11 signs your boss is passive aggressive

During your feedback sessions, they talk in circles. Passive-aggressive bosses leave you with the impression that you've screwed up, without giving you concrete information on how you can improve.

It's a passive-aggressive tactic, because it avoids confrontation while also signaling something is wrong. This can really throw you off balance.

Maybe your boss has an obvious favorite that they coddle. Maybe they sow seeds of discontent within different teams, giving rise to a toxic, hypercompetitive environment. Maybe they even wade into the sludge that is the office rumor mill.

Either way, if your boss is playing games in the office, treat it as a red flag that they're a passive-aggressive person. Instead of taking charge and managing, they'd prefer to adopt sketchy behaviors in order to further their agenda.

One morning, your manager up and reassigns your big project to a coworker. You try to figure out if you did something wrong, but they won't give you any clear answers.

That leaves you stuck in limbo — angry about your abrupt demotion and confused about whether or not you're to blame.

Your boss holds everyone accountable — except themselves. When they mess up, the blame's always put on external factors or some poor scapegoat. It's never any sort of overt announcement or explanation either. After a while, you begin to just accept that the rules don't apply to your boss.

This is one passive-aggressive tendency that's particularly terrible for office morale.

Passive aggressive people love lots of intricate, pointless rules. These guidelines give them the ability to strike others down from the safety of taking an official position.

If your office is hampered by a tangle of arbitrary but intensely enforced regulations, you've probably got a passive-aggressive person at the helm.

If you feel like your boss is ignoring you, consider the possibility that you're the problem. Try asking for feedback in order to figure out what's going on. Did you mess something up and lose their trust? Could they just be swamped with their own problems?

If your reflection and their feedback turns up nothing, they might just have a bad attitude. Maybe you did something minor that they perceived as a slight. It's too petty to bring up, but they're still determined to punish you.

Suddenly, your boss is saddling you with impossible deadlines, insane requests, and an insurmountable workload.

They might just be demanding. Or they might be setting you up to fail because they don't like you or see you as future competition.

Either way, this is a super passive-aggressive tactic. They can always just fall back on the excuse that you failed.

You messed something up months ago, and they're still throwing it in your face, despite the fact that you've since proven yourself and returned to form.

Passive-aggressive people are like magpies, expect instead of collecting odds and ends, they hoard examples of others' weaknesses. If your boss can't let go of one mistake you made long ago, that's not a great sign.

The passive-aggressive boss really couldn't care less about cultivating talent and mentorship. They're so wrapped up in their own professional progression that they tend to focus exclusively on themselves (along with a few lackeys, in some cases), at the expense of the rest of the office.

At first, this might seem like a good thing. At a certain level, having a manager that doesn't boss you around can feel like a plus.

However, in reality, this is a huge problem. Your boss forces you to play the role of mind reader in order to figure out what they actually want, rather than simply telling you outright. This leads to a stress-ridden, unclear office environment.