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.

Oh, and good luck tomorrow - and Friday. Hope you can get something so much better, with a great team!

I think you should approach HR before she does. Get your story in first. She's a bully.
Having said that HR in private sector companies can be shit.

OP, did you know that businesses have rates of acceptable human errors? They are usually 5-10%.

So you were actually operating at an acceptable rate; and if they had wanted 100% error free they should have either allowed you more time to check your own work. Or simply have someone check it for errors and fix them.

Good luck with your meeting.

She sounds horrendous

good luck for your 1.1

@Thelnebriati that’s the thing- we do have a review process for every piece of work, and I instructed that person to do an in-depth review of the calculations before I put them in the word document. I asked this person why more errors had been spotted and she told me she’d only done a spot check in the end. I mentioned this as well in my email.

Definitely record the meeting. Good luck OP.

I think it’s great you stood up for yourself. Bullies tend to back off when the person fights back (especially with logic!)

Just a heads up though that covertly recording meetings can be considered gross misconduct in many workplaces. Even without an express ban, it’s still likely misconduct. Just saying this because whilst it’s understandable that you’d want to record it, I’d be itching to do it myself, if you did get found out it gives her a reason (not an excuse) to discipline or fire you!

You could ask her permission to record, or ask to bring a colleague with you as a witness (you could even put the request in writing and tell her the reasons why). Or you could take the risk and just make sure you aren’t found out!

Thinking of you today OP... deep breaths!

Just want to say good luck, OP.

Hopefully, the anticipation is/was worse than the actual meeting. I recall that awful heart racing feeling.

Good luck today OP. Take notes and email them back to her afterwards to summarise the meeting.

If it goes horribly, tell her you're going for some air to collect your thoughts. Go to HR and tell them you're being bullied and want to initiate a grievance.

Then simply keep your head down and don't get drawn into anything more with her today. Get your work done, leave on the dot and concentrate on smashing the interview tomorrow.

Go get ‘em OP!

Best of luck OP.

Remember to excuse yourself if it gets personal and walk away to get some air and get your head together. Then finish the meeting if you need to.

I would arrange a meeting and speak directly with her

It’s not shit or awful to say at all - managers often pick on colleagues of the same gender. I’ve seen it plenty of times.

No business I’ve worked in allows 1 in 10 pieces of data to be incorrect - that’d be worse than useless in my (and many other) industries.

@Tsc2011 hope it goes ok. I think stick to:

• review wasn’t completed
• didn’t need re-doing so no need for her to claim ‘oh I had to re-do it’
• if she wants a certain calculation done a new way that needs to be a new process notified to the entire team

Thinking of you OP! Hope it wasnt too awful.

Thanks everyone. I had the meeting and I didn’t cry! Yay! It was pretty awful though and I don’t think it was constructive or helpful.

I stood my ground and told her that I felt it was inappropriate that she chose not to speak to me in person and felt a lot of this could have been resolved if she had. I felt her approach was public shaming and it should have been dealt with differently.

She kept using phrases like “littered with mistakes”, and “too many errors to save”. She couldn’t expand on this.

I kept coming back to the fact the document was draft and only partially complete. Her response was that she “ didn’t believe that she could trust me to have completed this document to a high standard”. I asked where that lack of trust had come from as all of my previous work had been well regarded. She said that it came from the circumstances I working in so I pointed out those were out of my control and I had flagged the stressful circumstances to them and had received no support.

i went over the stressful situation, lack of support and long hours. The fact the other team weren’t being held up to the same standard, the substandard review.

She said no errors were acceptable in any spreadsheet so I asked her what the point of review was if the expected standard was perfect first time.

She said I was defensive which I agreed as I felt this was a personal attack. She said she didn’t like how I was speaking to her so I pointed out that I wasn’t raising my voice and I was just laying out the facts but I didn’t like her use of the term “didn’t trust” me.

she ended by saying going forward she hoped I would take some of her comments on board. She asked if I had any comments and I said that going forward the lack of support and the difficult situation I’d been placed in should be considered. She claimed I’d turned down support, which I hadn’t and she denied that in our last meeting when I raised again concerns about the deadline that her response had been that the deadline couldn’t be moved.

My partner was listening and said I maybe sounded annoyed at her and he didn’t want me to come across as being irrational. I think I could have been a cooler about it but the stress of this situation as well as the pain I’m in got the better of me a bit.

I’m not sure where it goes from here. She didn’t suggest an improvement plan or any micromanaging. I’m sure she’s run straight to her boss to tell him. I was going to send a list of bullets but my partner thinks I should let the dust settle.

I just want to go to bed.

It sounds like you put your points across well, and she is floundering.
Deleting an entire spreadsheet instead of just correcting 4 errors is unhinged, she must realise that which is why she has changed her story. Try not to second guess her next move.

I think you did brilliantly, well done! You're going to ace that interview tomorrow and you're going to tell her to fucking ram it.

Well done, sounds like you defended yourself well - and it was defensive, because this was a personal attack. I would write up your notes from the meeting and send them to her - make sure there is a paper trial. Especially her comment about 'littered with mistakes' when there were 4 and asking for her definition of what the review process is for if there are expected to be no mistakes. I would also put the bit about her saying you have turned down help, but in fact none was offered and you had asked for it. Ask if she thinks it might be helpful in future to put all communication in writing so you can refer back to it if there are any further differences of recollection.

I would 100% send notes by the end of the day - but write them now so they're contemporaneous and you don't start to doubt what was said.

This always plays out the same way. Ultimately the relationship is ruined and you will never work well together. The options are:

1. An unspoken agreement to have as little to do with each other as possible. It doesn't sound like she will do this.
2. You move sideways in the company away from her or vice versa. How likely is that?
3. She leaves.
4. You leave.

I would start by trying to get a sideways move then swiftly onto job hunting.

Well done OP - micromanaging undermining managers are the worst!

Ask if she thinks it might be helpful in future to put all communication in writing so you can refer back to it if there are any further differences of recollection.

This.

But sadly the outcome will be you will end up leaving whatever way you play this. Over time, you will be followed by a number of others until the day comes when she is moved to another project area.