Utterly Silent: The Passive Aggressive Boss

Due to privileged communication demands with the client, actual names and company names have been changed.

A human resources department is concerned over five grievances. Allegations state that a company leader has been “aggressive, undermining, and quietly demeaning with her engineers.” What words did she use? No words. This CEO is utterly silent.

Colleagues say she is “tricky and sly” speaking with theatrically arched eyebrows, cold glances, and condemning smirks. Her preoccupied, otherworldly face says “miserable presentation” and her bored body says “no, no, no.” Scientists are hushed and humiliated. Engineers say she does not appear to be remotely interested in their Harvard, Stanford, and MIT pedigrees or revelations. Why speak when our boss sneers and her head is deeply buried in that iPhone? Has she lost her words?

I was contracted by HR to assist in assessing and addressing “the escalating workplace indignancies and sabotage” attributed to CEO, Ingrid Stillway, a renowned engineer. Specifically, two current allegations alleging “danger to others” (DTO) allowed for the opening of long-sealed records revealing a prior history as a passive-aggressive leader.

In the case of Stillway and Scorching Solutions Inc., formal complaints addressed a boss who at first glance appears to be reasonable and agreeable with few, if any, words. But at second glance she “talks with a scathing, disturbed face.” What is up? HR has been bombarded. A boss of so few words allegedly sabotages her R&D engineers through some form of facial kabuki and toxic body language.

One engineer confided that “our boss is sometimes deceptively chill in her negativity as she quietly shuts down my most creative bursts with her facial expressions.” Another engineer stated, “Ms. Stillway is detached and toxic. If looks could kill, she wins the Oscar. She doodles and texts during a Zoom and PowerPoint.” Video surveillance reveals that her engineers regularly observe Stillway’s silent disrespect but choose to “play very dumb.” The director of an R&D project spoke for the team when she whispered that “Dr. Stillway seldom speaks. At one meeting, she compliments me with two sweet words but minutes later she abruptly goes kamikaze with her lava-scowling eyes and looks at me like I’m the plague.”

Common to the five complaints is a “silent manner of crushing engineers and causing public loss of face.” Such workplace misconduct is seemingly 98 percent nonverbal. Mysteriously, words play almost no role in the assault.

At first glance, the passive-aggressive boss appears quite aggregable and supportive, with a smile at the beginning of a meeting. But one of Stillway’s techniques is to soon drift off during that meeting and offer zero feedback. Look up at your boss. No one is home. Stillway excels at providing a negative, dismissive face. In the words of one grievance, she “excels in degrading nonverbals,” and “she should have been the villainous actress in silent movies.”

Baffling to the engineers has been this lack of direct verbal feedback from their passive-aggressive superior. They have to read between the lines, paying acute attention to her “frazzled face talk” and “bodacious body language.” Engineers became hyper-sensitized. They acutely observed slight shifts of her mouth, lips, a pained faint smile, otherworldly eyebrows, and the impatient rhythm of fingernails on a table. All came to signify wordless expressions of rejection. The scientists were wildly starved for spoken words, thirsty for direct communication, and hungry for a meaningful conversation.

The engineers experienced a workplace that was “an enigma, a mystery and perpetually vague. It was “a guessing game” to constantly figure out what Stillway was objecting to or rejecting. What was she shooting down? There was frustration and agitation surrounding why “she doesn’t she just come out and say it?” As pointed out by Brogaard (2020), the passive-aggressive leader masters the subtleties and toxic art form of “hidden messages.”

The phrase repeatedly surfacing and gaining traction was “subtle sabotage.” The CEO was quite personable in her 360-degree resistance to HR grievances and references to her sabotage. But this was purely on the surface. I directly experienced Stillway’s passive-aggressive style in response to my workplace observations and interviews. She glared and quietly threatened.

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Facing a soon-to-be onslaught of negative social media, Scorching Solutions Inc. urged Stillway to fully cooperate in the consultation and to also negotiate in words with the engineers. Serving as an executive coach, negotiator, and deal maker, I provided forums for this conflict resolution agenda.

Central to the consulting agreement was executive coaching with Stillway to develop more direct verbal means of communicating with her engineers and limiting her use of sophisticated nonverbal artillery. Pointedly, the CEO’s utter silence was no longer an option. There was much resistance.

I observed pain, emotional turmoil, and social media threats to the global brand, the engineers, and the CEO. The insidiously indirect communication of Stillway did, in fact, sabotage productivity and morale. Innovation and research and development suffered. The air was thick. Behavior was cautious. The leader’s toxicity metastasized when unchecked. It emanated outward into the volatile public arena of an innovative and cutting-edge company.

Following three months of therapeutic teamwork with engineers and executive coaching with Stillway, three of the five grievances were resolved. Productivity and emotional tolerance are gradually on an upswing. We are witnessing a resistant and belligerent CEO who is gradually and not-so-gracefully finding words. Utter silence remains in her repertoire.

NOTE: Due to privileged communication demands with the client actual names and company names have been changed.