my manager’s erratic behavior is sabotaging my work

A reader writes:

I work for a large company and am my manager’s (“Sharon”) only direct report. Sharon is professional and high-performing the three days a week she is in the office. However, on her work-from-home days and even on her scheduled days off, her behavior becomes deceptive, erratic, and deeply disruptive. I choose to work in the office five days a week and arrive at 7 am — 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 her erratic behavior:

• On a remote day, Sharon claimed she couldn’t work due to a failure in our software. Since our department manages that software, I checked the logs; no such failure existed.

• She once manufactured a “critical emergency” on her scheduled day off, calling me at 7:30 am claiming she couldn’t click a link because her cat was sitting on her phone, and asking me to submit a compliance report for her. Peer managers later confirmed that there was no urgency to this request, and it could have waited until the next day when she was back at work.

• Despite an HR policy mandating that cameras be on during remote meetings, Sharon remains camera-off at home but camera-on in the office.

• She sometimes skips our team’s mandatory morning status meetings, later calling me for “debriefs” that interrupt my own work. Minutes for these meetings are uploaded daily by a dedicated note-taker to a shared digital document accessible by our entire team, so there shouldn’t be a need for her to call me about them when she can simply check this document.

Recently, this has turned into what feels like active career sabotage:

• I have led a high-profile app project since long before Sharon arrived. She asked me to cancel the twice-weekly status meetings about it that I had been leading since before she arrived; these meetings were an essential tool for staying in the loop about development and testing progress, and without them I feel like I don’t have a proper grasp on progress, even as the app has grown in complexity in recent months

• She frequently cancels our scheduled 1:1s, instead relying on phone calls 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 designed to keep me off-balance.

• During these calls, she has explicitly told me not to take notes and to “just listen.” Note-taking is essential for my focus, but she seems determined to eliminate any audit trail of her instructions.

• She is questioning my “bandwidth” to continue as project lead on the app. Yet she refuses to delegate my low-level grunt work, despite me providing full documentation for a hand-off to other team members

• In the two years she has managed me, I have received the lowest performance scores of my time at this company. During a recent “swing by” session where she claimed my performance had “dropped sharply,” I offered to show her my detailed weekly task logs. She waved me off, said the data wasn’t relevant, and continued to insist I lacked bandwidth.

• She recently told me that if our next release is delayed, she will have to “justify” to a high-level VP stakeholder why she gave me such a “high” score (the score was actually quite low). I have a great long-term relationship with this VP, and this felt like a direct threat to my reputation.

How do I handle a manager who makes formal accusations about my performance but refuses to look at the evidence that disproves them? 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 her erratic behavior? I have my own thoughts and suspicions, but I would love to have your input on it in case there’s an angle I’m not considering.

Yeah, something is up with Sharon, although I don’t know what it is. If she weren’t professional and high-performing on the days she’s in the office, I’d suspect this was just garden-variety incompetence and disorganization, combined with a low work ethic, and that she was trying to hide her own ineptness by painting you as the problem. But if she’s good at her job when she’s in the office, that falls apart.

I do wonder if, due to whatever’s going on during her days away, she’s feeling threatened by your competence and that’s why she told you to cancel your app status meetings and is making what sound like baseless threats. But what is it that’s creating such a different Sharon when she’s not there? Is she working a second job / hiding a meth problem / possessed by a Dybbuk? I have no idea.

For what it’s worth, some of this on its own wouldn’t be that big of a deal. There are plenty of managers out there who skip or cancel meetings and then want updates at inconvenient times later (and it’s not usually designed to keep you off-balance) or who stay camera-off at home.

But lying about an easily checked software failure? Claiming her cat sitting on her phone was a “critical emergency” when the report she asked you to do in her place wasn’t even urgent? Forbidding you from taking notes when you talk to her? Refusing to look at actual facts (like your weekly task logs) when she criticizes your performance and your bandwidth?

Something is up here. She may indeed be actively trying to sabotage you, but she also may be flailing so badly at her job that that’s just a secondary effect.

Regardless, I don’t see good solutions that include you continuing to work for Sharon long-term. Do you have the ear of anyone senior who you can discreetly talk to about what’s going on — maybe that high-level VP who you mentioned you have a great relationship with? You could explain Sharon’s erratic behavior on her out-of-office days and that she’s been making unwarranted accusations about your work while refusing to look at actual data that would disprove them, and ask for their help navigating it. Or, in theory, you could ask HR for their help with that last part (responding to performance concerns when Sharon won’t look at actual data), but on something like this I’d rather loop in someone with more capital and influence than HR usually has when there are problems with a manager.

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