Has anyone got advice for coping with unsupportive manager after coming back from Mat leave?
I work with entirely men in a male dominated field. I actually love the day to day problem solving of my work and have missed it during Mat leave. I went in for a catch up the other day and manager spent the whole time talking about some mistakes at work and basically said they were my fault and that my (male) coworker is so much better than me at my job (I used to manage this guy before I went on leave so this is quite hurtful contextually as I am a lot more experienced than him). This was obviously pre baby so I’m really fearful about going back now sleep deprived and making more errors.
From my perspective the errors have come about due to terrible work flow and management issues, aka it’s my name on the work but we should collectively own the mistakes as a team. To give an example, he didn’t forward me an updated document he received and then my work was based on the older version.
This has now caused problems and he blames me for this because I didn’t check whether there was a new version. However I was already working on a different project during this time frame and i would’ve expected my manager to communicate to me that a new version had been received and to programme in time for me to do the update. If I spent ages checking in on all my finished projects for updates on the basis there might be one I’d waste a lot of time.
I’m struggling to see his perspective on this, surely it’s more efficient for the person who received the updated information to communicate it to the relevant bodies?
That’s just one example to give an idea, I’m not perfect by any means. This is my main problem although generally speaking his attitude has been bad in other ways, he alluded to not promoting me in the past because he was fearful I would go on maternity leave (2 years before I even started ttc) and he is trying to get the company to pay for the annual leave I’ve accrued instead of letting me take it to return in a phased way. I’m not sure if he can force this or not, I spoke to acas and they did not seem sure as they said companies can be quite forceful about annual leave.
The company is brilliant and benefits/pay are really good so I don’t want to leave and I can’t really afford to do so. My other colleagues are lovely. I’m just not very thick skinned and find it really hard to be spoken to like I’m a massive idiot all the time. My husband thinks it’s a self esteem problem. Manager has treated my whole maternity leave like it’s some sort of sabbatical just for fun and that I should be grateful for it.
But I’m just really freaking out because I wasn’t coping well with this before I had my baby and now I’ve been off for a year I’m frightened to return. I’m obviously going to be rusty and it’s going to play into this idea he has about me that I’m useless. I really wish I worked somewhere with a supportive management team. Anyone got any advice they can offer on dealing with this kind of environment? I am making longer term moves to leave but it’s not feasible right now for various boring reasons. Baby is still waking 2-3x a night at 10 months and I have to return FT.
(Not that it’s the point of the post but I’ve tried sleep training and it didn’t work for us!)