Is this how everyone talks, where you work? Just curious.
Does everyone else also use this same jargon when talking with people not in your school/factory?
Because it makes you sound extremely silly, to be honest. Hard to take seriously.
It’s all pretty standard business-speak to me. Sounds perfectly normal. You just run in different circles.
OP if you like/need your job, promote this one out of your department. Let them be someone else’s problem. It sucks, but there is no way this doesn’t bite you in the ass if you try to fix it.
Different, more articulate, circles, it would appear.
I like the idea of giving her the first promotion out the door. If she can be promoted so that she reports to a different C-note, that would spread the pain nicely.
Apparently the hiring standards at this company are pretty lax, otherwise this sort of thing would be grounds for termination (or reassignment at the least) without the OP having to do anything at all.
Since it seems like the situation is tolerated by the CxO and their peers, the brown-nosing subordinate is bullet proof. Give the sub a project for which the CxO is a stakeholder. Then carefully document job performance.
Not everybody knows or watches football. Pretty much everyone has or has had a supervisor and a subordinate. This is more like talking about how pretty your garden is using only the Latinate names for your plants.
So it really does stand for “cunt”!
This will likely come off snarkier than I intend it to, so apologies in advance if that’s the case.
I’m baffled by the folks in this thread who are having issues with the terminology. I’ve been working since the late 80s, and even in those pre-email days the terms “direct report,” “C-level / C-suite” and the like were in common usage. For that matter, the terms have been defined within this very thread, and yet some folks are still questioning what they mean.
If you don’t work in the corporate world (particularly the American corporate world), I can understand that the terms might not be terribly familiar … but ten seconds on Google can solve that. (Literally; when I typed both “direct report” and “C-level” into Google, the second links that came up for both terms were definitions.) Continuing to play ignorant in this thread at this point seems ridiculous.
Sounds completely normal to me. Though when I worked at a much bigger tech company we had engineers that reported to D-Level Managers, which report to C-Levels which reported to Directors which reported to VPs then Presidents/GMs/CEO or whatever the hell they were calling themselves that week.
So Manager has a direct report (not matrix managed) that is dating a higher level manager involved in HR. Sounds sticky but how sticky depends on how large the company is and how well documented the incidents and “plans to address” are.
So, if you boss asked you to file some papers, or make a phone call, or whatever it is that you do for a living, and you told her to fuck off and quit interrupting your game of scribblenauts, that would just be hilarious and your manager would have no recourse?
“Insubordination” is just a piece of jargon that means “you didn’t do what the boss told you to do”. If you work someplace where you can ignore what the boss tells you to do and still get paid, please let me know where you work.
Gonna have to call Shenanigans here. Manager is synonymous with Boss. Bosses are superior in organization structure. Organizational structure gives boss power over underlings. Boss directs his\her employees. Boss tells them what is expected of them. If employees do not do it (obey) they can be fired, let go, downsized, laid-off, transferred, wished into the cornfield…(in criminal organizations, whacked)
The employees who do not respect this are either insanely good, or about to be looking for other employment or government assistance.
I’m feeling grateful.
Granted, I’ve only had two jobs since I left school. The first, I routinely told my boss “no”. Didn’t ever tell him to fuck off though. That seems rude. I did tell him to stop wasting my time now and then, and he did. Now if I’d done something bad, like being unsafe or playing grabass, that would have gotten me out on my ass. Not by him though; they have people for that.
Current boss mostly just authorizes work for me to do. That usually involves me asking to do something or her asking if I want to do something. Then the paperwork fairies work their magic and I don’t talk to her for a few weeks.
And I’m baffled by someone thinking that most people work in corporate, or that the fact that someone had to Google your terms doesn’t mean you need to adjust your speech to your audience.
Not that it was at all difficult to figure out what the terms meant just by reading the OP. The OP mentions that one is their superior and that they have the ability to fire the other one. That’s all the information you need to make sense of the terms.
That said, it’s still stupid executive speak to use a verb as a noun. This time, all you’d need is a freaking suffix. She’s a direct reporter. The -er suffix means someone who ____s.
I’ve read How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, so I know the wisdom of turning the boss’s girlfriend into Somebody Else’s Problem. I’ve read The Ropes to Know and The Ropes to Skip and The Peter Principle, so I know about giving somebody a different title that looks like a promotion, but really is moving a useless person to a place where she can’t do any more damage (the Lateral Arabesque.) Those methods are still fraught with peril, but they’re infinitely better than letting her flirt with you.
Document. Completely devoid of emotion, conjecture, assumptions, or personal issues. Everything had better be completely 100% objective, impersonal and bulletproof.
Then carry on as if you do not know about the affair. Follow the normal path of progressive discipline, if only slightly less aggressively than you would with someone else. Make it clear to your boss and HR that you’re trying to give this person every chance to straighten out. (You want that ‘known’ and witnessed, even if it isn’t true.) If you get to a written warning and no one has quietly let you know that you’re walking a dangerous path, then this person isn’t nearly as bulletproof as they would like to believe.
You shouldn’t have to use Google in order to understand a post in IMHO. I was able to figure out what the OP meant by context without Googling, but it’s still kind of irritating to have to figure out jargon when the situation could easily have been stated without it.
Royalscam - does your company have an anonymous ethics complaint process? Larger ones do. Otherwise, I agree with others posts, your options are not good. Move her, move yourself, or try talking to her about how this all looks to everyone else (in as benign a way as you can manage). Third option is risky but she may care about her reputation in the company. Good luck.
Two things:
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My first job out of college was at a non-profit (the American Red Cross) in 1988. The terms were in common usage then, in that non-profit. So it’s not just corporate America that uses them, or that has used them, for literally decades.
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“Reporter” is actually a job title, so saying someone is a “direct reporter” is actually more confusing than saying “direct report.”
I’m not defending the OP’s use of the jargon, but I do think it’s ridiculous to continue to harp on this.
And apparently I’m the only person on the Dope who has ever had to stop for a moment and Google a term or phrase that was unfamiliar to me. Is it good communication practice to use jargon? No. Was it impossible to understand the OP? No.
C’mon, folks. The terms were in the freakin’ title. It’s not like you opened the thread expecting a recipe in English and you got the Magna Carta in Sanskrit.
Wow lots of good responses and debate here.
What I can say is my boss is the CEO and does not like my direct report. So I’m literally thinking about just letting this play out for a bit. He may solve the problem for me.
It’s just a bit frustrating that I have to play this game.
I was unsure about “C-Level” until post #5. IMHO, using jargon here was no big deal. I guess royalscam should document everything. And since royalscam is the CEO’s direct report, not the woman’s boyfriend, he’s in a lot safer position.
If C-level boyfriend is married, there’s always an end-around run… Letting the wife know about the girlfriend. Anonymously, of course.
Welcome to another episode of Court Intrigue, where royalscam may or may not do something to screwup his/her career.
Hmmm. So you are a VP in a smallish to medium company. Can’t be too large. The CFO is screwing one of the directors and she/he thinks they can get out of any kind of trouble because of the connection. It’s gotten to her head, and like 95% of the rest of humanity, she’s stepping on toes because her boyfriend is a big man on campus.
The CEO doesn’t like the person, and doesn’t like having the CFO put him in this position, but also needs the CFO’s expertise. The CEO also just wants things to somehow work out, but that’s wishful thinking. We all have our blind spots.
The CFO is flattered that the attractive director turned her attention to him and has hinted that he can solve any problems for her.
You’re stuck in the middle.
Miss anything? (I just took the traditional genders since I hate typing out his/her all the time.
I suck at Court Intrigue, so better you than me. All I can suggest is that you don’t take the CEO at face value. They don’t get to become CEO without learning how to suggest to people that that person standing in front of them is right, without actually committing to a course of action. Getting others to do their dirty work is an essential skill for top dogs.
And you don’t want to unnecessarily piss off the CFO. Not if you want any budget next year, presuming you live that long.
Good luck, he says. You’ll need it.