my boss is furious that I was honest with my employee about our concerns with his work

A reader writes:

My reason for writing stems from a recent situation where I was meeting with my direct report, Lucas, to discuss an idea he came up with. It was a great idea, so I commended him for it and told my boss about it too to give Lucas more visibility across our department.

I did this because historically, Lucas has been difficult to manage because he is stubborn and argumentative. So I am hoping that with some positive feedback when it is due, and gentle coaching now and then, I can turn him around.

Anyway, when I brought his idea to my boss’ attention, my boss (Allen) directly reached out to him and decided to include him in a client call to allow Allen to present the idea. I warned my boss not to do this given Lucas’s stubborn personality but Allen felt I was just being insecure and went ahead with it, with no internal meeting to align first and without any coaching of Lucas before the call.

The call went badly as the client wasn’t open to Lucas’s idea. But Lucas kept insisting on implementing his idea even though our client refused and said no several times. He even started lecturing the client on why certain things in their data package to us were wrong. At that point, I had to step in and ask him to leave it there.

I went to Allen after the meeting to complain about all this, and he said he would talk to Lucas about it since it was his idea to bring him into the call. I learned, however, that Allen had actually told Lucas that he did an excellent job on the call. But then Allen told me on the side that we will never bring Lucas on future client calls.

I felt this not right, as there should be transparency in our department, and without feedback Lucas will not understand what he did wrong and how to fix it. I think it’s not fair to exclude him from calls without telling him why, even though Lucas typically isn’t supposed to be part of client calls anyway.

So, I met with Lucas and told him if he wants to be on calls in future, he needs to listen to the client and not try to ram his own ideas through if the client is not receptive. He refused to listen to me as he said Allen gave him good feedback and so he didn’t understand why I had a problem. This is when I told him that due to his actions, he was actually being put off any future calls until we saw improvements and that this wouldn’t be happening if in fact his performance was good during the call.

When Allen found out I had told Lucas about him not being on client calls again, he was furious at me. He called me to his office and accused me of being a toxic manager and said he believes any problems I have had with Lucas in the past (I complained to my boss about Lucas causing issues in the past due to his argumentative nature) were due to me not being able to manage. He then went on to threaten to fire me and to never allow my team to expand since he feels I will not manage anyone well.

Am I in the wrong in all of this? Should I have done things differently and if so, how should I have managed this situation better? I have been thinking about this constantly and I really would like to not be fired.

So Allen was upset with Lucas’ behavior on the call to the point that he wants to ban him from future client calls — but for some reason he told Lucas that he did an excellent job with the client and got mad at you for saying the opposite? And you’re toxic and the source of all the problems with Lucas?

The problem here is Allen.

Or, at least, one of the problems here is Allen.

The other problem is likely that you’re not managing Lucas as assertively as you need to; positive feedback and “gentle coaching from time to time” aren’t nearly forthright enough for someone who’s as argumentative as you describe. But I can understand why you might be hesitant to take that on more directly when you have a manager like Allen above you — someone who clearly doesn’t have your back and threatens to fire you when you relay honest feedback to an employee.

If Allen were a reasonable person, the right next step would be to go back and talk about all this — to find out why he didn’t want Lucas to receive honest feedback about his behavior with the client, and also to dig into exactly what his concerns are about the way you’re managing your team. But based on your letter, it doesn’t sound like you have the kind of relationship with Allen — and Allen doesn’t have the self-awareness or receptiveness to viewpoints other than his own — that would allow that to happen in a constructive way.

Frustratingly, though, I don’t see how you can move forward without doing that, since he’s threatening to fire you and doesn’t seem to have much respect for you professionally. So I think you have to have some kind of conversation with him about what happened … but how candid and useful it can be will be determined by whether Allen ever has moments of rationality or whether he’s always as ridiculous as he seems to have been here.

In your shoes, I’d be taking a look at the job as a whole and whether it’s a good idea — or even possible — to work for Allen long-term. “You should leave” is easy to say … but unless this was wildly out of character for him, this is probably a situation where it’s better for you to work on leaving.

The post my boss is furious that I was honest with my employee about our concerns with his work appeared first on Ask a Manager.

View the full article