Not posted for a long time but been here years.
I would like some advice as I feel like I have been gaslighted into taking all the blame for my work burn out by my manager.
I am in a senior management position in a fast paced, fairly stressful environment. I have worked in the industry for 20 years in various roles so I am not new to it. My manager is newer to the industry (4 years). Manager is very different to me in style and thought processes.
Manager doesn’t come to the office every day, and doesn't communicate what they are working on. I am in the office all the time, visible and contactable I never WFH. I feel like they dominate all my time through hundreds of small micromanagements, endless phone calls, messages, lots of repetitive meetings and questions and instructions. I can find this frustrating and time wasting.
Recently I have reached burn out, all the small micromanagements and noise from the dozens and dozens of daily calls and instructions have made me feel drowned and unproductive.
We spoke today and I tried to express myself, that I was feeling frustrated, burnt out, unproductive and needed to regroup myself somehow. I am working, but I am not working as well as I would like to be, my work-life balance was not ideal and I would like some quieter periods of space to focus.
Manager asked me to be very specific about what pieces of work were causing the burn out feelings, so I tried to start explaining that it was less about the work and more about general burn out/noise to be told the following:
-It had been noticed by people I wasn’t doing any work
-It wasn’t obvious what I am doing all day
-They don’t think I really have any work to do
-I am distracted and uncontactable
-They never WFH and are always visible
-They are picking up all my slack and protecting me from work I should be doing as I keep saying I am stressed
-I need to give them a list of all the jobs I should be doing for them to compare with
-I am too sensitive
-I get over involved in trivial matters
-I need to learn to not care about things as much
I feel even more depressed and demoralised now than I did. Is work burn out usually just all your own fault for being an oversensitive weakling? I mean if I am performing like this, why wait until I am on my knees to let me know?