I need to vent!
End of last year my long-time boss retired. I applied for his position. As I’m the most senior and experienced person in the department and the one that worked most closely with him, I’m the natural choice. In fact, until his job is officially filled, I am functioning as an interim manager and keeping the department going. However, in the end, my director tells me that they have decided not to promote me and to hire someone from the outside instead. Their reasoning is that they believe he will be able to bring “more authority to the position” than I can.
Obviously, I’m very upset about this, but I do my best to take it gracefully. When the new guy comes in, I play nice. I tell the other members of the department, who are all angry on my behalf, not to take it out on the new guy. It’s not his fault after all. Let’s just put it behind us a move on. I work closely with him to help him get up to speed on the list and how our organization works (it is a very complex internal structure). While he has a lot of industry knowledge, he can’t seem to learn our list or our company structure. He frequently gets one line of books confused with another, mixes up who’s who in different departments, and tries to do things in ways that just don’t make sense with our company procedures. In meetings with other departments reps, he frequently gets confused about what we’re talking about and I have to jump in and cover for him. He asks me and several other team members if one of our flagship titles is “important enough to warrant spending money to keep it in print.” It’s time to start working on the budget and he’s completely relying on me to put everything together because he doesn’t know how to find the information and won’t learn how. He constantly complains to me about the workload and how hard his job is. Needless to say, all of this is a little annoying because I WANTED HIS JOB!
Fast forward to Monday morning when we have a meeting with the VP, our director, and various other bigwig muckitymucks. Boss-Man starts off the meeting by saying something MASSIVELY WRONG. Essentially telling these people that we are not going to do one of our flagship publications next year because we think it is “not critical.” This book makes millions upon millions of dollars and is our companies pride-and-freaking-joy. Instinctively, I rush in to cover up his blunder with a “No, sir, that’s not quite what we talked about. I think you meant to say that we are going to do it because it IS critical, but that we are going to cut this other book because that one’s not critical.”
After I do this, the meeting continues but Boss-Man is completely silent. He doesn’t say another word. I suggest that maybe he is having trouble with his internet and can’t hear us. Not knowing what else to do, I try to move on with the meeting the best I can. Throughout the meeting I repeatedly reach out to him saying “Is that right, Boss-Man? Can you confirm that, Boss-Man?” Nothing. Crickets. I finally have to end with “Well, we’ll have to get back to you to confirm that, but I think it’s right” on a lot of things.
After the meeting I wait a little while and then write him a message just saying “Hey, sorry I interrupted you but I was afraid that if you said what you were saying the leadership would have gotten really upset.”
He writes back to say that what I did was absolutely humiliating but he’s glad I recognize what I did was wrong and he’s willing to forgive and forget so long as I don’t do it again.
Then, I hear from my director, who is evidently appalled that I had the gall to be so unprofessional as to correct my superior in front of others. Evidently, I “took over the meeting when it wasn’t my place,” and need to learn to not be so forward and pushy. I’m a little peeved at this point and write back that Boss-Man was wrong and I was trying to cover for him because i didn’t want him to humiliate himself in front of the leadership by revealing that after 8 months here he still doesn’t know our list at all. My director responds that if I were to “put myself in his shoes and think about it from his position, I would reconsider my behavior.”
Like...I WANTED to be in his shoes, remember? You thought he’d fill them better than I would.
His shoes make $90k more than mine, so while I’m struggling to survive on what you pay me I’m supposed to worry about his poor bruised ego?
While he interrupts me and my other female colleagues CONSTANTLY in meetings and takes credit for our ideas and our work, I’m supposed to cover for his inadequacies and pussy-foot around his delicate-man feelings?
