Do I need to explain this? If someone is trying to do good work and he meets criticism => major cognitive dissonance. It goes against his ethics. Usually people are aiming for the good and finding out that they are really evil or at least perceived as such. It destroys a man’s assumptions on his core beliefs.
Due to evolutionary forces women in general use reputation destruction to fight others. When a manager tells private interactions about one employee to another employee that is reputation destruction. It is unprofessional.
Sun Tzu said never corner your opponent. You will suffer more damage than if you allow them an escape. Sun Tzu says always allow them a way to escape. I made a bad assumption about a coworker. I assumed they were competent. It turns out the issue is not whether they are or not. After much discussion with my therapist she pointed out the coworker is likely suffering from ego fragility. (hindsight is 20/20) So any statement gets twisted into being perceived as an attack on their ego. I really had too many things to do to waste energy attacking people’s egos. I would rather just avoid them and use my energy in a more constructive manner. The problem is I was driving towards a solution so we could get work done and they had a different agenda. Their agenda was all wrapped up in their ego. This means that me trying to drive towards a solution, instead of spending over 100 hours on the problem with no solution in sight was perceived as an attack on their ego. Given the manager also told them things about me they could not know this gave them an excuse to be unprofessional. Bad behavior by one person does not justify bad behavior by another. But the manager supported it.
This left me in a situation where there was no way to redeem myself. There was nothing I could do that would have a positive outcome for all of us. Errors would accumulate and never fade away. I am far from perfect; but even the best person, if you accumulate their errors over time, would fail. Also I saw how the manager made assumptions about others and if you got on their wrong side you were doomed. If some communication was perceived as negative it became passive aggressive and reputation destruction. This became especially clear over a lunch. The manager was stating an opinion about a worker in another department. That his communication (only to the manager; which is important because the worker was NOT trying to embarrass by saying these suggestions in public.) on ways to prevent this from happening were taken as a F U to the manager. The manager had caused a major operational issue that required many people to scramble to fix and loss of revenue to the company. The other manager at the table said that was not in that worker’s nature at all. I had worked with that worker at 2 different companies and I agree. But the worker was now deemed unacceptable to communicate with ever again. How professional, NOT!
Finally back in November feedback and ideas were given and that was not disseminated to the group. In it one item was really good and would have saved us a lot of time this week. (and it was simple) But hey ignore feedback at your peril.
Chance Musings 