Reading this reminded me of an over-sharing boss I once had. It was not tawdry stuff but it was very uncomfortable all the same. The oversharing ran the gamut - details of domestic mishaps in the form a burst sewer line that had flooded the basement and needed a weekend of clean-up. That was not a mental picture one could un-imagine. She had learned to weaponize the over-sharing to the point that some of her superiors viewed it as her secret super-power. When it was not a household disaster, it was something about her kids that was not something an average parent would share with a group of random co-workers. It certainly did not show the said kids in any positive light and it made one question the quality of parenting.
She always triggered a tsunami of over-sharing in meetings because she led by example. Her stories had a couple of interesting effects from what I could observe, first it deflected the discussion from areas where she was not quite performing or delivering. Second, it promoted random over-sharing by everyone around her to where the point of the meeting became a human bonding experience but no progress was made as far as work. She was able to normalize this mode of operation and people in her orbit lived under this spell of fake warmth and false sense of security. It seemed to me that when bosses decide to overshare to the point of making others feel uncomfortable it is a very twisted power move.
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