My boss is under a lot of stress. We deal with a lot of data in a high pressure corporate environment. She manages much more than I do. Sometimes I think she feels frustrated when I ask for help solving a problem or learning more about the industry. She can be very mean and very snappy when I ask for her help in my 1:1 and I feel like I’m not doing a good job. I celebrated an anniversary at work last month and she wrote me a wonderful note about how proud I should be of my team, my leadership, and what we’ve accomplished this year but when I present something I’m working on (usually to make sure the direction we are heading in makes sense or to just get a second set of eyes on stuff) she always has suggestions on formatting, or additional data to pull in - which is great but at the same time I end up leaving my 1:1 feeling bad about my work and thinking that I should be doing better. She never says “this is great so far. Keep going” or “I think if you added XYZ it’ll really add to the message” instead she says stuff like “why didn’t you think of adding XYZ? I can’t think of everything” “let me see the formula you are using. Why aren’t you hard coding that number? Why take the extra step of typing that?” I will tell her “I can hard code that but it won’t change the message the data is sending. What do you think of the story we are telling with data?”

- it feels like I’m picked to death.

I’m not sure if I’m just being needy or too sensitive. Idk if I should have a convo with her and tell her how I’m feeling. It feels like she really likes things done her way and has a hard time seeing that two different approaches can arrive at the same outcome.

My thoughts on not having a convo with her are that it likely won’t change how she manages and could create some tension between her and I?

Yikes sorry this was so long. Thank you for letting me share my feelings in a safe place ❤️