Ask This Influencer What Your Boss Really Thinks. You May Regret It

There’s a genre of career content that has dominated the internet, the kind that’s upbeat, aspirational, and perhaps mildly delusional. Believe in yourself! Lean in! Your boss is rooting for you! But Colleen Bordeaux’s content is decidedly not that. The former Deloitte leader turned founder of Growth Inc. has built a devoted following on Instagram by doing something disarmingly simple: telling you what your boss is actually thinking.

Worried your boss has favorites? They almost certainly do, and if you’re waiting for them to feel bad about it, Bordeaux would like to remind you that they’re not your mother. Wondering what your manager really thinks when you complain about your coworker for the third time this week? That you should probably learn how to work it out yourselves, because they didn’t sign up to be a referee. Convinced your boss is ignoring your Slack messages because they hate you? Likely not—your ping is just number 47 in the queue.

Through short, satirical clips that exaggerate the inner monologue of managers, Bordeaux has given language to a tension most workplaces have been too polite to name: leadership has gotten exponentially harder, nobody prepared anyone for it, and the gap between what employees need and what their bosses can realistically give them is widening by the day. Her comments sections are predictably split—part relief, part rage, part “I hate that you just said that, but you’re so right”—and her audience keeps coming back because she refuses to dress it up.

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We talked to Bordeaux about why her brand of workplace honesty is resonating now, what women still get wrong about likability, and the question everyone’s really asking: does my boss hate me?

What do most women have to unlearn about how they show up at work?

I talk a lot about the pressure to fit the mold at work. And I think the biases women face around likability are very real. In my career, I focused so much on how I was being perceived. Being liked and approved was paramount. And I hit this point where I realized in my own leadership journey that was coming at the cost of my own confidence and at the cost of building trust and respect, making difficult choices and decisions, doing things that needed to get done but would potentially be unpopular. If everyone likes you and approves of you, you’re not leading anything.

What’s a post that got the biggest reaction, and why do you think it hit a nerve?

I’ve had a few that have gotten really big reactions, but I think I had one that was about if leaders were honest when you complain about your coworkers. Something I’m hearing over and over and over again is leaders being put in this position to referee interpersonal issues. And so I think it hit a nerve because it was touching on a challenge that leaders are facing every day that they didn’t necessarily expect to face—in terms of navigating interpersonal dynamics and issues that they feel that their team should understand how to navigate on their own.

Career content has gone from inspirational LinkedIn posts to something more anxious: people decoding interactions for subtext. Why do you think that’s resonating now?

The bone I have to pick with a lot of this content and leadership development approaches is that it focuses on these visible aspects of leadership—how you fit the mold of success, how you project confidence and build your executive presence. And this invisible part of leadership, what I call the invisible capabilities of leaders, which is judgment, discernment, self-trust, emotional regulation—those are things we have never reinforced in leadership development but are now absolutely critical. I hear from thousands of leaders this experience of intense loneliness. That if you’re struggling, there’s something fundamentally wrong with you—I think recognizing that it’s actually a much more universal experience than you realize. What we are all craving is how to have our day-to-day experiences and struggles reflected back to us, to feel seen and heard.

Is the internet making people better at work or more paranoid?

I love questions like these. I think it’s both. I think that it is very easy for all of us to opt in to the type of content that reinforces our own worldview, tells us we’re doing things right, and reinforces what we want to believe. And I do think there’s a lot of workplace content out there that I personally have seen that does not translate to what success looks like, that listening to this advice will sometimes create the opposite of success for you. But I also think that there is a huge need, and I’m seeing a lot of creators in this space stepping into that need [who] have the credentials, the chops and experience to [use] social media as a channel to be able to reach people who need it and are genuinely looking for it. And I think there is a growing niche around that.

You talk about respect over likability. That’s a hard sell for women who are still punished for not being warm enough. How do you square that?

100 percent agree. And there’s more to it than just likability. There’s even tone of voice and appearance. And I think women are trained to understand that from a very young age. So I think it’s recognizing that that bias exists. And there is an element of logic, that you want to be able to set yourself up for success and do things that are going to help you move forward in your career. And just ignoring that bias exists is something that has ramifications. So I think it’s recognizing that these realities exist, but [also asking yourself], how do I start to build some constraints around what I actually allow to affect me? Where do I actually need approval? Where does that likability actually matter the most, and where does it not matter as much? And then give yourself the permission to be disliked and have people not approve of you—and look at that not as data that you’re doing something wrong, but as proof that you’re starting to step into your power.

What’s something a boss does that people are right to read into—and on the other side, something they’re way over-reading?

The hottest topic on that point is giving feedback. I hear from individual contributors that their boss doesn’t give them feedback, or if they do get the feedback it’s very vague, non-specific, they’re not quite sure what to do with it. And that is a very real experience that I think team members are having in today’s work. And on the other side, I have thousands of leaders telling me that they are deeply afraid to give feedback because when they have those conversations, they are trying to do everything they possibly can to help it land, but are oftentimes experiencing resistance to feedback or really disappointed employees that may take it the wrong way. There’s this sense of backlash, that if I provide anything that is sort of constructive in nature, that it is going to affect my likability.

Biggest misconception about bosses?

The biggest misconception is that leadership is an innate trait, that you either have it and you’re naturally good at it, or you’re toxic. I see that binary narrative perpetuated over and over again. And I think that this idea that the job has changed, fundamentally changed, it’s truly never been harder, but we haven’t changed the way we’re preparing leaders. They’re internalizing that as a personal failure, and this misconception is preventing people from actually growing. And something that I hear often—that my boss is unavailable, I’m concerned they don’t like me. And the reality is, many leaders have a mathematically impossible job. That’s a reasonable expectation for a team member to have with their leader, but if you have more direct reports than there are hours in the day and you have all of these pressures on top of you for how you’re navigating your work, it can be really hard to dedicate that time on an individual basis to everyone who desires it of you.

Is there a specific person you’ve impacted where you really felt it?

I got a DM yesterday from a woman who told me that she just wanted to say she’d been following my work for years and she just submitted her resignation at a job she’d been at for her whole career. And she said that she wanted to change her job to give her more time and space and capacity to live a day-to-day life that she actually felt fulfilled and energized by and wanted to spend more time with her kids and invest in her hobbies and her creativity. That means so much to me because I think we need more examples of women that are choosing to direct their careers in a way that gives them what they ultimately want—and gets out of this binary model of: you’re either ambitious and grinding in a high-profile job, or you’re giving up and getting “a lazy girl job” or being a stay-at-home mom.

If there’s one thing you’d want people to take away—both leaders and the people reporting to them—what would it be?

It’s impossible to lead anything and anyone if you haven’t figured out how to lead yourself first. You have to figure out: How do I develop the capabilities I need to have professional judgment, to trust myself, to have healthy emotional and relational interactions day-to-day? And this idea also of the role of a leader has fundamentally changed, and we’ve done a very bad job of fundamentally changing the way we prepare them. So whether you’re in a leadership role or individual contributor, the work to build that ability to lead yourself first is going to be critical no matter where you go in your career.