Introduction

I have worked for a variety of bosses and would not recommend any of them without hesitation. At least two of them were seriously mentally deranged and regularly made me miserable. A recent survey^[1] points out that 60% of American employees believe that they currently have a toxic boss, which means that probably everyone has experienced or at least observed bad leadership at one point in their career.

Recently, I came to be in charge of a large team myself and I now see the challenges: lack of engagement and interest, sloppy work, bullying or even open conflict between staff members, gossiping, underperforming employees asking for raises, others unable to deal with deadlines or mild critique. Accountable for the team's performance and under pressure on costs and results, I sometimes feel caught in the middle between the big boss and my team. This dual perspective helped me to better understand the issues surrounding leadership.

Most advice on "managing up"^[2] amounts to generic common sense, which implicitly assumes that boss and employee operate within the same mental framework: provide solutions not problems, no surprises, be proactive, mutual understanding and respect. Unfortunately, this assumption is generally false. A deeper understanding is needed to enable real action or, at least, the realization that the situation is hopeless and cannot be resolved, in which case you should protect yourself and quit if possible.

Key Points of Individual Psychology

Alfred Adler's Individual Psychology is far less widely known than the ideas of his Vienna contemporary and rival Sigmund Freud, perhaps because Adler's concepts seem less exotic or provocative. Yet they have arguably left a deeper mark on modern psychology, particularly on cognitive, humanistic, and family-systems approaches^[3]. The name "individual" refers to Adler's view of the person as an integral whole (Latin individuum = indivisible), but it might have been better called "Holistic Psychology."

Both Freud and Adler began as physicians working with neurotic patients, and from these extreme cases they tried to build a universal theory of the human mind. In doing so, Freud looked backward to past causes and constructed obscure mechanisms that make all people victims of traumata they might not even remember. Adler, on the other hand, looked at the present and tried to understand the actual purpose of behaviors and what they achieve within the realm of the person's view of the world, i.e. within their own private logic.

The element that most distinguishes his approach is the feeling of inferiority. Observing his patients, Adler concluded that all human beings carry an inherent sense of inadequacy, and that the individual strategies each person develops to overcome or avoid this feeling are a fundamental driver of all human behavior.

Other key concepts of the theory include social interest ("community feeling"), which is the capacity to feel connected and to contribute to a group, and which was perceived by Adler as a universal measure of mental health, the idea of purpose in behaviors, i.e. each characteristic behavior in a person must be seen as fulfilling a specific objective in the person's own private logic, generally to diminish the pain of feeling inferior, and the courage to face the challenges of life, or the lack thereof.

In Individual Psychology, deciphering the private logic is the essential step in understanding a person's behavior.

The Feeling of Inferiority

The theory positions that the roots of the universal feeling of inferiority lie in childhood, and its intensity varies from person to person according to upbringing, family situation, and early conscious and unconscious experience. By its very nature, a child feels inferior to its surroundings: it is physically weaker than all people around it, often cannot communicate what it wants or needs, is denied many of its wishes (e.g. ice cream), and depends on others for nearly everything.

As the child's grasp of the world expands, so does its awareness of its own perceived inferiority, and it must continually find new ways of coping. A well-adjusted person channels normal inferiority feelings into striving for improvement through real effort and social contribution.

If the child does not find a way to address its feeling of inferiority, an inferiority complex may develop. Rather than spurring healthy effort, they leave the person chronically discouraged, afraid, and stuck, convinced they simply cannot measure up.

Somewhat counterintuitively, the superiority complex is not the opposite of an inferiority complex but a compensation for inferiority. When someone cannot cope with deep feelings of inadequacy, they may overcorrect by becoming boastful, arrogant, domineering, or contemptuous of others. The outward show of superiority conceals the underlying insecurity, such as in a school bully. For Adler, the bragging and the need to dominate are themselves symptoms of inferiority feelings that have never been worked through in a healthy way.

Note that inferiority feelings might be situational, e.g. a person can be genuinely confident at work but feel inadequate in romantic relationships.

Private Logic and Lifestyle

Every person develops a subjective system of reasoning shaped by their particular experiences, called their private logic. From the inside, this logic feels entirely rational, even when its premises are distorted. This system of intimate convictions and decision-rules generally cannot be expressed or articulated by the person themselves, but it is the basis of all decision-making that relates to a person's feeling of worth and inferiority. Guiding a person to realize the misconceptions of their private logic is a key objective of (Adlerian) therapies.

The private logic crystallizes into a lifestyle, which is an unconscious and automated set of strategies and mechanisms to cope with one's feelings of inferiority. The lifestyle is very personal and may include many different "individual" expressions. For instance, a belief "Nobody takes me seriously" might express itself as cultivating an air of intellectual authority, accumulating credentials, or correcting others compulsively. "I am not attractive enough" might lead to obsessive exercise routines, cosmetic procedures, or constant comparison with others. "I am boring and forgettable" might drive someone to curate an extraordinary social media presence or to adopt an unusual external appearance. The range is vast, but the structure is always the same: a feeling of inferiority, a private logic that articulates it, and a lifestyle built to compensate.

In a work context, the lifestyle becomes the management style.

Safeguarding Tendencies

Adler observed that people protect themselves from the pain of inferiority through what he called safeguarding tendencies. They come in two main families: aggression and distance^[3][4]:

Safeguarding through Aggression

When a person feels threatened by inferiority, one response is to go on the offensive. Rather than retreating from the situation, they protect their self-image by actively diminishing others or redirecting blame. Adler identified three forms.

Depreciation is the habit of undervaluing other people to feel superior by comparison. The person minimizes the achievements of others and questions their motives. Diminishing other people is an indirect statement of one's own superiority.

Accusation is the refusal to accept responsibility for anything that goes wrong, combined with the insistence that someone else is at fault. The function is twofold: it explains away any failure and provides direct moral superiority because one calls out the flaws of others.

Self-accusation is aggression disguised as humility. The person attacks themselves before anyone else can, which achieves three things at once: it makes external criticism impossible (you cannot tell someone what they are already saying), it forces others into a reassurance role, and it reframes the person as a victim rather than someone accountable.

Safeguarding through Distance (or Withdrawal)

The second response to inferiority is to create a distance between oneself and the test of one's worth. Distance can take many forms, including indecision, not fully engaging, delaying, finding excuses, refusing change, or not showing up, etc.

As an example of distancing, take a student who sees himself as being very smart, which compensates for his inferiority in many other areas with respect to his comrades. Unfortunately, he never prepares for exams and therefore receives only average grades, which he presents with some pride as proof that he is so smart that he can pass without even preparing. However, this is actually a safeguarding through distance behavior. Imagine he would have prepared but not received the best grade. This would have proven definitively that he is not the smartest of his cohort and thus would have shattered his source of superiority. By skipping preparation, he essentially created a pre-emptive excuse, i.e. distance between himself and the outcome, expressed in the private logic: "If I prepare and I am not the best, everybody will see that I am worthless."

Distance is often accompanied by anxiety, which reinforces the pattern. Once a person has acquired the habit of avoiding difficulties, anxiety makes the avoidance feel necessary and involuntary. The anxiety feels genuine, but its function is protective: it prevents the person from ever reaching the point where they might be exposed.

Bad Leadership as Compensatory Behavior

Genuinely good managers have overcome their feelings of inferiority (at least those related to the workplace) and have social interest in their team and peers. Therefore, they do not need safeguarding mechanisms or a superiority complex. Actual competence is obviously a critical requirement for this. Bad leadership behavior, on the other hand, is in many cases an expression of deep insecurity and a lack of community feeling.

The Difficult Position of the (Middle-)Manager

A promotion, in particular the first one that puts a person in charge of a team, is a very particular event. All of a sudden, there is a formal structure of superiority with respect to people who might be older, more experienced, better experts, or, if promoted within an existing team, who used to be colleagues until recently. The manager needs to justify their new status by actually becoming superior, not just on paper. But managing people is very hard. Often, you feel that employees do not respect you or do not put in the expected effort, making you look bad towards your own managers. This creates a dependency on the employees that conflicts with the very superiority one is supposed to demonstrate.

At the same time, the manager is not a peer within the team and might be excluded from the team's community. With respect to peers, he might be in a position of rivalry or structural conflict, further increasing the sense of isolation. Indeed, most managers want to feel the support, understanding, and engagement of their team. In this situation, flattering can be a surprisingly successful strategy for an employee because it satisfies an emotional need of the manager, although it seems to be totally dishonest and transparent from the outside.

Meanwhile, your boss has a boss. Understanding the pressure they receive from above, and whether they absorb or amplify it, is essential context. One of the defining qualities of a manager is how much organizational pressure they shield the team from, and how much they pass on with their own anxieties added on top.

If the manager has not actually overcome or learnt to manage their deeper feelings of inferiority, the door is wide open for their private logic to crystallize into coping mechanisms and a management style, which might not actually serve the person very well and might survive the situation that initially created it. Each further promotion, each move to a different team, reactivates the same tension: new people to prove oneself to, a renewed sense of inferiority and disconnection, the old certainties gone.

Decoding a Manager's Private Logic

The practical task is to figure out what drives your manager (or a peer manager). What do they reward? What do they punish? What triggers them positively and negatively? What language do they use when stressed? What are they afraid of?

The sources of inferiority in managers may be varied but recognizable: promotion beyond one's actual competence (the Peter Principle); impostor syndrome—the sense of having gotten lucky or cut corners without meriting the role; an educational or social-background gap relative to the team; generational insecurity (feeling too old, or too young); a past professional humiliation that was never processed; comparison with a strong or well-liked predecessor or a peer; a lack of recognition from one's own boss; failing to deliver on unrealistic or self-imposed targets, etc.

Each of these produces a private logic, and the private logic produces a management style. Here are some examples.

"Nobody can do this as well as me. If it is poorly done, it will reflect badly on me.": This is the micromanager. They were promoted because they were excellent at doing the work themselves, and they derive their worth from the quality of what they produce. In a management role, every imperfect deliverable triggers their inferiority, so they compensate by controlling everything. Crucially, "excellent" here means "the way I would have done it," not an objective standard.

Micromanagers have not yet learnt to trust and delegate. Accepting imperfect or simply different outcomes is a fundamental requirement for every manager, and some do get more lenient as they grow into the role, in particular with people who have proven they work reasonably well. One strategy is to work in a niche they do not master. This creates complementarity and forces them to rely on you because they could not do the work themselves.

"If I admit a failure, my position is at risk.": This logic prevents a manager from taking responsibility. When things go wrong, they are terrified and must instinctively deflect fault to someone else: yours, the client's, headquarters', the market. They rewrite history so that their decisions were always sound and the execution by others was the problem. This combines accusation (assigning blame outward) with distance (ensuring their own judgment is never in question). The Blamer also fails to protect the team from external criticism. Because their primary concern is their own exposure, they will sacrifice a team member's reputation to preserve their own.

There is no good strategy. While paper trails may protect you from being scapegoated, they do not change the dynamic. The underlying problem is that the Blamer experiences every failure as an existential threat.

"If I never fully engage, I can never fully fail.": This is the absentee manager. They do not give feedback, make no decisions, and do not show up for their team. What might feel like freedom for employees is a losing strategy: the team's efforts are not organized or internally sold, and key decisions are left unresolved. Many absentee managers were once engaged and got burned, either by a failed initiative, by conflict they could not handle, or simply by the exhaustion of a role they never truly wanted.

It is worth noting that absentee behavior can also reflect genuine depression or burnout rather than Adlerian safeguarding. If the disengagement appeared suddenly rather than gradually, the situation may be medical, and the most useful response is compassion.

With a safeguarding absentee, do not wait for them to come to you. Take over responsibility in domains where you can be reasonably independent while keeping them informed.

"If I say no, people will think I am useless.": This manager cannot refuse a request or admit a limitation for fear of being exposed. They over-promise to stakeholders, take on projects the team cannot deliver, and commit to deadlines that are unrealistic, because every "yes" feels like proof of their value while every "no" feels like an admission of inadequacy. When delivery inevitably falls short, they turn to excuses or accusation rather than revisiting the original commitment. The pattern is self-reinforcing: each over-promise creates a crisis, and each crisis is explained away rather than traced back to the original decision.

If you are assigned one of their over-promised projects, try to manage expectations as early as possible and propose alternatives that may be achievable and have similar outcomes.

"If I show warmth or uncertainty, people will take advantage of me.": Projecting strength through very strict professional boundaries is safeguarding through distance. A cold, transactional attitude keeps out every personal interaction and avoids vulnerability, while maintaining an air of constant critical evaluation as a basis for power. The background is often a betrayal: they were once more open, and someone exploited their trust, or a moment of doubt was used against them in a performance review or a political move. Their private logic concluded that openness is weakness, and they built a management style around emotional distance.

With this manager, do not try to force a personal connection. Earn trust through reliable delivery and professional discretion. Over time, consistency may create enough safety for the relationship to thaw, but it will happen on their terms, not yours.

"If I take a position before knowing what my boss thinks, I might be wrong and exposed.": A manager with this mindset will be conformist and not challenge existing wisdom. Concretely, they will not commit to a view before the important people have spoken in order to avoid any risk. As a result, there will be no innovation, originality, or personal convictions. They might have learnt this lesson from a previous initiative that was punished, leading them to a subtler variant of the absentee manager: Ready to contribute but only within the limits that are safe.

Under this manager, do not expect innovation or support for unconventional ideas. If you want a stable, predictable environment, you will be fine. If you need a manager who fights for the team's position or is looking to innovate, you are in the wrong place.

"If people find out I do not understand this, they will see I am not fit to lead.": This manager lacks genuine competence in the domain they oversee and invests enormous energy in concealing it. They avoid technical discussions, defer to jargon without understanding it, and tend to surround themselves with people who will not challenge their lack of knowledge. Their meetings are vague and directive rather than substantive. When pressed on detail, they deflect through distraction ("there is another more important issue here"), authority ("we need to deliver now"), or delay ("let's take this offline").

No manager can be an expert on all topics, but they should have the overall idea while being transparent if they do not know. If your manager is genuinely incompetent and trying to hide it, you can either cover for them, which makes your working life smoother but leaves you doing their job without the title or pay, or you can expose the gap, which is very risky and may backfire if they have political protection.

Case Studies

The following three cases illustrate how the Adlerian framework applies to real situations. The descriptions are anonymized composites based on my actual experience, which led me to develop this framework in the first place.

Case 1: The Recognition Craver

Description

S is a senior leader of a team of around 15 who has been with the organization for over a decade. He craves recognition from the senior stakeholders and invests most of his energy in pleasing them. He frequently chases side projects, which he believes will be interesting for stakeholders, while neglecting the team's core mission. The work he presents to stakeholders is mostly his own, produced with the support of two close allies in the team. Contributions from other team members are not actively promoted.

S has little contact with or interest in his team and leads from a distance. He values "character" over competence and has repeatedly made poor hiring decisions based on personal affinity rather than ability. He is not open to innovation or changes in the team's methodologies, despite evident need for improvement.

At any given time, he holds a grudge against one person in the team, often for no apparent reason. This leads to him ignoring the person completely or actively mobbing them, without ever openly confronting them or communicating the source of his anger. He is capable of shunning one person while being friendly and humorous with everyone else in the same room. If the person has not left after some time, the grudge moves on to someone else and S's behavior towards the person returns to normal as if nothing had happened.

He thinks it unjust that he has not been further promoted and regularly complains that "the team is not being valued" by the stakeholders. He suffers from mood swings and sometimes locks himself in.

Adlerian Analysis

S's sense of worth is entirely externally located with the position he holds in the organization. He derives it not from the quality of the work or the team's development but from how the senior stakeholders perceive him. His private logic "I am worth what the powerful people above me think I am worth." betrays a powerful feeling of inferiority towards these senior stakeholders and explains the upward orientation as well as the neglect of the team, which is instrumental, not relational. The side projects serve the same function: they are chosen not for their value to the team but for their visibility upward. The core mission, which is harder to present as a personal achievement, is neglected.

"If I present other people's work, I become replaceable" explains why he does not promote contributions; his two allies are safe because they are extensions of himself. Hiring people for their loyalty instead of their competence follows the same pattern.

His resistance to innovation fits a similar logic: "If I admit that the current approach is imperfect, I admit that I have been imperfect all those years."

The grudge pattern is based in the belief that "If someone disrespects me, they must be punished". The triggers can be small because the insecurity underneath is large.

S uses several unconscious safeguarding strategies. The grudge behavior is textbook depreciation: by shunning one person at a time while being friendly with everyone else, he establishes dominance through visible contrast and uses silence as punishment. "The team is not being valued" is a chronic excuse that deflects responsibility. The mood swings and self-isolation are episodes of withdrawal.

His low social interest is evident throughout: the team was never a community for him but an instrument to calm his feeling of inferiority.

So what?

If you work with S, you know that his image towards the top management is the only thing that really matters to him. If you find ways to support him in this endeavor, he will reward you for this.

On the other side, if you are the current target of S's grudge, you are in a difficult spot. He is unlikely to tell you why, and the pattern suggests the grudge serves a psychological function: a scapegoat who absorbs anger he cannot direct upward. Do not seek a direct conversation about the conflict as he cannot admit any unjustified behavior. He will just move to accusation when challenged. Given the past pattern, you can either try to sit it out or decide that it is time to move on from this suffering man.

Case 2: The Board Member

Description

N is in her mid-fifties and was a partner in an international consultancy for 25 years. She was rumored to be difficult to work with and was eventually let go for failure to deliver on her business plan. She has since joined two organizations as an external board member but has not succeeded in obtaining a third mandate in three years. In the larger organization, she is perceived as very engaged, spending far more hours than her role requires. In exchanges with management, she frequently takes contrarian stances, typically responding to statements with "yes, but". She genuinely tries to bring new perspectives, but her argumentation often lacks internal consistency. She is perceived as not understanding the business and creating unnecessary noise. She has received this feedback repeatedly from the shareholders, sometimes in sharp and blunt terms but is unable to adapt her behavior.

Adlerian Analysis

The termination after 25 years is the defining event. Losing a partnership for underperformance is a direct message of inadequacy from the institution that defined her adult life. The rumor of being difficult suggests compensatory patterns predate the current situation and likely contributed to her downfall. The crucial point is that she cannot see this, because the behavior of excessive activity feels to her like main strength and expression of her value.

Two core beliefs drive her. "I must prove I am (still) a senior strategic thinker" explains the overinvestment of hours, an attempt to demonstrate value she fears is no longer self-evident. "If I agree with management, I am redundant" explains the contrarianism: for someone whose self-worth depends on intellectual superiority, agreement feels like disappearance. Every "yes, but" is a way of making herself exist in the room and, in her view, demonstrating her contribution and value.

She is unable to adapt despite sharp feedback because her behavior is not a professional habit but a psychological survival mechanism. If she stops performing the brilliant critical thinker, what remains? There is also likely a genuine competence gap: consulting skills do not automatically translate to a board role requiring deep knowledge of one specific business, but her private logic likely includes "I spent 25 years advising firms - I cannot admit I do not understand this business".

Unlike S, N genuinely wants to contribute to the community. Her problem is that her contribution is delivered in a compensating, insecure way that sabotages her considerable efforts.

So what?

N has not yet learnt to be a board member. If you have to work with her directly, pick a good idea from the pile of comments she produces and try to develop it the best you can, while constantly reflecting back to her that the idea was hers to begin with. The objective is to give her the feeling that she is being heard and reassure her of her own contributions. At least towards you, that might give her the reassurance she needs to feel valued and overcome the safeguarding.

Case 3: The Second-Generation Owner

Description

O is in his mid-sixties and has been CEO for 25 years of a large, successful business inherited from his late father. An older sibling sits on the board but is mostly passive. O is known for his sharp tongue and for risky business decisions. While these decisions have generally paid off and the business has grown continuously, he has not managed to overtake any of the historic competitors.

His retirement timeline is unclear, rumored to be two to three years away, but none of the next generation family members is ready to take over. He greatly values family control of the business and is hostile to the idea of handing over to professional management.

About 15 years ago, the business underwent a critical crisis caused by excessive and blind risk-taking by management. O's father had to step back in and take over the reins from his son, making costly but decisive decisions that saved the business.

On a personal level, O is very fast-paced, direct, and impatient in conversations. He uses provocation and jokes extensively with subordinates. While this gives him a certain charm, it makes concentrated, thoughtful discussion very difficult. He frequently takes opposite views and arrives at exaggerated statements, leaving the actual issue under discussion unresolved. Decisions are taken rashly without deeper strategic analysis. If he does not like where a conversation is going, he does not hesitate to shout or publicly chastise the person speaking. He seems to enjoy conflict in his senior management meetings. He openly belittles his directly subordinated senior managers but never actually fired one of them. He trusts only one member of the leadership team unconditionally, who is also a close friend. His leadership team is not composed of strong individuals but of people who are, or have become, subservient to him.

Adlerian Analysis

O's career is guided by a single doubt: "People believe that I am here because of my father, not because I am capable." Fifteen years ago, this belief was significantly reinforced when his father stepped back in and saved the business.

Therefore, O believes "I must prove I deserve this position.", which leads to continuous compensatory risk-taking. Each successful bet is evidence that he is a real CEO, not merely an heir, and the attempt to build his own legacy. That he has not overtaken the historic competitors despite 25 years of growth likely gnaws at him as the business was already successful when he inherited it.

"The business must stay in the family." is the fear that a professional CEO might do the job better, which would be the final confirmation that the role was never his by merit. The unresolved succession issue is related and existential: if the business thrives without him, he was never essential; if it struggles, his legacy is failure.

The impatience, shouting, and public chastising are not confidence but its opposite, a superiority complex. "I must dominate every room in order not to appear weak." is the underlying belief. The provocation and jokes keep others at a distance. The fact that he has not fired any of the senior managers shows that the subservient system is working as designed. Everyone is kept diminished, producing exactly the team he needs to feel safe. Strong individuals might become the kind of decisive figure his father was and make him feel his inferiority.

Interestingly, the passive older sibling on the board has responded to the same source of inferiority by safeguarding through distance instead of through aggression.

So what?

For anyone working under O, the honest assessment is that the scope for change is very limited. His position is structurally unchecked: there is no boss above to provide a corrective and the leadership team has been shaped to not challenge him. This is classic toxic leadership at the top that has repeatedly resulted in corporate scandals.

An employee who needs to survive this environment should understand that direct contradiction is the most dangerous thing you can do, because it threatens the one thing holding his psyche together. It is best to keep a distance to O and not engage with him unless absolutely necessary.

As regards the senior management team, these people accept the poor treatment in exchange for status and financial reward. It is more than likely that they have themselves severe leadership issues.

Turning the Tables: Interviewing Your Interviewer

When you are invited for a job interview, wouldn't it be reasonable to also assess the interviewer and understand if that person would make a good manager? Unfortunately, problematic managers can be very correct and charming at first glance, until their inferiority issues are actually triggered.

Here is some advice:

1. Pay attention to the topics that the manager brings up during the interview and how they frame them. Most importantly, which topics do they avoid?

2. Cover any revealing key topic that was not addressed to see their reactions. They might take the topic for granted in a healthy way, or the avoidance betrays some underlying issue.

3. Depending on the constellation of the interview, ask surprise questions that destabilize and invert the power dynamic to see if the person can deal with these situations.

If the position is not part of an existing teams, the questions and topics need to be adapted to the specific organizational context.

Key Interview Topics

Inverting the Interview Dynamic

The idea is to create a moment of surprise that destabilizes the manager and lets you see through the facade. These questions briefly reverse the power dynamic and ask the manager to be reflective, vulnerable, or accountable. A healthy manager responds with openness or even enjoyment, but if the person reacts poorly, you have learned something important. Obviously, these need to be deployed depending on the context.

"Why did you select my CV?" This question is powerful because it reverses the dynamic in a single sentence. For the entire interview, the manager has been evaluating you. Now you are asking them to justify their own decision-making. It tests whether they actually read the CV carefully and made a thoughtful choice, or whether the selection was superficial or delegated. It also signals self-respect and strategic intelligence: you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. A secure manager finds this attractive, but an insecure manager may find it threatening. You can follow-up with "what do you think I should improve?" This lets you test the manager's ability to give constructive feedback and, through the spontaneous setting, is likely to reveal the thing they actually care about most. If they give you a good and honest answer to these questions, you may actually learn something useful for your next application.

"What is the most important thing you have learned from your team?" This probes whether learning flows upward at all. A manager with genuine social interest can point to a specific moment where a team member changed their thinking or praise the outstanding skills of their staff. A manager who sees the team as a mere tool or status symbol will struggle with the premise of the question. It tests humility, openness to change, and genuine engagement with the people they lead.

"What would your team say is the hardest thing about working with you?" Asked with a smile, this question forces the manager to adopt the team's perspective, which requires both empathy and honesty. A good sign is a pause, a slight discomfort, and then something specific that might be rather revealing.

Please note that this interview approach only works if you can actually turn down the job or are comfortable with the idea of not being selected. If this idea makes you anxious, there is probably a feeling of inferiority at work that prevents you from being courageous through a private logic along the lines of "If I am refused for a job, it shows that I am worthless."

1. Toxic Bosses Survey

2. Managing Your Boss, J. J. Gabarro and J. P. Kotter

3. See for instance Introduction to Carlson, J. & Maniacci, M. (2015), Adlerian Psychotherapy

4. Ansbacher and Ansbacher, 1956

5. Different classifications exist, including newer ones (e.g. Feist) that use excuses as a separate category, which in my view does not add clarity.