I come off work in 11 weeks - yipee! However the boss has thrown me a massive project before I go off, so I've had very little time to go through the whole advertising and interview process to find a replacement. We were offered someone from a sister organisation with the same background to me, albeit from a completely different industry (I work in a very specialised part of the healthcare industry) and so we hired him and brought him in early to take over the more routine bits of my job while I concentrate on directing the major project.
So far so sensible, but he is really ambitious, a total climber. When I've asked him to do something over the past 2 weeks (that's how long he's been here) comments I've had back include "I don't understand the context so I can't give you an opinion on whether that's the right thing to do or not" and "I'm not sure that you're coming at this from the right angle, I would suggest..." - I want to scream. I wasn’t asking for opinions, I was asking for it to be done!
He has also: kept ideas to himself until we're in external meetings with clients where he makes the suggestion, putting me in an awkward position; been telling my staff to make changes to things without discussing it with me first; telling me that I should be considering doing x/y/z. This is all driving me mad – partly because I’m a control freak and have built and been successfully running this department for 3 ½ years, and partly because I have a horrible feeling that the minute I leave he is going to dismantle lots of my hard work to show what he’s achieved while he’s been in the post.
He’s on a fixed term contract, I’ll only be off for 9 months, and will be working a couple of days a month from December onwards, so he knows that I’m not walking away entirely (and I don’t think that he’s happy with that, but tough, my CEO is very happy with that plan).
So, what do I do – he has an awful lot to learn about this industry and is going to cause problems if he carries on being so opinionated. Several colleagues have commented that he rubs people up the wrong way/thinks a lot of himself, so should I keep schtum and let him hang himself so to speak, or speak to my boss and raise these concerns? I am so nervous about leaving at a critical time in the growth of the business anyway, and my boss knows this, that I don’t want to come across paranoid, but neither do I want him messing things up!