A reader writes:
I work for a large company and I am only a direct report to my manager (“Sharon”). Sharon is professional and high performing, being in the office three days a week. However, during work-from-home days and even on scheduled vacation days, his behavior becomes confusing, erratic, and deeply disruptive. I choose to work in the office five days a week and arrive at 7 a.m. – an hour before the rest of the team – which has made me the “face” of the team while Sharon has become a digital ghost.
Some examples of his erratic behavior:
• On a distant day, Sharon claimed that she could not work due to a failure in our software. Since our department manages that software, I checked the logs; No such failure existed.
• She once had a “serious emergency” on her scheduled day off, calling me at 7:30 in the morning claiming she couldn’t click on a link because her cat was sitting on her phone, and asked me to submit a compliance report for her. Coworker managers later confirmed that this request had no urgency, and could wait until the next day when she returned to work.
• Despite the HR policy requiring cameras to be on during remote meetings, Sharon keeps the cameras off at home but on at the office.
• She sometimes skips our team’s mandatory morning status meetings, calling me later for a “briefing” that disrupts my own work. The minutes of these meetings are uploaded daily by a dedicated note-taker to a shared digital document accessible by our entire team, so while she can easily check this document, she shouldn’t need to call me about them.
Lately, it’s starting to feel like active career sabotage:
• I led a high-profile app project long before Sharon arrived. She asked me to cancel the twice-weekly status meetings I had been leading about this before she arrived; These meetings were an essential tool for keeping up to date on development and testing progress, and without them I feel like I don’t have a proper grasp on progress, even as the complexity of the app has increased in recent months.
• She repeatedly cancels our scheduled 1:1s, instead relying on phone calls from out of nowhere on WFH days or asking me to “swing by” her desk with zero notice. I never know what she’s going to ask about, and it feels like it’s designed to keep me off-balance.
• During these calls, he explicitly told me not to take notes and to “just listen.” Taking notes requires my attention, but he is determined to eliminate any audit trail of his instructions.
• She is questioning my “bandwidth” to continue as a project lead on the app. Yet she refuses to delegate my low-level grunt work, despite me providing complete documentation for hand-off to other team members
• In the two years he has managed me, I have received the lowest performance score of my time at this company. During a recent “swing by” session where she claimed my performance had “dropped precipitously”, I offered to show her my detailed weekly work logs. She turned me down, said the data wasn’t relevant, and continued to insist that I lacked the bandwidth.
• He recently told me that if our next release is delayed, he’ll have to “justify” to a high-level VP stakeholder why he gave me such a “high” score (the score was actually quite low). I have a very good long-term relationship with this VP, and this felt like a direct threat to my reputation.
How do I deal with a manager who makes formal allegations about my performance but refuses to look at the evidence that proves them wrong? Also, how do I protect my reputation with the VP when my manager is actively trying to eliminate my audit trails?
And finally, what do you make of his erratic behavior? I have my own thoughts and doubts, but if there’s an angle I’m not considering I’d love to get your input on it.
Yes, there is something wrong with Sharon, although I don’t know what it is. If she hadn’t been professional and high-performing on her days in the office, I would have suspected it was just garden-variety incompetence and disorganization, combined with a low work ethic, and she was trying to hide her ineptitude by portraying you as the problem. But if she is good at her work while in the office, then it becomes a different matter.
I wonder if, because of everything that’s been happening during her days away, she feels threatened by your ability and that’s why she asked you to cancel your app status meeting and makes what seem like baseless threats. But what is it that makes Sharon so different when she’s not there? Is she working a second job/hiding a meth problem/possessed by Dybbuk? I don’t know.
For what it’s worth, none of this will happen on its own He Very big deal. There are plenty of managers who skip or cancel meetings and then want updates later at inconvenient times (and this usually isn’t designed to keep you off-guard) or who are at home away from the cameras.
But lying about an easily verified software failure? Claiming that her cat sitting on her phone was a “serious emergency” when the report she asked you to make at her place wasn’t even urgent? Refuses to take notes when you talk to him? Refuses to look at real facts (like your weekly work log) when she criticizes your performance and your bandwidth?
There’s something up here. She may actually be actively trying to harm you, but she may be failing so badly at her job that it’s merely a side effect.
Despite this, I don’t see any good solution that involves you continuing to work for Sharon for the long term. Do you have someone senior you can talk to confidentially about what’s going on – perhaps that high-level VP you mentioned you have a great relationship with? You can explain Sharon’s erratic behavior on days out of the office and her making inappropriate accusations about your work while refusing to look at actual data that would disprove them, and ask for her help in navigating it. Or, in theory, you could ask HR for their help with that last part (responding to performance concerns when Sharon won’t see the actual data), but on something like this I’d prefer to involve someone with more capital and influence than HR, which is usually the case when there’s an issue with the manager.
