+1 to everything Alex Chiou suggested :) 

(lot more articulate than I was :D)

Capital One

Senior Software Engineer

As fate has it, I’ve been in this situation a few times. Here’s how I dealt with it - It really helps to ground everything with empathy and data.

Empathy:

- I would like to learn what concerns my manager is facing. You never know the pressure they might be under or the objective they want to drive and if they think a particular concern is not being addressed by the team/or you. 
- Once establishing the concerns, evaluate it objectively, use data, other team members to establish if concerns are not being addressed.  For example, say your manager’s concern was that the team is having too many sev2/3 incidents from the services owned by the team and that it’s not being taken seriously by the team to address the tech debt, evaluate with them if this is actually the case.   
- Explain how their behavior/actions are affecting you and the team. Continuing on the previous example - the misalignment is due to too many sev incidents, but his actions/behavior are not helping to resolve this issue instead demotivating you/team, no one wants their actions to misfire. It’s in the manager’s interest to have a well functioning team and no one really goes to work thinking “let me do a bad job today”
- The principle here is to try to translate feelings to data, then you can actually evaluate and move forward

Data

- The second way I learned to deal with these situations is by data. Say, you/team tried to learn what the manager's concerns are and given feedback on how their actions/misalignment is impacting the team.  It’s time to involve a third party/escalate, for this you need solid data.


- Here’s how I would talk to my skip level
-Causes of friction - Situation, manager’s reaction on the situation, your feedback to them, their reaction to your feedback, what are the next situations followed etc.
- By keeping everything organized in facts rather than feelings, you are giving your skip level an opportunity to coach your manager 


My template is more or less like 
- Here’s the situation 
- Here was the discussion i had with my manager
- Here was his response
- Here was his action post feedback (either improved or the same)
- Here is how I feel about it
- Here is how I think the team feels about it (maybe guage how the team feels in any retrospective meetings, one-on-one, etc.)
- Here is how that is translating into productivity for the team.

Once you provided the feedback to your skip level, move on. If this is a systemic problem within the company, time to find different company - as one person can never change the whole top down management chain. Usually, most things like this are misunderstandings of situations rather than top down toxic behavior.

Building side projects is one of the most organic and powerful ways to both get jobs by boosting your portfolio and level up your performance on the job by leveling up your coding skills and product sense.