my employee blew up at me and claimed her therapist said I was threatened by her

A reader writes:

I do communications and marketing and would love your advice on something that happened my first time managing a team.

I had a marketing assistant, “Kitty,” who was very earnest and a brand new grad from the fancy university in town. She was good at visuals (so the promotional graphics and fliers touting our products on social media) but less so on writing up the descriptions needed for a company like ours.

Typical interactions would go like this:

Kitty’s draft: CompanyName just released a new line of teapots inspired by London. The teapot are red.

Me, when, reviewing drafts: This is a good start, but let’s try to make these teapots sound like the best thing ever! How would you do that? What do you think of when you think of London?”

She never got it, so in the draft I would use Track Changes and change it to, “Transport yourself to London each morning, with our latest teapot collection. Using the same shade of red as London’s historic phone booths, Painty Fancypainter…” (You get the idea.)

Then I would say, “Look over the edits I made and let me know if you have questions, but that’s how I’d like to jazz things up.”

Anyway, it goes on like this for a bit and she never has questions and I’m struggling to figure out how to explain it/teach it better.

Then I go on vacation for a week. Before I went away, I pre-edited as much as I could, but instructed her to go to our skip-level boss, Lydia, our very harried head of our division without a marketing background who runs six other teams.

During our first meeting after I come back, Kitty looks agitated before bursting out, “Lydia only made one change to the floral teapot post I had to do while you were away. Unless there is a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT STANDARD for when you are here, I don’t know why you edit me so much.”

She goes on to say that I’m super critical and her therapist told her that I am an insecure person who “wants to be her friend” and that I’m threatened by Kitty’s brilliance because she’s young. (I was 39 at the time.)

And then she repeated the part about how if our harried boss Lydia approved the one (1!) post while I was away, there was a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT STANDARD for when I was here versus when I was on vacation, and that the vacation standard was clearly correct.

It quickly became clear that the “ask her about the completely different standard” line came from the therapist. Kitty also used the “it makes me feel bad when I get edits” line, and while that framing might be helpful in conversations with a parent, romantic partner, or friend, I really just want to get my social media posts out and was frustrated that she was prioritizing her feelings over honing her skills.

While this part was none of my business, I was also upset at Kitty’s therapist for giving her such terrible advice and never once considering that maybe a new grad still had skills she needed 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 in the moment.

There are a lot of therapists out there giving weird work advice.

Who knows if Kitty’s therapist was actually one of them, because Kitty could be a very unreliable narrator, but it’s definitely a thing that some therapists don’t get how work works … or they are correctly focused on their patient’s feelings in a way that wouldn’t translate appropriately to a work setting.

That said, if Kitty was legitimately confused about why she got very different feedback from Lydia than she had been getting from you, it’s reasonable for her to ask about it. The way she did it was terribly executed, but the crux of the question itself could be a legitimate one.

Ideally you would have calmly and matter-of-factly responded with something like, “Lydia runs six other teams and doesn’t have the time for the line editing I’m responsible for when I’m here. Part of my job is refining copy and coaching you do that, whereas Lydia is just doing a brief review for glaring issues. My review and her review are different by design.”

In response to Kitty saying that getting edited made her feel bad: “I’m sorry to hear you’re having a rough time with it. When you write professionally, getting edited is a very normal part of the job. It’s also how we all 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 get over time and the more successful you’ll be in your career. I’m giving you feedback because I care about developing your skills, and also because I’m ultimately responsible for the work we put out.” You might add, “There’s no version of your role where the person in it wouldn’t be getting edited; it’s an inherent part of the job, like with most writing-heavy jobs.”

But that’s before getting to the part about her saying that you’re super critical, insecure, and threatened by her brilliance and youth. I mean, maybe you were super critical, I can’t know for sure, but based on the totality of facts in your letter I’m inclined to think Kitty was the issue, not you. Particularly with the “threatened by her brilliance and youth” piece, it sounds you were dealing with someone having a pretty ridiculous and over-the-top outburst, 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 operate the way I do, and I will hear you out if there are parts of that that aren’t working for you — which doesn’t mean they will change, but I will certainly listen with an open mind — but at this point you’re making personal attacks in a way that isn’t okay to do to any colleague. So I’d like to resume this conversation tomorrow and ask that you be prepared then to talk from a calmer place and without personal attacks.”

All that said, though … at that point I think you also needed to look at whether Kitty was the right person for the job. In addition to what sound like significant issues with her writing and ability to incorporate feedback into her work, it sounds like there were some serious maturity issues there too, and those tend to show up at work in all sorts of ways.

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