Short version: one of my employees is boiling mad at me. Why? Because I declined to write her a letter of recommendation for a promotion, after first writing such a letter for a peer of hers whom I judged more qualified.
And now the details. I manage a team of account managers. There’s about twenty people on my team, only two of whom matter to this story: “Ginger” and “Robin.” Both have been with the company about several years, but Robin has about a year’s seniority; they’ve been working for me about a year.
Ginger is made of awesome. She’s by far the best member of my team. She consistently exceeds her productivity numbers by ten percent or more, and her sales figures reflect her hard work. She sets the curve for continuing education; if I wanted to, I could ignore the memos on what reps are supposed to be learning and just check her logs, because she’s always ahead of the game. She’s first in and last out every day; her sales proposals are clear, well-written, and personalized to each customer; she requires almost no actual management.
Robin is … adequate. She meets her productivity numbers exactly–no more, no less–because she stops making calls as soon as she reaches her day’s target. You can set your clock by her, because each day she clocks in at the last possible second and clocks out at the first possible second. Likewise, if she’s supposed to learn how to use a new product by close of business on 7 December 2012, she starts the the sixty-minute training module an hour and five minutes before the deadline. Her sales are decent but not spectacular, which she blames on her stars rather than herself. Et cetera.
Recently a position in the training department (incidentally a possible stepping stone to a team manager’s job) opened up; it was posted on the company intranet for any employee to see. Almost regretfully I drew Ginger’s attention to it, but she already knew and had begun getting ready to apply, which involves gathering documentation that she’s eligible for promotion, preparing an updated resume, writing an essay explaining her unique qualifications for the job, and so forth. She asked me for a letter of recommendation. I was tempted to let her write her own and just sign it, but I thought she might be too modest so I wrote it myself so I could be properly laudatory.
That was a few weeks back. Close of business today is the deadline to put your application in. Robin came to me this morning asking what she needed to do to apply and asked me for a letter of recommendation. I pointed out that the instructions on how to apply are on the site; that getting her documentation together would take some hours, so if she wanted to do that she should take some personal time as she still has her current job to do; and finally said that I couldn’t write her a letter as I’ve already done so for somebody else. This caused her to explode, saying, among other things, that “You wrote a letter for Ginger, write? Of course it was her. Blondie’s your damn pet. She does everything you want her to do, the way you think it should be done, and you think that makes her the best!”
She started to say some worse things–she was about two works short of calling me a self-hating Negro-- but I cut her off. She was already being insubordinate, I pointed out, but in a way I could overlook. A few words more and I’d have to write her up. If she still wanted to apply for the job, I’d approve of her taking personal time to do so, but in the meantime she should leave before she said something she’d regret.
And so she left in a huff. I passed by her desk on other business a while ago–and outside her eyeline–and overheard a cell phone conversation in which she actually DID use the phrase “self-hating Negro.”
Sigh. Silly twit.
