I'm at my wit's end. My boss is making things so difficult for me. I honestly feel like he is gas lighting me.
I have been doing my job for 17 years, progressively moving through the ranks so that I am now in a pretty senior position. My boss / line manager is someone who has global responsibility for a particular department in our business.
It is hard to explain exactly what the issues are without writing a massive essay. I just feel like he is constantly setting me up to fail and deliberately trying to make me look bad. I think he is testing me to see how far he can push me before I crack.
One example is that we recently landed a new mandate which he asked me to work on. I had been working on it for a few weeks and couple of weeks before I was due to go on holiday, I reminded him about the holiday and how he would like to handle holiday cover. He basically told me that this was going to be a big problem and if I wasn't prepared to carry on working during my holiday that he would take me off the mandate and replace me with someone else. Apparently, it would not be fair to bring someone in as holiday cover and then take them off again once I was back. That is ridiculous, because it is very standard practice to put holiday cover in place. I ended up having to take my laptop on holiday and spend quite a lot of time working as I didn't want to be removed from the mandate. A large part of our performance is judged against how many hours we record working and this is the main thing I am working on at the moment - I need the hours to meet my targets (which he knows)! As part of the same conversation, he also said that I needed to consider my priorities (he knows I have kids) and what was more important to me at this stage in my life. Of course, my family is my number 1 priority, but that doesn't mean that my career is not important to me, nor that being a mother precludes me from being able to do my job well.
Another example is that we have recently had a few people leave our team, and I spoke to him about how we would be resourcing work in light of this. He told me there were no plans to recruit replacements and that we could cope with the people we already have. I was subsequently copied on an email which referred to a person I had never heard of before. It turned out that this person was a new hire about to join the team, and given the timing my boss HAD to have already recruited this person at the time of our conversation about resourcing. So, he had to have lied to my face about it. What's more, the person has been recruited partially to work with me on the mandate I mentioned above.
This behaviour has been going on most of the year. I have been reduced to tears (not in front of my boss, thankfully) on so many occasions. I discussed it with HR who were pretty useless because I don't want to raise a formal grievance (I think it will just make things worse). I also raised it with another senior person in the business and they said they didn't want to get involved.
I want to leave and have been keeping an eye out for other jobs, but nothing suitable has come up. I feel so trapped!