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This week in pm-clinic: Dealing with the powerful but annoying

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

The manager for my team is one of the company founders. He’s smart, but oh man, is he annoying. He has a litany of habits that make my life, as a team leader, frustrating: from disrupting my authority in front of others, to changing his mind and then changing it back, to just being downright egotistical, snide and resistant to ideas from others. He is smart and does contribute, and listens about 1/3rd of the time, just enough to prevent the other founders from doing anything about him.

So I have to work with this man: he’s not going anywhere, and he has significant power over me, my team, and the company. So how can I protect myself and my team from his many less than delightful habits?

– Stuck in Annoyanceville