Bosses are human beings too.

No, hear me out on this one

Marianne Jones in The Times Magazine, Saturday, October 22.

I want to talk about a piece in The Times this week, written by Marianne Jones. Marianne is a former editor of Stella Magazine - she was there at the same time as I was editing You magazine. The title was, ‘The job I loved nearly killed me.’ You can read it here. 

Essentially she speaks about how she repeatedly ignored the warning signs that stress was getting the better of her, until she found herself at a crisis point with life-threateningly high blood pressure.

While I have been capable of taking myself to dark, panicky places in moments of stress, I feel as though I’m also an hysterical enough hypochondriac to ensure it never gets quite that bad for me.  In fact, I’ve taken Marianne’s advice from the piece - buy a blood pressure monitoring kit to keep at home. That can be the new toy that simultaneously calms and feeds my anxious, health-obsessed brain. 

To some extent, I think we all brainwash ourselves into believing what she did -  that we must ignore how down and stressed we’re feeling and plough on. That your problems are not serious enough to warrant you feeling defeated by them. Like Marianne, I had many sleepless nights during that first handbrake turn into the 2020 lockdown, wondering how the hell I’d fill the pages of a magazine when the world ground to a halt. And like her, I would berate myself for feeling stressed about this, because, you know, NHS workers. And of course those two stresses are not in the same league. Reminding yourself that others are dealing with much worse than you is healthy for perspective, yes. But it doesn’t solve your problem. And Marianne is right, it was hard making a magazine at the time. I’m proud of how we kept the wheels on at You magazine and somehow got it out every week. Marianne should be proud of doing that at Stella too. She actually won a prestigious Editor of the Year award that year.  

But her story raised another issue for me that I wanted to talk about.  

Of course, along with the status and the biggest salary in the room comes responsibility. When we take these jobs and sign the contracts we understand that and welcome it. With that, there’s often an assumption - perhaps an expectation - that the boss can take as many punches that come their way and carry on standing. Quite often, people forget their boss is an actual human being. 

One example that really sticks out in my mind was when, whilst working at Glamour, one of my staff loudly, cheerily, across the office suddenly blurted out: ‘Jo, is it true that you and Ross are getting a divorce?’

I was staggered. ‘What?! What makes you ask that?’ I asked, as the room of about 20 people stopped what they were doing and looked in my direction.  A friend of theirs who worked on another magazine had been discussing it in their office, apparently. People I didn’t even know were passing this around as a fact. I have no idea why I was such a hot topic of gossip but by this time I’d also heard I’d been fired, got a job in New York, was pregnant with twins and had run out of my office one day to scream at my PA to get me biked round a selection of orange coloured shoes from Manolo Blahnik. All bullshit.  

What floored me about this exchange was that someone I’d worked with closely hadn’t taken a little pause to think, ‘This could be a sensitive topic and it might be true (it wasn’t). This woman might be going through something quite painful right now.’ It seemed that I was just the ‘boss’ object, whose personal life wasn’t a real thing, just the focus of amusing gossip as sport. If I had loudly asked someone who worked for me that question, across a crowded office, it could have been construed as bullying. 

I should have said something to this person at the time, but it was one of those moments when I was just stunned and didn’t really know how to react. 

There was another time when I wrote a feature for the magazine. At the proofing stage, I re-read a paragraph and thought, ‘That’s crap, I’ll change that.’ When I did, a colleague said, ‘Thank god you changed that, we were all wondering who was going to be the one to tell you how embarrassing it was.’

If I ever said to a staff member, ‘This thing you’ve written is so bad it’s embarrassing’, everyone would have been up in arms at my insensitivity. There are ways to critique someone’s work and that wasn’t it - letting someone know that not only did they write something terrible but everyone’s been laughing behind their back about it.

When you’re in charge, it’s often hard to find the space to ‘switch off’ and again, those of us who’ve worked as magazine editors largely accept that. Deadlines don’t care about your holiday. But something I’ve had several times, in every job I’ve had, is getting the text or voicemail or email while I’m holiday that says, ‘Hi Jo, I hope you’re having a great holiday and sorry to be cutting into it but when you’re back, can we have a chat? I need to talk to you about something.’

I’ve had that one many, many times. From various people. It is the number one best way to sabotage any success a person may have had with ‘switching off’. You’re left to lie awake at night wildly speculating on what the problem might be, or phone the office and find out, and maybe discover that it’s no big deal.

Again, if I butted into someone’s holiday with the gentle indication that there’s a nice ball of stress waiting for them as soon as they’re back, I’d earn myself a place in the Horrible Bosses Hall of Fame. If you would like to increase your chances of having a boss who doesn’t fly off the handle, makes rational decisions and lets you have a life, let that boss have some downtime too.

These are crystallising moments when you’re a person in charge: you realise that no matter how well you think you get on with the people you’re paid to manage, some of them will never really view you a fully-formed person. When you’re ‘the boss’, this means you’re often viewed as nothing more than the buzzkill who makes unpopular decisions; ‘the enemy’ and certainly not a real person with human emotions. It’s something you just have to make your peace with, otherwise you’ll crumble every time you realise they all went to the pub without you. 

We rightly set high standards for the character traits we want in a boss - someone fair, empathetic, flexible, respectful. It’s only fair that the people we work for get a little of that from us too. That saying everyone loves putting on their Instagram grid - ‘everyone is fighting a battle you’re not aware of’ really does mean everyone, possibly even the boss you think is a bit of a tool.

I don’t know the ins and outs of what Marianne’s day to day office life was like. But I feel certain that if we allowed those in charge a bit more space to be a bit more human, maybe she wouldn’t have felt she had to power through the mental burnout that nearly killed her.