There is a genuine distinction underneath this question and it decides everything: whether your manager is difficult for you, or difficult for everyone. The first is a mismatch and mismatches can be worked. The second is a property of the person, and the only real moves are containment and an exit plan.
The cheap way to find out is to watch how they are with two other people. If the same behaviour arrives regardless of who is standing there, stop trying to solve it by being better at your job.
What is usually going on
They cannot decide, and the cost lands on you. Everything is under review, nothing is signed off, and work gets redone because the direction moved after you started. This one responds unusually well to a format change: stop asking open questions and start sending two options with a recommendation and a date by which silence means yes. Indecisive managers are often overloaded rather than evasive, and a decision shaped like a yes-or-no is much easier to make than one shaped like a blank page.
They take the credit. Sometimes deliberate, often not — a manager summarising upward genuinely does say we, and the name attached to the work is the one in the room. The fix is unglamorous and works: put your name on the artefact, send the update yourself rather than through them, and copy the people who need to know. This is the same visibility problem that decides who gets promoted, and it is fixed the same way.
They are volatile. The tone turns without warning, and you spend a portion of every week managing the risk of the next turn. Two rules: put things in writing after every meeting, and do not deliver news in the middle of the reaction. A volatile manager is usually reachable an hour later, and almost nothing important should be decided in the first ten minutes.
They are absent. No time, no answers, no coverage. The instinct is to escalate; the better first move is to publish. A weekly note of what you did, what you are blocked on and what you will do unless told otherwise converts absence into implicit approval and creates a written record for the moment it turns out the absence had consequences.
It is a style collision and neither of you has noticed. A direct, fast manager experiences a careful, thorough report as an obstacle; the careful report experiences the same manager as reckless and rude. Neither is wrong about the behaviour and both are wrong about the motive. This is the most common version, and it is also the only one that gets meaningfully better from your side alone.
And the one nobody wants to name: it is not a style problem. Shouting, humiliation in front of others, blame that shifts after the fact, a rewriting of what was said. That is not a mismatch, and no format change fixes it. Keep contemporaneous notes, find out who the actual escalation route is, and treat the search as the plan rather than the backup.
What to do this week
- Watch them with two other people. The answer to for-me-or-for-everyone changes what you do next, and it takes about a fortnight to get.
- Change one format. Written summary after verbal decisions; two options instead of a question; a standing fifteen minutes instead of ad hoc interruptions. Format changes are low-risk and fix a surprising share of what feels like personality.
- Write down what actually happens, with dates, in a place that is not their inbox. Not to build a case — to stop the slow rewriting of your own memory that this situation reliably produces.
- Decide what you are prepared to absorb and for how long. A manager is a temporary condition in most organisations. Whether yours will outlast your patience is a question with a real answer, and it is worth asking before the patience is gone.
What it depends on
The most useful thing you can hold in your head is that the behaviours dragging on you probably are not aimed at you. Direct, expressive, steady and exacting are four ordinary ways of behaving at work; each of them is legible to people who share it and irritating to people who do not. The DISC test scores all four rather than crowning one, which means you can read your own profile against your manager's most likely one and see exactly where the friction sits — the exacting report who wants the reasoning colliding with the direct manager who thinks the reasoning is a delay. That is a translation problem, and translation is learnable. It is also worth checking what the collision is costing you elsewhere, because the traits involved are ordinary personality dimensions rather than workplace-only ones.