This is a complicated one, but I'll try to keep it concise! I've been in my current role for 4 years, and I work with a small team of people at the same level, most of whom have been here for a lot longer than I have except for one who's relatively new (less than a year). We're in a small and specialised department in our organisation, which has lots of other vaguely related functions which have little impact on our work as a whole.
We got a new manager nearly 3 years ago. When he first started, obviously he knew less about the industry and the specific role than we did. He was keen to get up to speed quickly and he seemed to value our experience - we were consulted whenever a change or big project was in the offing, and he was really good at taking our opinions onboard. We all really liked him!
Things seemed to start to change about a year ago. I don't really know why, but the boss suddenly started to become really interested in an aspect of the organisation that has little to do with our "business as usual" function. He decided that we all needed to change our focus to this other thing and started proposing tasks and projects that we should be doing alongside our usual stuff.
I think as a team we've been good at managing change and taking on new ways of working, and we're not obstructive for the sake of it, but our actual function is legally mandated, and these extra projects didn't fall within our remit. It would have been fine if we all had lots of spare time, but we don't, and what time we do have has to be spent doing the legally mandated stuff! We told him that we didn't think we had the resources to take on tasks that weren't within our remit and he seemed to accept it, although not with particularly good grace.
This is already long, so I'll just skip to the part where we found out recently that he'd given the project to the newest member of the team and told her to just get on with it without involving the rest of us. She's been doing it around the rest of her workload, but it means that she hasn't been processing the basic work within the required timelines and as a result, our whole team's KPIs have taken a hit.
We had a whole team meeting recently where we expressed our concern that it wasn't sustainable to have a member of the team working on non-relevant projects when we're already stretched. The boss didn't take it well and said that we were being argumentative for the sake of it, and he was in charge so we should ultimately do what he tells us. The team member who's been putting in all this work seemed to get a bit upset too, thinking that we were criticising her for doing it in the first place. I know that he basically told her to do it because she was new and wouldn't push back, and I don't blame her at all, but now he's set the team against each other and it's all just a mess.
It feels like he isn't interested in the "boring" business as usual work anymore and is perhaps trying to take on extra stuff that will be more visible and impressive to his bosses. Perhaps he's trying to get a promotion or move to a different work function - I don't know. But relations are very frosty and I'm thinking of moving away from the team myself. If you were a boss in this situation, how would you want your team to approach you?