I’ll continue my guessing game and purport the OP misinterpreted something said during the interview, probably due to naivete or simple stupidity. Then after coming to work, the petulant brat perceived some personal wrong done to him that existed only in his own mind, nowhere else.
As msmith noted: Who’s in charge here, anyway? I’m still amazed anyone including the OP does not get this.
If an employee is not doing his job, trust me, their coworkers know. It is for the boss to come down on them appropriately. It’s not appropriate for the boss to discuss their work performance with us as gossip (it’s one thing for me to approach her with concerns and then have her address them). It is not appropriate for me to know that my boss personally does not like one of my coworkers .
I’d say this is where you go awry. You can guess whatever you want, doesn’t make it true. All the information we have is Jill’s behavior, not John’s. The point is, regardless of how John behaved, Jill behaved in a breathtakingly unprofessional manner. Nor is the fact that John played hardball during job offer negotiations somehow a poor reflection on him. That’s how it works. The company will negotiate the best deal they can for themselves; so can, and should, the candidate. If Jill was unhappy with how the negotiations turned out, she could have not hired him; but hiring him and then acting like a passive-aggressive child because he successfully negotiated more out of her than she wanted is her problem. Sure he asked for it, but she was the one who gave it to him.
And, regardless of her motivations, gossiping about your employee’s work performance to the janitor is unprofessional and childish. So is obliquely scolding him in front of the entire department. Passive-aggressiveness has no place in the land of adults. She can handle the problem directly with him, and leave his co-workers out of it.
As told by John. With suspiciously dubious attempts at clarification and elaboration WRT his part later in the thread.
You sure do give a big benefit of the doubt.
The problem is that we don’t know enough about the situation, and the OP is deliberately giving slanted information to make his “case.” If you look at his question
For chrissake, if one ever wanted to write a misleading question, here is one. Where is the fact that he had just refused to come in to work because he didn’t feel like it? Or apparently quit on the spot?
The other day, my four-year-old was bugging her younger brother. He finally got mad and hit her, so she comes running to me, “Didi hit me.”
Well, yes. He did. That’s what you get when you take a toddler’s toys.
If someone quits on the stop, ignoring them on the way out is not out of line. Writing pissy OPs trying to justify yourself by selectively doling out facts out of context doesn’t lead to confidence that any of the story is unbiased.
Or worse, when the boss does this when the one person to whom the scolding applies IS NOT THERE in the meeting. And she goes on and on and on and on…
Calling someone a “brat” in the workplace sounds unprofessional to me, but I work for a spoiled brat of my own so,who knows, maybe one day I will snap and call her a brat.
No, I just go with the information we have, rather than making up information we don’t have. Sure, he’s biased. That doesn’t make Jill’s behavior, as presented, professional.
Hell, maybe there is no John, Jill, or job. Maybe it’s entirely fiction. The question was, is this kind of behavior rude/unprofessional, and it is.
However, there is a point where the information is so obviously biased that it’s meaningless to speculate. The question concerning Jill not saying goodbye when John walks out of the office is exactly that, and it’s an indication there is far more to the rest of the story. It sounds like Jill could also be acting unprofessional, but really who knows what happened.
If you feel you can make a judgment concerning Jill, fine. Knock yourself out.
Well, I haven’t addressed that specific behavior for that reason. Although in truth, I’d say it’s technically rude, even if (and we can only speculate) it was justified. I am not, however, one to say that a person must avoid being rude at all times and at all costs – if someone is rude to me, I will not be inclined to knock myself out being polite to them, unless some greater good than not hurting the rude person’s feelings would be served.
However, the behavior I did address, namely the gossiping and oblique scolding in the presence of disinterested third parties, is unprofessional no matter what John did. John could have been a total asshole, but as a manager (or, seriously, any professional worker) it is still incumbent on her to hold herself to a higher standard than that. Really, all she accomplished was demonstrating to the entire office that John quite easily managed to push her buttons. That’s not a trait I want to see in a a manager – part of their job is grace under pressure when handling difficult situations. The “greater good” served here is that working in an office with someone that passive-aggressive, especially one who has power over you, is an absolute hell environment to work in for everyone else who works there.
John does sound kind of like a brat.
No, there isn’t. We have information. We use it. When more information comes in, we change our opinion based on that. Saying you can’t make a decision because you think you might not have all the information is just lazy. That’s something you do when there are consequences to being wrong, which there are none here.
And why do you do that? Because it’s rude as hell to call someone a liar.
I don’t get you guys who think who think it even matters. The behavior as given is rude, no matter what happened. And standing up for what you believe in is not childish, it’s something adults do. Adults do something about the problem, rather than just whine about it.
There’s levels of rude, like mildly rude and then there’s holy-shit-WTF-provoked-that rude. It all depends on how it was handled and what sparked it.
Talking in private about someone else’s actions? I don’t know an office where that doesn’t happen for tons of reasons, both professional and unprofessional ones.
A meeting in which “someone’s” behavior is discussed and everyone knows who it was? That happens. Probably not the best management style but it’s common.
Call someone a “brat” to their face? I’ve done that jokingly with coworkers I like. A better choice in this case? It could have been saying nothing, or perhaps Jill would have been better calling him “insubordinate,” depending on John’s behavior. (In that case, “brat” probably would have been better from John’s POV.)
In this case, since this “John” left immediately after being called a “brat” I can’t say I’m surprised “Jill” said nothing in response to “have a good day.” I’d assume she thought the phrase was sarcastic and didn’t merit an in-kind response.