It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.
Remember the letter-writer asking if it was her job to manage a coworker’s feelings (#2 at the link)? Here’s the update.
I took your advice to disengage from trying to manage Claudine’s feelings and for a while it seemed to work (at least it took a lot off me mentally). I did notice that other people were starting to notice Claudine’s behavior and that it was impacting other teams she worked with.
I mentioned this to my mentor, Erika, who happened to be Claudine’s grandboss (we had a mentoring relationship before Claudine started her job, for the record), about how I was seeing that resentment was starting to build towards Kyle’s group due to Claudine’s work, and it was impacting my job as the lead of a group consulting with them but also that it seemed to be none of my business to deal with that.
Erika agreed and said it was Kyle’s job, and that if I were amenable, she suggested I take my concerns directly to Kyle and that it would be his job to manage his team. I swallowed back my skepticism, thinking Erika had a better view of the situation than I did from the Kyle/management side, and did as she suggested.
I brought it up to Kyle in a one-on-one that I was seeing that his team was alienating people with unreasonable asks, a lack of understanding of other people’s work statements, and an onerous number of meetings, and that it was starting to impact their working relationships.
Kyle seemed to take it well, and then asked me to a second follow-up meeting…
At which he ambushed me by bringing into the meeting Claudine and the rest of her team (but not my management) and proceeded to tell me in front of his team they had his full support and that the issues I was bringing up were not real and that I was essentially making it all up.
I mentioned this to Erika, who was aghast at the inappropriateness of such a response and reassured me that I followed the correct chain of command to resolve an issue. A few months later, Claudine claimed that her position did not protect her from workplace misogyny (for the record, while a large number of the technical folks I work with are men, I am a woman) and voluntarily moved on to a new position, and Kyle is under some more stringent management supervision.
I have happily moved on to a new project.
I wonder occasionally if I had inadvertently been caught in a web of office politics and that Erika knew exactly what Kyle’s response would be and simply needed a spark to light the fire so that she could intervene. But having moved on to bigger and better things, I am happy to report that your advice gave me some great peace of mind, and I can look back at this whole debacle with a sense of “well, that sure happened.”
