A reader writes:
I do communications and marketing and would love your advice on what happened for the first time when managing a team.
I had a marketing assistant, “Kitty”, who was very honest and a fresh graduate from the fancy university in town. She was good at visuals (promotional graphics and flyers promoting our products on social media), but not so good at writing the description required for a company like ours.
Typical interactions will be as follows:
Kitty’s Draft: Companyname has recently released a new line of London-inspired teapots. The teapots are red.
Me while reviewing the draft: This is a good start, but let’s strive to make these teapots the best thing ever! how would you do that? When you think of London, what do you think of?”
She never got it, so in the draft I’ll use track changes and change it to, “With our latest teapot collection, transport yourself to London every morning. Use the same red color as London’s historic phone booth, Panty Fancypainter…” (You get the idea.)
Then I’ll say, “Look at the edits I made and let me know if you have any questions, but I’d like to make things better that way.”
Anyway, it goes on like this for a while and he never has any questions and I’m struggling to figure out how to explain this/teach this better.
Then I go on vacation for a week. Before leaving, I pre-edited as much as possible, but instructed her to go to our skip-level boss Lydia, the very annoying head of our division with no marketing background who runs six other teams.
During our first meeting after I came back, Kitty looked exasperated and said, “Lydia just made one change to the floral teapot that I had to make while you were away. There’s no completely different standard for what you’ve been doing for as long as I’ve been here, so I don’t know why you edit me so much.”
She goes on to say that I am overly critical and her therapist told her that I am an insecure person who “wants to be her friend” and that I am threatened by Kitty’s talents because she is younger. (I was 39 at the time.)
And then she repeated the part about how if our annoying boss Lydia approved one (1!) post while I was away, there was a completely different standard for when I was here and when I was on vacation, and the vacation standard was apparently correct.
It quickly became clear that the “ask him to a completely different standard” line came from the therapist. Kitty also used the “I feel bad when I edit” line, and while that framing can be helpful in conversations with a parent, romantic partner, or friend, I really just want to take out her social media posts and be disappointed that she was prioritizing her feelings over improving her skills.
Even though this part was none of my business, I was still upset with Kitty’s therapist for giving her such terrible advice and not once considering that maybe a new graduate still has skills she needs to develop? (I’m older and still have skills I need to develop!)
I didn’t say any of this, but I’m still wondering how I could have handled this episode better at this point.
There are a lot of doctors out there giving weird work advice.
Who knows if Kitty’s therapist was actually one of them, because Kitty may be a pretty unreliable narrator, but it’s definitely something that some therapists don’t understand about how that works… or that they focus correctly on their patient’s emotions in a way that wouldn’t translate appropriately in a work setting.
That said, if Kitty was legitimately confused about why she got a very different reaction from Lydia than she got from you, it’s reasonable for her to ask about it. The way he did it was horribly executed, but the gist of the question itself may be legitimate.
Ideally you should have responded calmly and matter-of-factly with something like, “Lydia runs six other teams and I don’t have time for line editing when I’m here. Part of my job is to refine the copy and train you to do that, while Lydia is only doing a brief review for glaring issues. My review and her review are separate by design.”
In response to Kitty saying that being edited made her feel bad: “I’m sorry to hear that you’re having a hard time with it. When you write professionally, getting edited is a very normal part of the job. It’s also how we get better and better at what we do. My experience has always been that the more you can actively welcome feedback on your work, the better your work will be over time and the more successful you will be in your career. I am giving you feedback because I care about developing your skills, and also because I am ultimately responsible for the work we do.” You can add, “There is no version of your role where the person involved wouldn’t be edited; it’s an inherent part of the job, as is the case with most writing-heavy jobs.
But this is before he talks about his statement that you are overly critical, insecure, and intimidated by his talent and youth. I mean, maybe you Were Overly critical, I can’t know for sure, but based on the totality of the facts in your letter I think the issue was Kitty, not you. Especially with the “threatened by her talent and youth” piece, it sounds like you were dealing with someone who was overly angry, and the best response would be something like, “I can talk to you about why our team is structured the way it is and why I work the way I do, and I’ll listen to you, and if there are parts of it that aren’t working for you – that doesn’t mean they’ll change, but I certainly will.” Will listen with an open mind – but you are making personal attacks in a way that is not appropriate for any colleague, so I would like to reopen this conversation tomorrow and ask that you be prepared to talk from a calm place and without personal attacks.
However, all that said…at that point I think you also need to see if Kitty was the right person for the job. In addition to fairly significant issues with his writing and ability to incorporate feedback into his work, it sounds like there were some serious maturity issues there as well, and they show up at work in every way.
