How would you deal with this awful manager?

[Tsc2011]

I have a senior role in a mid- size company and my role is very technical. I’ve been here 5 years and mostly enjoy it (I work from home, good salary and benefits and a lot of flexibility). A few years ago a competitor asked me to interview with them and I went out of curiosity. There I met, we’ll call her ‘Sally’, who I immediately got bad vibes from and I decided the job wasn’t for me.
Cut to two years later and Sally joins our company and is immediately vile. What was a very friendly, supportive team suddenly had this woman who was aggressively competitive and uncomfortable to work with. I find her very competitive with me whilst I mostly try to avoid her. She was also best mates with our manager.
Three months in to her contract, and not even through probation, we get told she’s been promoted to be our line manager (an extra layer of management we’ve not had before).
I’m still not clear what her role as line manager is. She has very little to do with us (which I count as a good thing), and as I work from home I avoid her as much as possible. Her inexperience has shone through many times and we’ve all witnessed how much she likes to be right and agreed with, even when she’s wrong. Some of the interactions I’ve witnessed are just wrong and she’s not well liked.

Now, over the last few months I’ve been working on a very stressful project. I’ve also had loads of extra work piled on me by her whilst others on the team, including her, are doing barely anything. I’ve told her it’s stressful and I’ve asked for an extra pair of hands but none have been forthcoming. We’d warned management that the volume of work and the tight timeframe left us open to errors creeping in but they did nothing. The huge amount of stress and very long hours have led to a slight back injury becoming a lot worse and I ended up in hospital where I’ve been told that the tension has damaged nerves and I may now need an operation- all very stressful and painful.

I came back to work this week and in a call with her I asked how the stressful project was going. She told me that she’d taken it on and in the tens of thousands of calculations I’d done she’d found 4 mistakes (which should have been picked up by another colleague in review), she therefore didn’t trust my work so deleted it all and started again. For context we all review each others work and I always find countless mistakes in hers but she gets very snippy of you point them out. I was shocked. It was around 50 hours of work and 4/10000 is pretty good going in our line of work. She was obviously loving telling me this and said she’d informed her boss as well and had written a list of errors so that we can sit down and go through them. Fine, but then she went on to emphasise how unhappy she was and how much extra work I had caused her.
This was on all in my back to work meeting, where stress had played a big factor in my time off.

I feel really down. I’ve been working so hard with no thanks or appreciation so to pick me up on minor errors and make out they were worse than errors usually found in these projects has been gutting.

How would you deal with her when she wants to discuss this. She really makes my blood boil and I’m worried about how to take this.

Sounds awful - what a bitch! Could you raise a grievance against her? I would be looking for another job… xx

Raise a grievance nce and get out of their as soon as possible. Sorry not much help I had similar in my last place still annoys me as was good at my job great pay but not worth the stress she was causing.

What a disgusting, nasty bitch.
She is victimising you and setting you up to fail
Start keeping a record of these events

Then have a one-on-one with HR and or the senior manager and tell us what you told us here

The bitch seems like going place twat which is not bad but her method is nasty and disgusting.

Sorry re my language as your post reminded me of some people at work the nasty.....

Btw - Have the meetings as I suggest and if not happy, contact ACAS for confidential advice/gusiance/help - I had to and the person that helped me was puka.

I'd be having a chat with your union / acas as it sounds like you have the beginnings of grounds for constructive dismissal here if she keeps on, despite your now known health condition. Especially if your medical team will confirm in wiring the cause of your issues.

Oh, straight to your union if you have one. But look for another job, having been in a similar situation myself it was the only solution. The vile fucker I had to suffer is still there despite me being just one of many whose lives she made an absolute misery.

Can you swap areas at all or anything to get a different manager?

You have the option really of going down a grievance route (possibly hard to prove and stressful), or finding another job.

I would simply raise a grievance. The return to work interview was not good, the pointing out of mistakes etc. I would list why you got ill in the first place, and if you have a note of the number of errors she has done I would add that in for context against your 4

I would also consider going off with stress, making it clear that it’s simply down to her and no other reason

Thanks All, nice to know I’m not the only one who thinks this is completely inappropriate.

I’m not part of a union and the job is the dream job apart from her. Our competitors who would be my options for moving are pretty terrible employers so I’m reluctant to leave.

Do you think it would be enough to raise a grievance about? Could she not just argue that my work wasn’t good enough and it’s her role to point that out to me?

I also raised a grievance in my previous job about a manager and it was incredibly stressful (and HR protected the managers to the death, even when their behaviour was appalling).

My annual review is coming up and she may mention something there. I’m just unsure how to react if she does. People patronising and condescending to me puts me in a rage but I want to keep my cool.

Union rep here.

It's not grounds for a grievance, she would simply say she redid it because of your errors and it was a business decision.

You do need to protect yourself though. Do join a union, and if you're supported by anyone above her, keep them close.

People who 'manage' like this are awful and you have my sympathy.

I do think that those people who suggest taking a grievance have no idea of the stress, the time it takes, what you actually need to prove to have a chance of winning and just how many grievances are not successful.

It's not a quick easy win at all.

That's really shocking that she deleted 50 hours of work. Could you go to a more senior manager and say that you want to have a chat off the record (without raising a formal grievance) and explain what you've told us here, especially that you were extremely surprised and dismayed that she deleted your work when 4 errors were within normal parameters, and could the senior person advise you on how to deal with her. Mention that the team morale is low, and that there's an unfair distribution of workload (with evidence).

Do you still have access to her completed piece of work? Because I'd have thought that 4 errors out of 10k is an incredibly low error rate. Maybe it's higher now she's redone it all?

Not really sure this helps you though given she's bestie with your boss.

Employment lawyer here.

Absolute tosh that this isn’t grounds for a grievance.

The manager has unfairly singled out OP and destroyed 50 hours of work based on an incredibly low percentage mistake rate. She’s actually cost the business valuable work hours and time, seemingly out of spite for OP being off work sick and/or because she rejected a job previously.

Add into that an unmanageable workload and lack of requested support and this absolutely gives OP grounds to complain if she should choose to do so.

As an employer, I would also want to be made aware of an incompetent member of staff who is bullying others whilst still (probably) in their probationary period.

Thing is OP, whilst you could raise a grievance (and they would have to address it) if they do decide her actions were reasonable then your relationship could become even more difficult. Or, they could realise she’s bad news and dismiss her as that’s legally fairly easy to do with her short service.

I would be interested to know if the higher up she copied in thought her actions were reasonable…

What a horrible situation.

Do you still have a copy of those documents so you can add up the number of errors she made? And why isn't she criticising the person whose job it was to check?

Is there a higher up manager you could discreetly have a word with, other than her best mates manager?

@Fallenangelofthenorth i do have access to hers and mine so I’ve taken a quick look and on the first sheet, out of 3270 cells I found one error which should have been spotted in the review by my other colleague. I’ve checked through several other same sized sheets and can’t see any differences.

The way we’ve structured our calculations is marginally different but it makes no difference to the result because it’s just a slight layout change.

She has a weird hang up about people doing things exactly how she does it even if it makes no differences, you’ve spent 20 years doing it that way and you had no clue that she did it differently.

Thanks everyone, I’m trying to think whether there’s someone higher up I can speak to, even just for moral support. Her boss is her best mate and he absolutely, unfailingly supports everything she does even when it’s completely inappropriate. I’d even go as far as to say his behaviour has become more inappropriate (aggressive and childish towards other teams) since she joined as they egg each other on. Above him is the MD. He’s approachable but I’m not sure how he’s deal with this (and he has a big mouth).

I have two colleagues I get on with really well who I can share this sort of stuff with (and they’ve had their own run ins with her) but we’re all at the same level.

My Mum (I’m 40 but my Mum still provides me with a lot of advice!) said I should raise it if HR ask how my being back at work is going. She said I should also raise it on my review with her and say I thought it was inappropriate, pointing out the tiny error rate and the inadequacy of the review, not my work.

Is it on excel? If it were me, I'd copy and paste values and then put in a formula to show difference between your value and hers, and try and find more than 4 errors with her work. But then I'm incredibly petty.

Did she redo the 50 hours of work herself, or give it to someone else? Because one way or another, if she’s spending that much time on correcting tiny mistakes, I would have thought questions will be raised about productivity. Either she doesn’t have anything else to do, or something more important is being neglected.

I think I’d ask for some objective standards on quality to be put in across your team and applied consistently. So everyone has to have an error rate of <5%, or whatever. Then by the sound of it, either you can demonstrate that your work quality is above the expected standard, or the standard she is expecting is clearly ridiculous and as a team you can go to HR.

@LoobyDop she told me she’d deleted it all and started from scratch. What she actually did was take my tables and just alter the format of the equation slightly in the first cell and drag it across the rest to come up with the same answers. She then spent time adding colours to title cells (which can’t be copied to the word document as the authority we send them to need them to be plain), and abbreviating worksheet titles. All pretty pointless. She did delete some summary table worksheets which her boss (her best mate) previously told me he liked so I’m guessing she deleted those from the word document as well.

I think using the back to work meeting to bash you is also grounds for a grievance. In my experience that time should be spent asking how you are, what medical advice you sought (you being in hospital was quite serious!), if you need any support or adjustments now you are returning… not least as stress was a factor. To add to your stress was outrageous.

Her approach was that of an uncaring employer and I agree with others, she’s a nasty bully.

I’ve been trying to go through my options and one I used a few years ago could either be useful or be like throwing a hand granade at my job.

i had an awful male boss who bullied everyone. He would say awful, hurtful things in private and throw his weight around. In my review he told me I’d let the whole team down by taking a week of leave which he approved and said I was too “scared” of chemicals (it was a chemical based job) because I had complained that they were asking students to spray a banned chemical with no PPE. I turned the tables after the meeting by emailing him and copying in his boss thanking him for the meeting and asking for clarification on certain points. Such as, repeating his comments about my leave and asking if getting his approval through the online system wasn’t enough, what would be the correct procedure for booking leave. Also, if the spraying of banned chemicals was OK, could I please request that I be exempt from that. His boss went nuts and he had to apologise to me.

I could email her thanking her for the meeting and copying in her mate and HR going over the points she raised and asking what an acceptable margin of error was.

Honestly, this sounds a lot like my experience in my last job.
He used a back to work meeting (when I'd been off with stress, due to unreasonable workload; they actually replaced my job with two posts), to list 7 performance things he wished to address. There was only something to answer in 1 case. I raised a grievance; he put me on a formal improvement plan. It was horrific - and I had the support of a dedicated Union worker.

I'm sorry to say it only got worse. It got to the point where he made a number of false claims about me. I decided my health, and wellbeing, was worth more, and I got another job instead. I was really upset about it, as I was good at that job, and well respected by just about everyone else.
So, in direct answer about what I would do. I would find another job, and leave before she makes your life a misery.

Also, please don't labour under the false pretension that HR are there to give you any type of support. They are there to protect the company.

Could you approach the competitor where she used to work? It might be a better place now she's left?