About 6 months into working for a toxic small business, my boss finally cracked under my constant complaining about how disorganised everything was and promoted me to manager of my (tiny, understaffed, un-managed) team so he could offload the problem-solving onto me
I have zero management experience (I’m 24) and was very clear about how uncomfortable the concept of being a manager made me but he dismissed my concerns about how managers need leadership skills and training & insisted I take it. Since I was already doing most of the management job without any of the power that comes with it, I negotiated a pay increase and accepted
I still make way less than I should in my position but now I can take control of organising workflows, processes, planning etc which has been good for me and my team and resulting in record success. What’s killing me is the stress of leading a team in such a shitty company. I can manage my team’s workload effectively in a silo’d internal way but when we have problems that require assistance from the wider company or god forbid my boss, I receive zero support or help
I spend half my time pushing back against unreasonable deadlines and requests sent from above and essentially counselling my team when they have yet another traumatic interaction with other staff or management. My boss clearly resents the fact that I’m not willing to work my team into the ground or push them to their limits and even past that. When I tell him that [team member] can’t do [project] because they’re already swamped, he says things like “just ask them to do it, you know what they’re like, they’ll find a way to handle it”
My boss is a tyrannical “young entrepreneur” type and I feel so guilty about how little I’m able to protect my team from his insanity. He’s a bully who preys on the weak, and I escape most of it by not being afraid of confrontation but it doesn’t stop him from targeting and humiliating the rest of my team and doing things like bringing up their salary to justify their overwhelming workload (in front of other staff, no less). I am actively job searching but in the meantime it feels like I’m trying to cool down a small section in hell