explains many of the internal problems organizations face today. For me, becoming a campus radical was a good way to flex newly acquired freedoms. The first thing I did with my freedom as a college freshman living away from home was to stop doing things I wouldn't have done if my parents hadn't made me - like going to class. Classes at 8 a.m. were a real drag, so I quit going. It was cool. Nobody came and woke me up. Nobody called me on the telephone or banged on the door and told me to get out of bed and go to class. It seemed like a workable arrangement until my grades came in. Being on academic probation after my first semester threatened my new freedoms, I decided to start demonstrating more academic responsibility as a means of protecting my new freedom. I began to appreciate the interdependency between work, sacrifice, recreation, and abundance. We enter adolescence still expecting the labor and sacrifice of others to sustain our recreation and abundance. Then, abandoning logic altogether, we rebel against the authority figures who have invested the labor and sacrifice to get us where we are. While still in the throes of adolescent rebellion, we haven't yet given up the notion that somebody else is responsible for our happiness and well-being. Therefore, as adolescent reasoning goes, it is someone else's fault if we're not feeling as happy and well cared for as we can imagine we should be. Sound like your office?

Smelling the coffee

The experience of working for an idiot might have inspired you to buy this article. Hopefully you'll finish it with a strong sense that you're really working for yourself, and that how content or contentious you are is up to you. I remember the first time I stood at the crossroads of adolescent rebellion and maturity. I say, "the first time," because my self-aggrandizing imagination has brought me back to that crossroads 1,000 times since. My roommate at Wartburg College, Hector, was in school on a full-ride scholarship from Mom and Dad. I was there on a half-ride, working all kinds of jobs to save money, only to clean out my checking account with one stroke of my pen on tuition day. Even paying half of my way through college gave me a sense of moral superiority over Hector. As far as I was concerned, my right to protest campus administration policies was bought and paid for and his wasn't, unless he was voting proxy for his folks. Nevertheless, Hector was loud and proud. Have you noticed how disgruntled folks around the workplace are the loudest and seem shameless in voicing their grievances? Like many of the people I've worked with over the years, Hector didn't make any distinction between what he wanted and what belonged to someone else. During the Hector phase of my life it was still cool to smoke and I kept a carton in my dormitory dresser drawer.

The bottom drawer of my dresser held bargain brand sodas I bought at the supermarket to avoid paying higher prices at the vending machines. Hector brazenly helped himself to my cigarettes right in front of me. The least he could have done was wait until I turned my back before he walked over, opened the top drawer on my dresser, and snagged a pack of smokes. Never being a big one for confrontation, I nevertheless told Hector to buy his own damn cigarettes. Addressing the issue directly, as with working associates, is a sound practice. But don't be surprised if laying down a boundary doesn't merely send them through another door. For those still stuck in adolescent rebellion, there is no vice in riding on someone else's initiative. If access is denied here, simply approach from over there. I was pleasantly surprised and emboldened when Hector took my advice and started buying his own tobacco products. In a clever ploy to ensure I never stole back cigarettes from him, he bought non-filtered Pall Malls, which no human would ever set a match to. He came right out and bragged about buying the horrendous things so nobody would bum them. How often around the office do people refuse to accept treatment from others they don't hesitate to engage in themselves? Just as I was beginning to think I had helped Hector make a breakthrough, I noticed my stash of sodas was diminishing much faster than I was drinking them. Being pleased he wasn't helping himself to my cigarettes anymore, I resisted the notion he might be drinking the sodas. But as the stash continued to dwindle, I faced the choice of confronting him again or just subsidizing his soda consumption. Still pumped by my recent behavior modification success with the cigarette snatching, I confronted him only to find out he wasn't drinking my sodas. He was selling them to raise the money to buy his cigarettes. In my attempt to instill a sense of personal responsibility in Hector, my best-laid plans had backfired.

I had barely closed the door before he found a window to crawl through. Beware your associates You don't need to be an active practitioner of adolescent rebellion to be sucked into its back draft. Have you ever found yourself involved in a grievance meeting at work, wonder how you got there, and wished you weren't there? Watching television coverage of campus radicals acting out at places like Columbia and Berkeley, I was hanging out with a bunch of Hector's intellectual, elitist friends in the student union one night trying to conjure a way to bring our placid little campus into the fray. They were itching for something to feel righteously indignant about. One thing led to another, and it was decided to pick a fight with the campus administration. Over what, we didn't know. So, we just started complaining about life in general and slowly spiraled in on a galvanizing issue; a habit we would all carry into our careers and workplaces. Although none of the minority students on campus were among us that night, we decided the college wasn't awarding enough full-ride scholarships to underprivileged students. In an uncharacteristic display of charisma, which in retrospect appears to be a case of drawing the short straw, I was appointed spokesperson for the group. I reluctantly accepted the role and led the three dozen or so students on a one-block parade over to the dean of student's house at two in the morning. It had taken us that long to decide what we wanted to protest. Surrounded by angry students, I knocked on the front door. A light came on inside, the door opened a crack, and the dean's wife peeked out. That's when a light started to grow brighter inside my head. Seeing that little woman with curlers in her hair, clutching the front of her bathrobe against the night air made me think to myself, "What are you doing, John?" But it was too late.

I was across the Rubicon. I had nearly 40 spoiled, upper-middle-class college students looking to me for leadership. When you find yourself embarrassed by your actions or to be associated with a popular movement at work, that's your cue to exit. Your fellow protesters will whine and complain, but it's better to leave as soon as your recognize your embarrassment than to wade in deeper still. When I should have been in bed with my alarm clock set to make an 8 a.m. class, I stood instead on the dean's front stoop and announced our grievance, demanding we be allowed to address the administration. He agreed to assemble a delegation to hear us out the following afternoon at 1 p.m. in the Student Union. If he had been smart, he would have scheduled it for 8 a.m. None of us would have been there and the meeting would have lasted 60 seconds. As the panel of administrators sat down the following day, a mob of bleary-eyed students began to gather in front of them, sitting on the floor, draped over furniture, and leaning against the walls. To my surprise, the ranking administrator turned to me and asked if I would act as moderator. He correctly suspected the dialogue might quickly become unruly and unproductive. As a class president and duly elected mob leader, he thought I might have some measure of influence over the group. Before the gripe session even began, I felt an urge to apologize. I realized that gaining more scholarships for minority students could have been better accomplished through channels, if only we had the maturity, discipline, and passion to follow that route. As it was, we were just rebellious adolescents acting out, not genuinely fighting for a worthwhile cause. Our mob of students at Wartburg College had no clue what patient discipline in pursuit of a greater cause meant. We couldn't even spell sacrifice. Whatever the true merits of freedom and justice, the agenda for most of those kids was to be as noisy and disruptive as possible. Acting up and causing general disorder is the adolescent manifestation of a 2-year-old's foot-stomping tantrum. In spite of my best efforts to maintain order, the meeting became noisy and unruly. Hector seized the opportunity to become shrill, rude, and disrespectful to the administrators. He savored every minute of it, only pausing long enough to light another Pal Mall. Suddenly, my entitlement issues reemerged. I felt if anybody had a right to rail on the campus administration it should be people who paid all or part of their own tuition in cash or sweat. Yet, the loudest and most caustic voices came from Hector and others who, to my knowledge, had no personal investment whatsoever in the college except to be there.

It's been my experience in the workplace that those who have most earned the right to gripe are usually the least likely to. That chaotic, angry session with the campus administrators was a transformational experience for me. When was yours? How many have you had? I admit I didn't learn as much from each transformational opportunity in my life as I could and should have. But, speaking for myself, the harder the head, the more bumps it takes to get one's attention. When you take up a cause, which might be standing up for the principles you believe are important in the workplace, I hope anyone looking into your eyes will see the real deal, and not an over-aged adolescent tantrum. Then and Now It amazes me how many Hectors I still encounter in organizations all over the country. They exist at all levels. Sometimes they're union stewards, sometimes they're vice presidents. Like anyone else, the more power they wield, the more damage they can do. Despite how righteous I felt about protesting campus administration policies because I paid tuition, I had to back off and let go of that resentment. There are Hectors everywhere, people who don't put into the system, but claim the right to complain about it, and make demands on it. If I resent everyone who I don't feel has earned the right to do what they do, say what they say, and receive what they receive, I'll become immobilized by my own anger and sense of injustice. Then who suffers? If you have earned the right to express yourself through enormous contributions you've made, I applaud you. But guess what? Others who've made no such contributions are going to make themselves heard anyway, and they will be recognized. Get used to it. Better yet, for your own sanity, get over it. Shift your focus to ways you can contribute still more. That's being true to your nature. Blaming your I-Boss is not. Although many people do little to earn respect, nobody deserves to be treated disrespectfully. Like my chronically tardy technician at Disneyland, we need to be reminded from time to time that we contribute to the corporate cause because doing our part is part of the grand scheme, the scheme that benefits lots of people. Dealing with I-Bosses might cause you to bite your lip, so take a deep breath, count to 10, and let it out slowly. But getting over it doesn't mean giving up. There is no reason to accept your lot without proactively doing something about it. If you choose to remain passive, blindly accept what your I-Boss hands you, then gripe about it, I must assume that griping lights your wick. Meanwhile, you're not truly helping yourself or anyone around you. You've read too far and have too much information now to merely accept an I-Boss relationship strictly on his terms. You're not stepping up and becoming more involved for his sake, unless you choose to. You're doing it for yourself and those around you who are willing to share your attitude.

Does anybody have the white pages for the Western Hemisphere? At first glance, these recovery steps seem to be pulling me in the opposite direction from my emerging coexistence with my I-Boss. However, as my understanding grows, it all weaves itself together in a sort of cosmic tapestry. The stupidity I've been describing so far didn't just hurt me, it also made life difficult for others. Don't you wish your I-Boss had such an epiphany? Will you choose "me for the sake of me" or "me first, who wants to follow"? The steps helped me learn the difference. I used to dwell on the injustice of office politics. Things I felt were unfair could keep me up for nights at a time. The board of directors/ weeping president nonsense made me an insomniac for the longest time. Before that, there were times I felt it was my moral obligation to expose my I-Boss as a moron. But none of my complaining hurt my I-Boss. And none of it helped me. As much as I feel compelled to expose things for the way they really are and force the hand of justice, I've learned it's more important to keep our composure. Discretion truly is the better part of valor. Positioning ourselves properly relative to our I-Bosses requires constant positioning radar. If we stay between the navigational beacons, we will not only survive life with an I-Boss, we can thrive. Because we can't change our I-Bosses directly, examining how we might have foisted I-Boss-like injury and inconvenience upon others will help us to keep perspective and develop a strategy to survive and prosper, in spite of our situation. Making a list of people to whom we should make amends - even if we don't actually make them - is a smelling salts eye opener. If you genuinely want to transform your attitude toward your Idiot Boss and develop a strategic (albeit understated) partnership with him, start by becoming the kind of partner you would want to have.