I am in a professional type job. Two years ago I did some work with one of the senior management team and it didn’t go well. She wasn’t a good planner and the task was ill conceived. I was put in charge of a small team with no direction and when things went south she tried to take over and was rude and abusive to me in front of the team. She kept saying we had to do it her way and I and another team member kept trying to explain to her why it wouldn’t work and she just kept insisting. Finally I said “whatever”, to her and she took it as insolence and got very angry and said “no, NOT whatever we need to get this right!” At that point I had realized it was her way or no way and just had given up. I was frustrated. That incident has continued to haunt me as she is apparently more powerful than I realized. I believe she has told the rest of her group not to give me any work. Sr. Project Managers who liked my work before now barely talk to me. So this past year I have been largely non billable. My supervisor has been non responsive in my requests for work and not done a good job of growing our group as a whole. There is an understood rule here that even low level staff have to market themselves and get work but I feel it is the supervisors job to give you work. Also during this year there is one person who had overflow work which is outside my skill set. She asked me to help her and I told her I didn’t think it was right to charge a client for work done by someone not trained to do it, plus it would likely take me longer and may just need to be redone by someone else thus costing the client more. Ultimately I emailed the boss to see if I should do it and discussed with him and he said do it. So I let her know I was available but she never gave me work to do then. There is a history with this employee being very negative and difficult to work with so the boss now says I did this because I can’t work with her and I’m not a teamplayer. I think this is nonsense because I would have done the same thing no matter who it was…it’s wrong to do work you aren’t trained for if it will cost the client more and potentially be wrong in the end. But now I got a bad review and I am wondering if they are using this as a way to prepare for firing me. I am 55 and realistically if they don’t have work for me it would be cheaper for them to fire me than lay me off. I’m amazed I didn’t get laid off this year with no work. Now they are saying I have to market and I have no experience with it and though I will try it is not what I was hired for. I am a technical support person, data management, not a marketer. I don’t want to change jobs because I like the technical work, I don’t mind the challenge of marketing but if I fail I am concerned about the consequences. Also at 55 with the current market I’m not likely to get a job quickly and I would lose all my vacation time. I don’t want to go back to 2 weeks…I worked a long time to build it to 4 weeks! What would you do?
The senior person in the first situation was not my supervisor. And I have explained and humbled myself with my supervisor and explained it was not intended as insolence. As far as inviting the senior person to lunch and humbling myself I’d be happy to do it if I thought it would make a difference even though frankly I think she owes me an apology for her rudeness to me in front of the group I was the teamleader for. Even one of the group members said “I can’t believe you let her treat you the way she does”
I should probably also note that my boss got a bad review this time too for letting the group flounder this year. He didn’t grow the group and didn’t provide any direction to his staff members. I’m wondering if my bad review was just the old “sh*t flows downhill” thing.