carolanne
Newbie
Posts: 4
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« on: June 16, 2004, 10:44:24 pm » |
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This is long, and I apologize in adavance, but I've never been in this type of situation before.
I really think that managers should be required to undergo manager's training prior to taking over an office, even in an acting capacity. My current manager is such a person. She took over this past March when my original manager's Reserves Unit got called up. Since that time, she has managed to make my work life stressful and filled me with such anxiety that even doing my work becomes difficult. And all because of her management style, which is nonexistent. This has all culminated in my meeting with her yesterday where she gave me a proposal for a letter of admonishment.
Now I admit to having made a mistake and know I deserve something, but a letter of admonishment? What happened is I was tasked with sending out memos of actions to be accomplished, and tasked with tracking these items until they are completed. This was tasked to me in March of this year. I did not get this done until May, but with reasons. At the end of April, my acting manager asked me why these hadn't been sent out and tracked and I told her. Mainly it was because during those same 2 months I was also tasked with several other, higher priority, items that were work intensive tasks. These other tasks took priority and by the time they were reaching a point where I could address these memos, they were already delayed. According to my PD, my supervisor is one person, Person P, whom I have kept informed of every single thing throughout this process, including the delays and reasons for them. This is also the person I have requested assistance from when I was having trouble meeting the deadlines. This is not the same person as my acting manager, but we both work for this acting manager so I felt sure that P was keeping our manager informed. Anyway, over a month ago I was called in to a meeting with the acting manager and was called to task for not meeting my deadline with these action memos. Following this meeting, I was asked via an e-mail, to give my reasons for not meeting the deadline. I responded accordingly. My thoughts were that the meeting and the following e-mails were all part of an in-house counseling session and that from this we would develop an action plan to address the issues that I faced and a plan to keep these from occurring.
But nothing more came from it until yesterday and then those were used as justification for me to receive a letter of admonishment. Of course, it has not reached that point yet. The practice at our facility is that the manager proposes a specific disciplinary action, the employee gets an opportunity to answer the charges, and the entire package goes to the next level supervisor for determination of what, if any, action will be taken. When we are being given these sorts of proposals, we have the option to have union reps with us, which I did luckily. Thanks to my union rep, it was determined that my manager originally drafted these charges based on the assumption that the status of these actions have to be reported outside of our local company to the district company. They don't, which she would have known if she had asked either myself or my supervisor. She checked on this, and then decided to go ahead with the charges because she discovered that though they do not currently get reported anywhere else, in the future they will be. So now I'm being disciplined on not meeting a deadline, and because the information is not currently required to be reported outside of our company but will be at some point in the future. (missing internal suspenses are not as critical as missing external ones. External suspenses have higher priorities than internal ones.)
This has all added to the already considerable stress inherent in my position. When she took over, she changed policies and procedures so that no one in our office nothing can go out without her review. In my job, that really is a hindrance as most of my duties have templated letters that I fill in and send out, or templated memos, or are simply standing reports that I normally send directly to the appropriate parties. Now every letter, memo, and report gets typed up and submitted to her, where it may sit for days before she addresses it. And normally she asks questions of it, tries to change the templated information (which is templated from company-wide policies), or tries to change the information that is being reported. So I miss deadlines because of her holding items or my time to work on things gets cut by days in order to ensure she has time to review and request changes. In the past, all my items went with the knowledge of my supervisor, but now they need the manager's as well who hasn't taken the time to learn about our processes, what standard forms, letters, etc we use, and what our regular day-to-day duties include. And for her lack of knowledge, I'm being counseled?
This same manager is the one who rated me a 2 (out of a possible score of 3) on my manager's performance appraisal that has to go in with any internal job application. Her reasoning? She told me that she did not feel I had matured enough, that I didn't have the maturity or the experience to do these items at the level that would be expected of me. The position I was applying for would have made me her equal as far as grade in the company. Last year when she was acting as my manager, she also required me to re-write my PD so that I no longer reported directly to her position as everyone else in the office does, but to P, thereby putting another layer between our positions and between my position and our overall boss. I'm really starting to feel that she has it in for me, and my union rep agrees with me after seeing some of the e-mails that I have received from her, after this complaint, and other issues and procedures ongoing in this office. To protect myself, and my career with this company, I had to counter her proposal for admonishment with a memo of grievances myself. So now she will have to answer to the mistakes she has made since she took over and especially those mistakes she made in the process of serving me with this proposal.
Anyway, sorry this was so long, but I had to vent a bit. This is eating at my insides and really hurting my working relationship with the others in this office as they are all close friends of the manager. Even though I'm not saying anything about this, I can tell they have heard things because of the changes in my relationships with them, they're colder and more withdrawn. Ain't life just grand.
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