Was I wrong for speaking out at staff meeting today

[Safarigiraffe]

Had a staff meeting today after work, boss goes round asking everyone at the end of the meeting if any of us had any questions or anything to say so I said that staff in a particular room are not doing their part in what they have to do to help us out so then both my bosses tell me to watch my tone of voice & not to mention names (I mentioned no names only mentioned the room in particular) made me feel uncomfortable, guilty & awkward after for saying something. So should I of kept quiet or were my bosses being unreasonable for telling me to watch my tone of voice & not to mention names

oh come on, this isn’t some subtle ‘expectations trap’. It’s bloody obvious (and pretty explicit) that at no point is it every acceptable to publicly have a go at another team at work.

An expectations trap might be not realising what is too big an issue to raise. But just being outright rude and confrontational by saying that you just want to tell X room that they shouldn’t do whatever it is you don’t like is not how people behave at work.

A basic and explicit workplace rule is that you don’t just issue orders to colleagues.

I think you don't know what "explicit" means. It means "stated clearly; stated openly; stated in actual words". No one actually told me before my very first job not to tell colleagues that they were doing something wrong within earshot of someone else, so it wasn't an explicit rule. So I did. And didn't understand why people complained about me. And didn't understand why I was being rebuked. And ended up self-harming because clearly I was "broken" and couldn't understand what was "broken" about me. And 25 years later still have the scars on my skin.

But you keep peddling your ablist "fix the autist not the environment" crap.

It took an autistic man, who had been diagnosed in childhood on account of being born with a penis, to explain that a lot of people are more bothered about not having hurt feelings than they are about doing the job right, and you have to walk on eggshells around them and the easiest thing to do is to just report problems to my line manager out of earshot of the problem person and let the line management deal with it. But then I found that you get told to stop escalating things and to sort it out yourself. So whatever you do, you are in the wrong.

If I could work with 100% autistic colleagues, I would.

Perhaps people complained about you because you were aggressive and rude?

That’s rough. I’d be proactive and ask if there are any mentoring opportunities/learning and development courses that you can undertake to avoid this happening again. I think that doing something like this once is less than ideal, but navigated correctly is something that you can come back from in time (I have had it done to me and was prepared to give the colleague the benefit of doubt that this was a one off). I’d be very cautious going forward though, as a repeat of this would identify this as a pattern of behaviour, raise red flags and have you seen as a liability. :-)

I don't understand why they thought that though. I was left puzzled, thinking "I didn't swear, I didn't call anyone stupid, I just said that you were putting the labels on upside-down".

I'd be proactive and ask if there are any mentoring opportunities/learning and development courses that you can undertake to avoid this happening again.

Armed with a diagnosis (which I see as a key to unlock reasonable adjustments, not as a label), I can do just that. 25 years ago, the medical establishment was only just getting its head around the idea that girls and women can be autistic (thanks to Lorna Wing, no thanks to Simon Baron-Cohen) and someone like me was far more likely to be told "borderline personality disorder" and put on a long waiting list for DBT, which isn't a useful therapy for someone autistic.

But not everyone has the diagnosis, so they don't have that key, they are locked out of reasonable adjustments and lose jobs, money, homes, self-worth, and even their lives because of a disability that is not their fault and they get no help to cope with.

I am very familiar with the history of attitudes to autism within the medical establishment and impacts of not receiving the correct support as I have my own autism diagnosis, but thanks. We don’t actually know whether this person is neurodiverse or not, we are surmising. My point is that many work places offer learning opportunities and mentoring schemes irrespective of any diagnoses, and the OP may want to explore that. :-)

Sorry. I mistook your reply as being aimed at me, not the OP.

Ugh. This thread has become tiresome.

And your last comment improved it so greatly Hide the thread if you don't want to read it any more.

I'm relatively neurotypical, but I work in a field (lots of software and maths) where quite a lot of colleagues are at various points on the autism spectrum (yes, yes, I know it's not actually a spectrum but a bunch of different conditions present in different levels with different people, STFU already) and I relish the directness and lack of cant that they display.

That being said, there are rules to the way the NT people interact, and one has to learn to work with those rules. And one particularly useful rule to keep in mind is: "No matter how it looks, everyone is trying to be helpful". If this isn't true where you work, look for another job! But it is true in most places, so if it looks like people are being needlessly idiotic/slack/obstructive, there is probably something making them act that way that you don't know about. The best way to deal with that is to try and figure out what crucial knowledge you're missing.

Possible explanations for other team appearing crap without actually being crap:

• they are short-staffed
• their manager is preoccupied with some other urgent problem
• they are getting stuff at zero notice themselves
• they don't realise what the impact of short notice is on you
• etc

It could be worth the OP going to whichever of their managers is more sympathetic and saying something like "I accept that I shouldn't have raised (bad thing) at that meeting, it was the wrong time and place. I don't think (other team) wants (bad thing) happening either." What I don't understand is why (bad thing) is happening so often, and what I might be able to do to make things better?"

No matter how it looks, everyone is trying to be helpful

That's actually really useful. It might not be me they are trying to help but someone else, but they are trying to help someone.