Work situation driving me nutso

[phil_at_dayboro]

Sorry to say it, but these experiences are just about universal. The only way to avoid being frustrated with management is to be your own boss. But then you’ve got clients to deal with, and that is just as frustrating.

Anyway, companies pay us to not merely be competent at our specific jobs, but to be part of a team and take direction from management. Following the direction of your supervisor and hand-holding them through issues they don’t seem to understand is just as much a part of your job (any job) as the actual tasks you are performing.

I’d suggest going to HR on this issue is unlikely to resolve anything and unlikely to endear yourself to anyone, but if you are careful and frame it as seeking guidance rather than complaining, it could help.

This is a great Comment, and it’s a major reason I became self employed,
To be self employed is the most rewarding experience,
I started out making Flyscreens and Security doors, Blinds / awnings then hit the jackpot
By selling &. Installing shower screens,
There must be something out there you could try, just never ever ever get involved
In Resturants, that’s how I lost everything, took a long time to get back on my feet,

 

[Gordon_Sims]

I really am at the end of my rope right now. My team lead is very incompetent and has extremely poor mathematical abilities. She has horrible time management skills. As well, she has tunnel vision. Anytime I try to point out a different perspective or a different way of talking a problem, her face goes blank. She has awesome people skills which is partly why I think she got the job.

Make her a guy and take away her people skills and she could be one of my former managers, Bruce. This was a guy whose math skills were so bad, he spent six months on a productivity project and his results were the exact opposite of reality. When his boss questioned it, he asked me to check it over for him. I found his mistake in a couple minutes then spent over an hour trying to explain it to him, using progressively smaller words as I went. At the end of the hour he decided that he was right all along. Since his boss was no better, he accepted the “corrected” report as valid.

My advice, if all else fails, is to recommend her for a promotion. That’s the only way we got rid of Bruce. It also worked with Dave, a manager two or three prior to Bruce. Dave was far worse than Bruce. It’s not that he was stupid; he was one of the meanest, nastiest, cruelest people I’ve ever met. The third-meanest thing he did to me was the time I took a day off to take my son to an ice show. My son was a kid and it was geared toward kids. Dave spent the next three months mocking and ridiculing me for going to it. He’d throw in a five minute long, profanity-ridden monologue about what a wimp and a baby I was into ever team meeting. He’d gotten some local press at HQ for succeeding in the face of adversity (a bit of a euphemism, but I’ll leave it at that) so when I complained about him it was my job that was threatened. Everybody who worked with him hated him, but since he had this protected status, nobody had the nerve to fire him. Instead, everyone who dealt with him ended up trying to get him promoted. Management got the hint so they would move him on up to progressively smaller teams with less and less responsibilities. Each promotion gave him a huge salary increase and cut his team size in half. He ended up with some title like VP in Charge of Special Projects. He was making in the low to mid six figures, had nobody reporting to him and no responsibilities. He had a tiny, windowless office about the size of a broom closet, but he also had a company car, two laptops, a pager, two cell phones and a Blackberry (again, with nobody reporting to him). He would assign himself projects which he was responsible for both completing and reviewing. He “reported” to an executive who wasn’t a people manager (in other words, someone who had no clue they had anyone reporting to them and wouldn’t know what to do about it if they did), so he came and went as he pleased. As unfair as that sounds, just about everyone who’d ever worked with him was thrilled because it meant that he was out of their hair and he wasn’t tormenting anyone else. After a reorganization he found himself reporting to another manager who really was a people manager. When she found out what he was doing she canned him, although he did get a huge severance package thanks to his thoroughly undeserved title. So while all the results may not be ideal, the whole “promote them out of my hair” thing may be something to think about.

 

[KCT]

When I say this woman is difficult, I am really not joking. She just does not understand appropriate boundaries

There you go. Time to set appropriate boundaries.

Not easy, but if your frustration level is only going to get worse, you’ve got to figure out how to do it.

 

[shainski]

So in other words just keep everything short and sweat and don’t give any specific updates unless asked point blank?

I would agree with this advice. If this person is not a technical person, there is no reason to bog her down with the details.

And if I were on the other end, where I needed an answer to a dilemma, I would probably set up the problem in an email something like this:

"I am working on the Anderson case. I wasn’t sure whether we should go in direction X or Y, and I would like your (name removed by moderator)ut. I’m going to give you a little time to think about your answer while I am working on the other pieces of that case.

Thank you. let me know when you decide."

and if she stopped by my desk and asked

“How are things going?”

Me:“Great. I’m working on the macros. Did you have an opinion on whether we should do X or Y?”

and if I found that she insisted on intruding on my space, I would say something like this:

“I know you are really great at multitasking - but I can’t think as well like that. If you give me an hour to work out my thoughts, then I will share with you all that i have accomplished.”

Years ago, I was doing some consulting at a company near San Francisco. The company prided itself on only hiring people in the top 2% of the population intellectually. Then it made everyone see a psychologist and take a test to make sure they could all get along. At one point, a strong-willed German woman said to me. (That was my introduction to myers -briggs)

"Bob and I had to learn how to work together. He is a ENTP and I am a IJTN (I don’t remember what the letters mean or what actual things they were).

I looked at her like she was speaking Greek.

But she went on to explain. “We each used to think that the other was going out of his/her way to drive the other crazy. The psychologist had to tell us that we each had a different way of processing information. For example, If we were at a meeting discussing a topic - Bob needed to have an answer before the meeting was over. I, on the other hand, needed time to consider all the aspects of the problem, and I would have to get back to him on Monday.” (Neither one of us could easily alter how we were - but, at least, we realized that the other needed some concessions.)

 

[SouthCatholic]

I would LOVE to lay low. This woman comes to me and asks how things are going and when I try to explain that is when the defocus starts

When she comes to you and asks you how things are going just tell her great. Don’t try to explain anything to her since you know she won’t understand it anyway!

 

[Anglewannabe]

I get the impression that your boss just might want your friendship and companionship which you probably don’t want to give. .

I do give her friendships and we get along very well when it comes to water cooler chit chat. It is just her work skills are difficult to be around

You said she got the job because she is vey personable, but then you tear her down. .

She is very personable in the sense she does not play favorites nor does she hold grudges. It is like I said before, she seems to think people should sit beside her while she dilly dallies and takes her time to talk to herself.

Perhaps she is more competent than you give her credit for, and if she isn’t, help her achieve that level. And it is quite possible that her boss has told her to go to you and that you would show her the ropes. .

First of all, I have done enough tutoring to know the difference between someone who simply needs to be shown something and something and when someone does not have the ability to understand. Very often, she falls into the ‘does not have the ability to understand’ category. And I seriously doubt anyone told her to come to me to learn the ropes

 

[Anglewannabe]

Well, I did go to HR and it was a positive experience. I was able to lay out my concerns and HR gave me some guidance as to how I could possibly handle it. I presented the situation as ‘I want guidance before things get out of hand’

Then HR told me that I could pull her aside and have a private talk. I told HR, I was not ready to do that yet. But now that I think about it, perhaps it would be better. I will go to HR and run by them what I have to say and see if it is acceptable. I was thinking of pulling her aside and saying something like

‘I am very grateful for all the help you give me and I hope you understand that I am simply bringing up a suggestion to make our work relationship even better. I strongly suspect we have very different styles. I like to be by myself when I think and you strike me as the type who likes to think with another person around. I was wondering if we could come up with some compromise we both can be happy with’.

And then I will give and example about how when I am working on something and she gives a suggestion, although it is worth considering, very often I am in my own train of though and I feel it is interrupting me. I would rather be left alone to figure things out.

And then I will tell her that when I ask her a question, very often she will suggest things I have done. And then I will say 'I totally understand that you want to double check. However, from where I am sitting it would be easier if I could do something else at my desk while you are double checking.

Angie

 

[Anglewannabe]

If you cannot be a good fit at your work you should leave.

If I could get another job (even a lesser paying one) I would leave in a heart beat. I am doing my best to get out of there

Perhaps going into business for yourself would be a good fit for you and you may be a lot happier. Plus, you get to call all the shots!

No, the risk involved in starting and owing a business is not the kind of thing I could live with. I would be much worse off

 

[silver_moon]

2 days ago, an issue came up I had never seen before so I had to ask her about it. Of course there was the usual expectation that I twiddle my thumbs as she works. Then she said she would take care of making a few calls. Finally, she had a solution and asked me to write an email She knew the solution why did it fall back on me. So I wrote the email which she told me to send to her. Then she changed it all She did not change the message, just the wording. Well, why was my time wasted if she was going to do it her way???

Then, she said ‘Before this email goes out, please audit XYZ just in case.’ I put the audit together and told her where I saved it to which she responded ‘Instead I think I will do something else’:banghead: Yet again she made me waste my time.
Angie

I condensed the quote. From everything you’ve said, it sounds like she prefers to do things her way and has a high need for control. However it struck me that you disliked her changing the wording on emails and etc. While this is frustrating, I was always told do not send emails without review and waiting for some time to go by.

The review could come from me or from someone else but it was stressed to me that it’s important to write something, take a break from it, come back to it, then see if you’re still saying it the way you want to. I don’t see what she’s doing specifically on the writing/emailing review as a waste of time, especially since she has good people skills. Better to check too much than not enough. And where I used to work things got reviewed so many times I would pull my hair out so to speak especially when management changed their minds. On a seemingly daily basis. So I can relate to the frustration. This part of it may be a step you can’t really skip though. take care.

 

[1ke]

Angie,

Have you considered looking at book on the topic of Emotional Intelligence, also called EQ. Daniel Goleman’s book is excellent. There are several books related to skill building in this area. I would encourage you to look at them to help you shift the dynamic of your work interactions.

 

[Anglewannabe]

Angie,

Have you considered looking at book on the topic of Emotional Intelligence, also called EQ. Daniel Goleman’s book is excellent. There are several books related to skill building in this area. I would encourage you to look at them to help you shift the dynamic of your work interactions.

Could you please expand on your point? Is this book something that will help me understand where other people are coming from?

 

[Anglewannabe]

From everything you’ve said, it sounds like she prefers to do things her way and has a high need for control. .

Well, now that you mentioned it, perhaps she does have a control issue. However, it is not the first thing one would notice about her so that’s probably why I didn’t think of it

However it struck me that you disliked her changing the wording on emails and etc. While this is frustrating, I was always told do not send emails without review and waiting for some time to go by.

I totally understand reviewing emails. The problem I have is with how she changed the wording to something worse. We have a standard form which we changed a bit to fit each situation. The opening paragraph basically explains why we have decided to contact the client. In this situation, we had already had a discussion with the client so I changed the opening paragraph to something like ‘further to our telephone conversations’ and she took that out and put in the generic ‘we have decided to email you because’. At the time I bit my tongue because I have spent enough time around her to know this is something she does not seem to be intelligent enough to understand. Also, that day I had spent enough time with her over my shoulder, I just could not take anymore

Angie

 

[Anglewannabe]

Well, I had another conversation with Human Resources and it went really well. I presented it as me needing guidance and HR provided it. I also gave a few example of the situations I did not know how to handle and HR told me some ‘sentences’ I could use to speak up without being threatening. I thanked HR.

I decided to give these things a try. I must be honest, my main concern is this will just generate more of a discussion (than me biting my tongue) and that is what is making me nervous, the first few minutes, I am capable of being polite but after a while my blood starts to boil

Anige

 

[AKDee]

If I could get another job (even a lesser paying one) I would leave in a heart beat. I am doing my best to get out of there

I understand but hope you have prayed about this and are sure. Generally interpersonal problems come up at EVERY job. If that’s the only issue and the person is a good person even if hard to work with, sometimes it’s better to develop the skills to work with that person. The next person you have an interpersonal issue with might not be a good person and they may well make you far more miserable.

 

[Anglewannabe]

Angie,

Have you considered looking at book on the topic of Emotional Intelligence, also called EQ. Daniel Goleman’s book is excellent. There are several books related to skill building in this area. I would encourage you to look at them to help you shift the dynamic of your work interactions.

I got 2 of his books from the library. Emotional Intelligence and Working with Emotional Intelligence. I don’t find them helpful because it seems all he talks about is companies and people that fail because they don’t have EI. It is just one example of failure after another.

I believe the concept is good but there is no advice on how to develop emotional intelligence. I am starting to think perhaps a Dale Carnegie book would be better. Or can you recommend another book with the same topic?

 

[1ke]

I got 2 of his books from the library. Emotional Intelligence and Working with Emotional Intelligence. I don’t find them helpful because it seems all he talks about is companies and people that fail because they don’t have EI. It is just one example of failure after another.

I believe the concept is good but there is no advice on how to develop emotional intelligence. I am starting to think perhaps a Dale Carnegie book would be better. Or can you recommend another book with the same topic?

I’ve heard good things about Tuhovsky’s Emotional Intelligence although I haven’t read it.

 

[Anglewannabe]

Thank you Ike