Dream Company, Nightmare Boss — Part III - Till the Breaking Point

A few months into my role, non-admin tasks started to come my way; it was difficult. I received no background, no training, no info. Everything I learned came from my own research and digging. I struggled. You expect a support system to get on your feet, and I received little to no guidance.

A text I sent to my sister about my frustration in the first few months on the job: "I have to keep my head up and assure myself that this is temporary. This whole thing…I feel like I wasn't set up to succeed. I think I almost had an anxiety attack… No, I did. Greg is VERY scatter-brained, so it's difficult to manage your manager when he faults you for not understanding him. Cindy is doing OK. She's overwhelmed too, but said she’s learned to adapt to the chaos."

After enough confusion regarding my short- and long-term responsibilities, I reached out to Greg with a firm request for help. I said I was unclear what my tasks were and how to execute them. I requested training and a plan, stating that he would need to assist me in establishing that clarity. I suggested using the job description as a guide. Greg's response? The job description was no longer correct (this is around September, my fourth month at the company), and I shouldn't refer to it. He said he would need to revise it to be accurate, as my job changed.

Me in 2014 during work hours

While I waited for Greg's update on my new job, I figured talking to his boss, Christa, was the next logical step in finding a semblance of normalcy.

In a meeting with Christa, I admitted that learning from Greg had been challenging, and asked if there was any way she could assist in guiding him to better support my training and defining my role.

She stared at me for a moment, and then accused me of expecting my hand to be held. I stared back in shock. Why is she playing defense? Christa, I'm the lowest employee on your org chart asking for help in a crappy situation, and you're making me out to be the bad guy?

Here's what I expected: guidance. Give me the general structure of my duties and responsibilities. I can fill the gaps and ask questions from there. My four remote colleagues had been with the company for decades; Cindy had been with the company two years. I was every shade of green compared to my teammates, and Christa's only advice as I walked out of that meeting was to "manage up."

I understand now that she was frustrated with Greg's inability to manage employees, let alone himself. And me complaining about his lack of leadership and training pointed out the obvious, an obvious she preferred to ignore. Greg is the mistake she can't accept responsibility for. Still, great leaders can maintain courtesy and respect in their words and actions. All I saw was her problem being reflected back at me to handle. And her expectation is that I grin and bear it.

Around this time, Greg's true nature started to come forth. For those who knew him at face value, he was a chummy, goofy man—that was the person I interviewed with. I learned there was an insecure, condescending person below the facade, especially if things didn’t go his way.

A Skype message from Cindy: "He has a bad habit of wanting to have brain diarrhea all over you so he can shift the responsibility. I hate that… "

It’s hard to capture all the bullying instances without sufficient context. Here are some examples:

• In August 2014, after not completing the first draft of an assignment the way Greg envisioned, he asked me, "Do you really want this job? Do you want to be here? Because your work demonstrates that you don't.” I assured him that I wanted to be there, with him repeating that I wasn't proving that to him. Upon hearing that, I feared I was going to be fired and worked through the weekend to remedy the assignment, hopefully to meet his ever-changing expectations.
• During a meeting with several people, I noticed Greg didn’t understand the industry jargon someone said. I whispered to him, explaining in layman's terms what they were talking about. He shushed me.
• During a meeting with two colleagues managing a video campaign, I made a suggestion. Greg paused, chuckled, and continued to speak, ignoring what I said. When I asked if he heard me, he said, "Yes, I heard you, and you're being ignored." Both colleagues came to talk to me afterward saying they were sorry and were made uncomfortable by the way he spoke to me. I confronted him about this later, and he told me to only speak in meetings if I tell him beforehand what I'll say.
• As previously mentioned, Greg told me multiple times not to speak to colleagues without him being present. This extended to meetings. As in, if a meeting occurred, and I was in a conference room without Greg, or on a call and Greg was not present, my only task was ensuring Greg was found. This even included him being late to a meeting. "Call me, text me, find me in the office—that's the most important thing for you to do."
• If Greg needed to talk to me and I wasn’t at my desk, he would search the building for me. He chased me down in other people’s cubes, in the kitchen, and once waited outside the women's restroom for me to come out. I was always on high alert.
• He stared at me and said, "Stop typing and pay attention." I was taking notes during a meeting on my computer. I showed him the notes, but thereafter, he said I was only allowed to bring a pad of paper and a pen to meetings since being on my computer while he spoke was disrespectful to his time.
• One day, Greg and I had a meeting at 1 o'clock. I returned to my computer at 12:55, and it wasn't turning on. I grabbed my laptop, brought it to his office, and asked if he could call into the phone conference since my computer was acting up. He said, "I shouldn't be doing this. I don't want to ever have to do this again. You should have been prepared." He continued to ramble variations of this. He made me come around to his desk and input the numbers into his phone because it wasn't his job to dial into calls for me.
• He kept emailing my personal email account (and other Katie's / Kate's / Katherine's in the company) and blamed me. He accused me of phantom emailing him from my personal email account, and then switching back to my work email. After several instances and finger pointing, an IT associate and I confirmed he wasn’t checking email addresses since they auto-populated. IT had to remove my personal email from his address book because even knowing why it was happening, he kept doing it—and kept blaming me.
• One day, Cindy and I went out to lunch together. When we returned, we both had multiple emails from Greg asking where we were. I had a meeting with him soon and told her I would take care of it. He berated me for being gone without telling him and that he couldn’t be productive without help from one of us. He said that from now on, if we planned to go on lunch together, we had to get his approval.
• One bad habit he had was taking personal phone calls during our one-on-one meetings. This would range from a couple minutes to nearly sixty minutes of time. “Oh, this is my dad,” and he would take the call, insisting that I stay. I’d get up to leave, and he’d gesture for to me to sit down. If I continued to approach the door, he’d pause his phone call and command me not to leave, "Sit down." I would stare at the wall, frozen: "This is your dream job. This is your dream. This is what you wanted..."
• I found out it wasn't only me getting this treatment: A colleague told me that Greg made two female co-workers cry over project disputes. I witnessed him bring Cindy to tears, with her body visibly trembling over a task that she was uncomfortable with. She insisted that the task was not appropriate, and he would not relent. It was late in the day, and so to separate herself from the argument, she left the office to meditate. When Cindy came back, she called me out to the parking lot to tell me she was OK and just needed space to cool off.

Over time, this awful work environment wore on me physically and mentally. My hair started to fall out in clumps, and my doctor prescribed me anti-anxiety medicine specifically to manage working for Greg. I was ashamed. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I handle this situation and stand up to him? What was happening to my self-worth, my confidence, my joy?

In October and November, there were two incidents that pushed me over the edge, and I decided to give that HR thing a try...

Next up: The End of 2014