After 35 years in higher education, I’ve stopped being surprised by how much damage one mismatched relationship can do – and how surreptitiously it happens.

Yes, it’s the line manager/line managed relationship.  That most vexed of imposed interactions.

After all, you can choose your friends, your partner, where you live, what you wear, and whether to have milk in your tea (please do, by the way).

But your line manager is assigned without consultation.  In most cases.  And of course, just when you think you have the relationship working well, it can change in a heartbeat – on a whim, on a notion of ‘spans of control’ or in a re-org.

And yet this single relationship – this workplace accident of organisational design – can become the most consequential of your entire career if you are not careful. 

Without due care, the relationship with your line manager can shape how you feel on a Sunday night, how you perform on a Monday morning, and how clearly you can see your own worth on all the days in between.  That can be both positive and negative, of course.

I’ve had 35 years of bosses. Great ones, admirable ones, difficult ones, and a fair few who were somewhere in the mediocre middle. I know from lived experience – and from coaching women leaders across higher education – just how destabilising a difficult line manager relationship can be. And how quietly it can corrode your confidence if you let it go unexamined.

Sleepwalking into a dysfunctional line manager relationship

The curious thing about a difficult manager relationship is that it can emerge slowly and imperceptibly.   There’s no dramatic incident you can point to. It creeps in through small, ambiguous signals, despite your best efforts to ‘not leap to judgement’, ‘give them time to settle in’, ‘offer them the benefit of the doubt’. 

It could be a missed one-to-one, rescheduled twice with no explanation.  When you needed sign off for a key piece of work. Or a curt reply to an email you crafted carefully, that you read over and over again, trying to read something positive into it.   It could be a moment in a senior meeting where your well thought through contribution landed in the room and then… nothing.  And your boss, from the chair, passes over your idea without acknowledgement, like a stone dropped into still water that somehow makes no ripple.

On their own, these mini moments are nothing to write home about. Universities are full to bursting with busy people, full diaries, and off-days. But the cumulative effect can be truly toxic if left unchecked.  Your inner critic can go into overdrive: 

‘They don’t rate me’. ‘I haven’t made it into the inner circle’. ‘Their view of me will follow me around this institution.’ ‘If they don’t value me, nobody else will either.’

I’ve sat with women in coaching sessions who are intelligent, experienced, genuinely impressive leaders – and watched them assign a single manager’s ambivalent opinion the weight of a final verdict on their career. 

It’s painful to witness – partly because I recognise it. I’ve done it myself.

Early in my HE career, I had a line manager whose style and mine were fundamentally misaligned. No real drama or conflict (not at first!). There was just a persistent, grinding sense of not quite being on the same page, not meeting the mark – and the slow, creeping belief that this said something definitive about me. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to see what was actually happening. The problem wasn’t my competence – or theirs necessarily. It was the relationship dynamic. And those are very different things that take you to very different conclusions.

One data point among hundreds

Here’s what I now know, and what I wish I had understood me sooner.

Your line manager’s opinion of you is one single small data point. Just one. It sits alongside hundreds of others – peers who actively seek your advice on knotty problems, teams you’ve developed, coached, stretched and believed in, projects you’ve carefully and successfully navigated through institutional resistance, problems you’ve elegantly solved that nobody else could quite fathom.

The trap is that the line manager ‘data point’ feels weighted differently to all the others. It comes with control and authority attached. It can have direct consequences for recognition, pay, for promotion, for how comfortable your working life feels day to day. Of course it looms large. Of course it crowds out the other evidence in your mind’s eye.

But ‘weighted heavily in the short term’ and ‘definitive truth about your professional worth’ are not the same thing. And treating them as if they are is one of the most costly mistakes I have made and that I see talented women leaders in universities make all the time.

I’ve seen creative, talented colleagues wither under one senior leader and flourish – visibly, measurably – under another. Yet it is the same person, the same quality and skills, and often the same institution. I’ve seen brilliant Directors move sideways and suddenly become the star performer that everyone talks up in the corridors. The difference is never competence or talent. It was interpersonal dynamic, and the particular chemistry of that specific relationship.  Add a dose of power imbalance and you have a recipe for pain and discontent.

What I’d like to say, without equivocation, is that in these scenarios, the story your manager’s opinion is telling you about yourself is, at best, partial. At worst, it’s fiction.

What’s actually within your control

OK – to be clear, I’m not suggesting you simply reframe your way out of a genuinely toxic situation. Sometimes a difficult line manager relationship is a signal worth taking seriously – about the culture and what behaviours are tacitly rewarded, about your future in that role, about what you actually want from this stage of your career.

But if you’re staying – and many are, at least for now – then there are things genuinely within your control. And being purposeful and unemotive about them can change more than you might expect.  Here are some ideas for you to consider: 

Seek to really understand what your manager actually needs. Not what you think they should need, or what a reasonable manager in their position would need, but what this specific person – under these specific institutional pressures, in this specific moment of HE turbulence – actually needs from you. This takes patient observation, setting aside of emotions (‘why should I have to pander to them’ etc) and occasionally real courage to act on. It’s worth doing anyway.

Build your reputation determinedly and consistently beyond the reporting line. Look around you right now. Who calls or what’s app’s you to help with tricky and sensitive problems? Who turns to you at meetings when something contentious needs unpicking or validating? Who messages you informally, not because they have to but because they value your judgement? These people see you very clearly. They’re part of a network of honest supporters that exists whether you’re nurturing it or not. Start nurturing it.

Document meticulously what you’re actually achieving – for yourself. Not for performance review boxes. Just for you. When your inner critic turns hostile – and under a difficult line manager, it will – you need cold hard evidence you can actually return to and which is irrefutable. Log specific outcomes, moment of real impact, times when you held the room or secured approval for a tough ask. The practice of recording your own achievements is one of the most underrated acts of professional esteem building available to you. It’s also, I’ll admit, one of the habits I had to build deliberately, because it felt uncomfortable and slightly self-congratulatory. It isn’t. It’s necessary and its honest.  As one client says (I paraphrase) ‘I’m data driven by nature, so gathering and believing accurate data about my own value should be instinctive!’

Invest in the relationship anyway. I know. It’s the very last thing you want to do when you feel unseen, badly judged or undervalued. But a manager who feels understood – whose pressures you’ve taken the genuine trouble to appreciate – is far more likely to become workable than one you’ve quietly written off. They don’t have to ‘deserve’ being understood – this work is to benefit you. Get selfish!  This single act can shift the dynamic more often than you’d expect.

What’s your part in this?

OK, this is a tricky one.  When we’re in a difficult relationship or any kind, not just with a line manager, we tend to look outward – at their behaviour, their lack of knowledge, their blind spots, their failures of judgement. That scrutiny is often entirely justified, and frankly, it feels rather good. Some managers are genuinely ill-suited to the role, and no amount of generous reframing on your part will change that.

But there’s a harder question worth sitting with, and I ask it of myself as much as anyone else.

What’s the part I am playing in fracturing this relationship?

Don’t approach this in a self-blaming way – that will just create a downward victimhood spiral. Look at it with genuine fascination and curiosity. Because sometimes the dynamic making us miserable is partly – not wholly, not even mainly, but partly – being fuelled by our own responses to it. The gradual withdrawal and frosty messages; the second-guessing that leaches the confidence from our communication; the subtle defensive edge that frames our emails when we feel mistreated.

These responses are wholly understandable.  I have absolutely been there!   But they’re also worth examining. Because the only part of this equation you can actually change is your own side of it. And doing that – deliberately, and without self-recrimination – can improve things in surprising ways.

A final word

To reiterate, your manager’s lens is not the only one that matters.  It may not matter at all.

Their opinion is not your identity. Their current assessment of you is absolutely not the final word on what you are capable of – now or at any point in the future.

You have built a career in one of the most complex, demanding, structurally challenging professional environments in existence. Higher education in 2026 is not for the faint-hearted. The fact that you are still here, still leading authentically, still caring about doing it well – that is a lot.

Don’t let one difficult relationship – however significant it feels right now – be the loudest voice in the room.

You get to decide whose opinion counts. Start there.