My Boss Loves Chaos, Help! (Ask Christa! S7E73)

Introduction

Hi everyone, and welcome to Ask Christa! where I answer listener questions about business challenges and workplace issues. I’m Christa Dhimo, and my show is a free resource to help as many people as I can to get through common day to day issues at work. I do this for my listeners, but you know how it helps to like and subscribe—and I THANK YOU for the support.

This is episode 73, which is the first episode in Season SEVEN, which is a follow-on to Season SIX focusing on Dealing with Bad Bosses. For all episodes, I offer additional resources you can learn from or even contact to help you with workplace issues, so be sure to listen to or watch that chapter and go to the show notes for the full list.

Today’s episode is about how to manage a boss that always feels chaotic, unorganized, stressed out… what many people sometimes calls, “all over the place.” It can be stressful, especially if you’re the non-chaotic type.

Listener Question

Here’s the listener question, “My boss is chaotic. He loves chaos. It’s as though he gets too antsy if he doesn’t have a fire to put out, an emergency to attend to, or something to start. He doesn’t give us room to breathe, much less a chance to get work done, before he’s frantically thinking up another thing we should do. He doesn’t seem to have a plan, and yet, we know what our goals are and we as a team attend to them each day. He just seems to love chaos, and it’s making me want to avoid him. It’s also making my job much harder than it should be. I just want to get good work done. What do I do?”

The Energy Drain from Work Chaos 

We will all experience chaos at different times in our lives, both professionally and personally, and it’s often experienced on a spectrum. There are times when we feel chaotic, see chaos unfold, hear chaos from afar: this uncontrolled, disorganized, splattering of life swirling all around. 

Chaos is a part of life, and our ability to recognize it for what it is, usually a disruption that creates intense uncertainty and confusion, often also creating some type of stress response, is part of how we manage through sudden and unpredicted changes.

But the other part of chaos is how disordered it feels for most people, like something is messy, jumbled… all over the place, and if a part of your life has order, predictability, and some semblance of organization too, any major disruption of that will feel… chaotic.

And chaos takes up and uses a lot of energy to work through. Managing anything that wasn’t predicted, or creating structure around what feels confusing or disorganized, or assembling what feels jumbled, uses up a lot of bandwidth in our brains: we have to assess the situation, determine what can and cannot be moved or changed, then determine the best way to assemble or perhaps REassemble the pieces into a coherent structure that feels ordered and understood. 

Now imagine the amount of energy it takes to get good work done at work when your boss’s default mode is creating disorder, causing confusion, creating unpredictable situations, and disrupting the flow of your team. There are so many factors for how to get work done, sometimes it’s a miracle when teams actually complete what they’ve set out to do. Work outcomes is a result of who is doing it, what resources are available, the dependencies involved, how the work needs to be done, and when. With all those dynamics already in play, and so many more, it may feel impossible to GET anything done when your boss PREFERS disorder and appears to thrive in chaos.

The Chaotic Leader

Our listener describes various behaviors that I have seen in a lot of leaders, including CEOs, often at the founder level or at small companies with early stage growth, and they tend to be some of the most destructive types. Twenty years ago their frantic energy may have been interpreted as “innovative,” or “disruptive in a good way,” or “exciting.”

 But like all things that are described that way, none of it can or should last forever. Innovation is just the starting point of seeing or working or building new things; by definition, you can’t be innovating or innovate all the time. You’d never get anything done. and yes, disruption can be good to break bad habits or the inertia of a work culture that prohibits and stifles new ways of working—or even a way to break patterns that are no longer in service of an organization or a team, but too much disruption or long term disruption quickly turns into destruction. And distraction. And being exciting? That's great to motivate and boost up energy, but no one wants excitement around them all the time. It can be exhausting, and often interrupts focus.

With all of those words in play all the time or as a default mode to a work environment, no one would ever get work done.

And that’s usually the number one complaint employees have when it comes to working with and for a boss who loves chaos: no one can get any work done, and in fact we heard our listener talk about this, too.

The Antidote to Chaos

So what do you do when you’re dealing with a boss who LOOOOOVES chaos?

First: force some structure by connecting your boss’s goals, and therefore the team’s goals, to the work that needs to be done, and do this through weekly status meetings or, at the least, reports. If you already have status meetings, then you have a forum, but if you don’t: try to setup a 15 minute “Review Only” meeting every week with the team to verbally repeat what you’re working on and what the status is. The four important words here are focus, priority, results, and impact.

Here’s our focus because this is the priority, and here is the result so far, which impacts our goals like this.

That’s the structure.

Your boss doesn’t seem to have a plan—create it for him. Say to your boss, “Hi, boss—we’ve got a lot going on, so I thought to create a really quick work status sheet for all of us so we can review and be clear on what we’re focused on, where it sits in terms of our priorities, what the results of the work is so far, and the impact the work has on our goals. That way, when something new comes up, we can see where it fits and how the new work impacts our existing work. It’ll only be 15 minutes once a week, and it will only be to review our work items.”

And so, if he wants to add something to the list, your response can be, “OK, no problem. This is why I’m glad we have a team status sheet, so we can add things like this and make sure we shuffle the work as needed. Let’s add it…”

The Chaotic Boss Kickback

Now, a few things to be mindful of:

People who create chaos often do so to feel in control. Although no one around them can predict the chaos, it puts them in a situation where they are creating it before they have to deal with it, and that means when you force some structure to stop the top from spinning, you may be breaking their ability to feel like they’re in control.

You may also ruffle them up a bit by forcing some level of discipline they likely won’t be too keen on because you and the team will be holding them accountable for… well… what you’re focused on, which is a commitment… what the priority is, which is a rule that quantifies the commitment… results to date, which will quickly demonstrate whether anyone has had a chance to get work done or not, and the impact to the goals, which doesn’t only impact you and the team, but your manager also.

You may hear things like, “Not everything has to be so structured, you need to learn how to be more flexible,” and to that I’d respond, “I’m open to other suggestions. I want to be sure we all have visibility on our work because we have a lot going on and these items are directly tied to our goals.”

By focusing ONLY on the work being done that’s aligned to goals, you’re offering a recommendation that serves many purposes, not just reining in the chaos.

And of course, if you feel that the chaos isn’t healthy or is causing far more issues than you’ve described in your question, then as I always say: know your resources. Talk to a mentor, talk to a trusted person at work, maybe even bring your concerns to HR if you’re in an organization where HR has the skills and capabilities to help teams and managers with stirring up chaos in a never-ending cycle—and YES, there are a lot of organizations where organizational effectiveness sits squarely in the camp of HR, usually called People and Culture.

But if your organization does not have that, then still: talk to someone. Then think about when it’s time to make a change if you cannot see any difference or positive impact to your recommendations OR if it becomes too much work for you to manage all of this. 

Some people do just fine with managers who habitually create chaos. Most don’t, and there’s no need to waste time sitting in someone else’s chaos when you just want to get good work done.

Additional Resources

For your resources, located in the show notes, I included a fascinating article by Dr. Anthony Mazzella, a PhD who specializes in complex personality patterns. I’m offering this because it will give you a short and very readable overview of personality types that crave and thrive with chaos. I don’t think any of us think about people who create chaos as having a complex personality pattern, especially at work since so many organizations place very little attention or performance scrutiny on how disruptive and wasteful a chaos-centered manager is. But those who generate work for the sake of work, and those who chronically and compulsively dismantle things that are in good form are very… very… problematic in every way, ESPECIALLY from an organizational performance perspective.

Next up, a fantastic LinkedIn post from November 2025 called “How to work with a chaotic manager and get your needs met.” It has one of the best shorts I’ve ever seen, perfectly demonstrating what reporting to a chaotic manager frequently looks like. She offers a lot of tips and guidance for dealing with tricky work dynamics, and I recommend a follow.

Last is a top-notch article from Ben Brearley called “How a chaotic work environment is hurting your team.” It’s on the Thoughtful Leader site, and the article showcases three primary performance effects that chaotic managers and have on their teams, most specifically the issues that arise about accountability, failure rates, and how priorities simply aren’t valued. When I read it, I was reminded of my earlier comments about how creating some structure will often feel threatening to a manager who thrives in chaos. It’s a great article. 

Wrap Up & Submitting Your Question

And that’s a wrap for Episode 73 from season seven focused on Dealing with Bad Bosses. Like and subscribe here, but also go to my site and send in YOUR question. It’s AskChrista.com, that’s Christa with a C-H. You’ll also see answers to other questions, listed by category and season, and every season has a theme. As always, thank you for your support. And remember, if you have a business challenge or a workplace issue—Ask Christa!