I work in a charity. My predecessor, who I’ll call X, is still very active as a volunteer and trustee; she’s a strong and charismatic woman for whom generally I have enormous respect. However, there are areas where it is evident that X struggles with things that were not her initiative, at times she has fairly unreasoning prejudices against people, and she can be a bit of a bully. She has developed a trick of putting something into conversations or email exchanges along the lines of “I know I’m being grumpy but …” as if that excuses everything. Generally I get along fine with her and she knows I am not someone who will roll over; however, in the past when we have had a difference of opinion I have been the one to smooth it over in the interests of the charity. For background, it’s relevant that we have a number of volunteers who we have trained, plus a handful who already had relevant training from other sources. It’s also relevant that we both have family stresses at the moment which don’t help.
Without going into boring detail, we recently had a dispute arising from X’s sarky comments on an innocuous email sent by another person, Y, whom I defended. In the course of that I commented that Y had been helpful to us and that dismissing help from him on the basis that he was not one of our official volunteers could be seen as a bit hypocritical in light of some horrendous bloopers a couple of the official volunteers had made recently.
X clearly seems to have seen red at that. After a short delay, she came back with a ridiculous defence of one of the bloopers, and claimed that the other volunteer wasn’t active currently - but he is. She clearly took my mention of hypocrisy personally and said she didn’t think her view that volunteers must all go through our training was hypocritical. She then made a slightly cryptic remark about having enough on her plate and subsequently has told someone else that she won’t be doing any more of a particular area of our work. Not sure if this extends to everything.
I really couldn’t understand how all of this had arisen from one innocuous email from Y, but I decided to sleep on any response. Eventually I decided that one of us had to be the grown-up and sort this out, and drafted a reply, starting it with a comment that maybe we could put the whole discussion down to both of us being very tired after several meetings the previous day and maybe we could start again. My draft is reasonably emollient, though it doesn’t roll over in relation to the bloopers from the official volunteers, and also points out that if we insist on everyone going through our training that will cause difficulties with the existing volunteers who haven't done it. The draft makes it clear, I hope, that the mention of possible hypocrisy wasn't direct at X. However, I haven’t sent it because I still feel cross about her behaviour, and because she has again been copying me into passive-aggressive messages saying she wasn’t taking on one area of work any more. Also, when I looked at my draft, I still don’t think she’s going to view it as sufficiently submissive to calm her down, and I don’t want to provoke her into another aggressive response that will just make everything worse.
So, I have a choice: leave things as they are, send the partly toned down response, or have another go at toning it down even further. The third option is definitely the way to a quieter life and would probably benefit the charity in terms of bringing her fully back into the fold, but at the moment I think I will hate myself if I roll over. For what it's worth, it doesn't matter if she refuses to help with this one area of work again, but it would be problematic if she extended her refusal to other areas. WWYD?