An acquaintance of mine told me his son is having a terrible time with a new supervisor at his job. According to the kid it’s obvious to him the super doesn’t like him and didn’t like him from the beginning. What the super does is find fault with whatever the kid does, and tells him he should have done opposite. If the kid does A, super will say he should have done B. If he did B the super says he should have done A. At the same time other employees will have done A and other employees will have done B, none of them being chastised for what they did. This form of management has the result of the employee rebelling, figuring he’ll be wrong no matter what so he’ll do whatever he pleases, or it can result in the employee doing nothing at all, figuring he’ll be wrong no matter what, so why do anything at all. The goal, for management, is for the employee to quit, thus saving the expense of firing him and paying unemployment.
This is a very simplex explanation of the situation. I don’t have all the exact details, and to be honest, I didn’t really care.
However, I seem to recall that there was a name for this form of managerial abuse. I’m sure a union type can answer this. And “making the worker crazy as a shithouse rat” isn’t it.
This is called constructive dismissal or bullying in the U.K. Your friend’s son should approach senior management for advice, with documentation, not mentioning either term.
I had an employer like that for a brief time before I entered graduate school. Most people I talked to about it told me to suck it up and move on, or quit, as that was the way the world worked. I was told I was too sensitive.
What kind of a job is this? Is the son an adult on a career path that involves this type of work, or is it a temporary gig until something better comes along? If the former, it might be good to talk to someone above the supervisor, not in an accusatory manner though, or else management might decide to close ranks and make the situation worse.
If it’s a temporary gig, can he find other employment? I just don’t see how trying to fix the system would be worth it in that case. Employers, in the U. S. at least, can do pretty much whatever they want as long as they don’t sexually harass employees or violate other EEO requirements. It’s free enterprise.
Keep a note pad. And ask questions, just exactly would you like me to complete this task. And write down what the boss said. the read it back to him to besure I got it right. If ask why the note pad the answer is "I am trying to improve as an employee and want to besure I get the instructions right. And when I finished the job writing down any coments made. Each entry should have a time and date.
This gives a record that can be taken up the cain of command. Also if it becomes to much it may allow some recourse. Justification for quiting, or more.
Yeah, there is. Some years ago I had sat in on a grievance hearing and a union rep had used a fancy word for this technique. But damned if I can think of it. It had something more to do with an employee getting bitched at for doing something exactly the same way everyone else was doing it, only they didn’t get bitched out.
It was a discrimination claim at that time. there were more elements to that claim too.
The concept that management can “abuse” people, or that they have any right to expect anything but abuse, no longer has meaning ij the current social-economic climate.
Let’s face it though, a manager can usually get someone to quit. It’s a lot better than firing someone. It looks bad for a manager to fire someone, especially if they hired them in the first place.
You can get unemployment if you quit for a “just cause” but this is difficult. Oh it’s do-able for sure, but it’s not an easy thing. You would definately need to do a lot of documenting.
I had an H/R manager who was a bully. She simply would never put anything in writing. It drove people insane. You’d send her an email and she’d come up and tell you to visit her in the office. She would refuse to ever respond in writing. This was very effective 'cause she’d bully you to death and you had no recourse, 'cause it was always her word against someone else.
I’ve seen similar situations tons of times and you need effective managers to intervene and help. I had one manager and he was a nice guy. While he was good at his job he sucked a managing a staff. His attitude was “never rock the boat.” If you came into work, said “hi,” and did your job he left you alone and it was bliss. He could care less about you.
But everytime a conflict came up it was “deal with it on your own.”
In cases like this, it usually makes sense to end the email with something along the lines of “Could you please reply to this email explaining what you would like me to do” (or however it makes sense to write it). Then, CC the next person in the chain of command. It can make you a bit of an ass, but I’ve found it helps. At least it helped in my situation where the next person up would later go and ask the other recipient “Did you respond to Joey’s email?”
My situation was different then this one, but it got the job done. I now get prompt responses to all my emails and any question about what I did vs what I was told to do are very quickly resolved. This was a few years ago and to this day any emails to this person are CC’d to the owner of my company as well as one of the partners at the firm she works for.
It could fall under “hostile work environment” which is part of sexual harassment laws but does not require anything related to sex, can just be a hostile environment.
About a year and a half ago, I got a new supervisor who seemed to think it was constructive to say “I would have done this” or “I would have done that”, as if he was teaching people by doing this. He honestly didn’t see anything wrong with it, and he’d pull out every opportunity to use it, even when things went well.
Finally, I’d had enough of it (I could get away with my response because I’m twice his age) and say “You know, I didn’t make any mistakes here. I did well. So frankly, I don’t give a shit what YOU would have done here. When you say that, whether you mean it or not, it comes across as criticism. When you say it despite everything working well, it comes across as “what you did still wasn’t good enough for me”. Seriously, knock it off.”
He actually did stop doing it, all across the board.
Then again, I’ve had a few bosses who have pulled the OP’s kind of shit, and it’s pretty clear that they’re only trying to drive you off or build a case for firing you, because they don’t like you. It doesn’t have to be anything you really did, just that they don’t like you and want to get rid of you. You can fight it, but it requires a lot of work, a lot of stress, and most importantly, people above them that don’t like THEM. Even then there’s no guarantee. Best move, and I speak from experience, is just to find another job.
I don’t know, some years ago I had a job, and I had an assistant I really liked. We had a long, cold winter, and she moved to Arizona, and I was supposed to get to hire my own assistant, but my boss hired somebody who was a friend of his ex-wife’s or something.
I did not like her at all. She did everything wrong, and the only times she accidentally did something right was if I told her something wrong, and she did it right, to spite me. It began to really piss me off and she was my assistant and was supposed to help me look good. Finally I got so pissed off I basically started doing all my work myself and left her sitting at her desk reading movie magazines. I kept hoping she would quit. Alas, she did not. So I did.
And then she became my (former) boss’s assistant–he tried to move her into my position. Since she was useless, she screwed up, a lot, and my boss got fired, and I had several attacks of schadenfreude. But I really had liked that job a lot.
However, first you need to look at it from other viewpoints. I am not taking one side or another, but a good manager is not going to try get rid of a good and effective worker. A new supervisor will often not tolerate what they perceive as poor workers in the way that perhaps previous supervisers have in the past. The new supervisor will have differant standards brought over from a previous department/section.
All that said, there are some ways to handle this situation, one is to be absolutely clear what it required by the supervisor, in other words, ask them exactly what they want in front of other staff and record it, then make sure to present your outcomes with others present, always ask for explanations of what is not allegedly satisfactory.It does not hurt to make some comparison in writing with similar situations given over to other staff.
Keep a diary, also, this supervisor must have a previous history - find out what they were like elsewhere, there is always the possibility that they have been moved out of some other area under a cloud.
You should always ensure other workers understand what is going on, not as some complaining whiner, but you may need to bring them on your side.
Be very wary about approaching more senior managers, as their default position is to support their front line manager - which is what a supervisor is, and they would need some convincing evidence, along with some evidence that this behaviour is detrimental to the organisation.
Sound like my last boss, who unfortunately was the CEO, so I had no one else to talk to. He hired me for $20,000 more a year than what I was making at my last company so that I could teach him and the other employees how to go after a type of defense grant that gets the Department of Defense to fund your R&D and to create a series of populated templates for creating winning proposals. In my year and a half with the company, I won them their first grant, which itself paid my salary, along with five multi-million dollar proposals. Then the economy took a nose-dive, and the CEO thought it would be clever to drop my salary $30,000 and tell me I could make it up $5,000 at a time for each grant I won. So basically, I had to win two a year just to break even with my old job. And of course, at that point, nothing I ever did was right, so I was constantly getting criticized for all my work. Needless to say, I was able to find a new job right away and quit, but I am extremely irked that the company has continued to do well using my templates to win loads of grants. The truth is, they wanted my formula for winning proposal and grants, and hired me just long enough to pass the process off to lower paid minions who could follow the templates.
