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Undermined by a Future Leader

Dear Work Friend,

I work in a satellite office for a U.S.-based company, and my manager and I have been locked in a three-year battle of the wills I never signed up for (but she’s gonna win because she writes my evals). She’s a first-time manager with little experience in our region yet she insists on doing both her job and mine — badly.

She undermines me in front of my team, dismisses my near-decade of experience and performs the corporate theater of “asking for my input” when she’s already decided her course of action. My colleagues now look at me with pity and ask me what I’m going to do about it. My answer is that I’ve tried to no avail with her and her boss.

Upper management adores her “leadership potential” and refuses to step in while she “learns and makes her own mistakes.” Meanwhile, morale’s tanked, productivity’s tanked, and I’ve become the office cautionary tale.

So now I’m done and counting down the months until my escape. My body’s waving the white flag — high blood pressure, eczema, anxiety — the works. I’ve never been in a situation like this and I’ve learned a valuable lesson about taking jobs where it’s not easy to leave if it’s not working.

I feel bad for my team when they look to me to push back on their behalf. But increasingly, doing my job feels like it’s putting me in a bad spot. Tell me I’m right to save myself. That sometimes the bravest thing you can do is stop fighting a battle that’s already cost too much.

The short answer: Yes, you’re right to quit.

The longer answer: You should have quit two and a half years ago. Allow me a brief diversion to help explain why.

Mohamed Salah, a longtime and beloved star soccer player for Liverpool F.C., recently gave an unexpectedly blunt interview to a reporter in which he complained about being dropped from the starting lineup by his comparatively new manager, Arne Slot. In response to this anguished outcry, Liverpool’s ownership let it be known to the press that Slot had its full support, and Salah — a legendary figure instrumental to the club’s recent successes — was left behind in England while the rest of the team flew to Milan for a game.

This saga has broadly played out on TV and in the tabloids as an emotional drama of loyalty and betrayal, but anyone who follows professional sports knows what’s really going on is a more prosaic personnel strategy. Salah is a superstar, with a superstar-size contract, but he’s aging out of his athletic peak and is no longer quite as useful to the team. Liverpool would like to sell his contract on to another club, erasing his wages from their books and allowing them to reinvest in younger players, but for various P.R. and institutional reasons they can’t openly say this. By benching him — and backing the newer manager for whom the icon has openly expressed dislike — the club’s ownership is in effect telling Salah to kick rocks and find a new club.

Now, I’m sure the pressures and burdens of your workplace are somewhat different than those of the Champions League. But it’s hard for me not to see the parallels here.

Like Salah, you are an experienced worker who feels misused by an up-and-coming manager. And like Slot, your manager has received the full backing of ownership over your objections. It might be the case that your manager is as bad as you say — Liverpool currently sits in 10th place — but it doesn’t matter much when that person decides who flies to Milan.

When upper management communicated to you that they believed in the leadership potential of your manager, I’m sure it was couched in language about working together, valuing your experience and appreciating your service. But what they meant was: Your services are no longer needed here. Take a hike!

Is that a lousy way to communicate? Yes. Do you have every right to feel angry and betrayed? Yes! But as you write yourself, they hired someone who does your job and hers, too. Your staying and trying to make it work in the months and years since that moment has been the equivalent of Salah electing to see out his Liverpool contract and showing up every day to train for matches he’ll never play a minute of. In other words, a waste of everyone’s time.

I extend this soccer metaphor partly because just as Salah’s relatively common workplace dispute is being cast in epic terms in the news media, occluding its straightforward reality, I suspect you are having a hard time recognizing the basic dynamic at your workplace because of a tendency to overdramatize.

Your commitment to your team is admirable, but they are (presumably) adults who can navigate this workplace without you — or find new jobs themselves if necessary — and their comfort at work is not worth your sanity or blood pressure. I don’t really know, as a philosophical question, if “the bravest thing to do is stop fighting a battle that’s already cost too much.” But unless you are a smokejumper or an Army Ranger, I struggle to see how the question is applicable here.

I don’t mean to be too harsh. I am sympathetic to your plight. When you identify yourself closely with a role you’ve performed for years, accepting an inevitable transition is difficult even when it’s communicated clearly and directly. And a strong emotional attachment to one’s job and co-workers is all but impossible to avoid.

But such an attachment can conceal certain basic truths. I’d bet your colleagues understood this, and when they asked you, “What are you going do about it?” they were hoping you’d say, “Find a new position.” Certainly, your body seems to have recognized much earlier than your brain that you were no longer wanted at this job and threw itself into dangerous overdrive alerting you that it was time to move on.

The Humming, Drumming Co-Worker

Our office, like many in N.Y.C. has an open-floor plan. Several of us have grown annoyed with a colleague who hums and taps constantly. He has no self-awareness. You can’t fault someone for being in a good mood, but it’s become distracting. This individual is very junior, so might not have a lot of experience in an office environment, and he’s also on another team, so it’s not as if we could ask our manager to intervene. How do we ask him to stop without coming off as rude or offensive?

As an advice columnist, it’s always nice when the answer to a question is contained in the question itself. How do you ask your co-worker to stop humming and tapping at the office without coming off as rude or offensive? Well, you ask him to stop and you don’t come off as rude or offensive. It’s really as simple as that.

If you want more specific instructions: Walk over to this person. Introduce yourself, if you don’t actually know each other, or get his attention if you do. Say: “Can I ask you a favor? I’m not sure if you realize this, but you’re humming and tapping while you work, and it’s distracting. Do you mind stopping?” Make eye contact and smile in a nonthreatening way, and maybe at the end throw in one of those subtle shrugs that communicates: Sorry, I know this is a bit awkward!

I suppose it’s possible that the colleague might be offended. But it’s much more likely that he’ll be slightly embarrassed, a condition you can ameliorate by stopping by his desk later that day or week for some unrelated small talk that will helpfully communicate there are no hard feelings. He’ll probably also be thankful for the heads-up: No one wants to be the office annoyance. And if he is truly offended by your mild, polite request to the point where his behavior is disrupting your work, you should think of it as helpfully surfacing a personnel issue that would have cropped up eventually.

You didn’t mention it, but I wonder if you’re worried about offense if the co-worker is neuroatypical, and the noises are soothing, self-stimulating behaviors. Even if that’s the case, my advice wouldn’t change. Neuroatypical people deserve the respect of polite, direct communication, and if your colleague needs to be able to hum to do their job, you and he (and, if necessary, H.R.) can find a reasonable compromise or accommodation. But such a discussion can only happen after you take the first step of stopping by his cubicle to broach the issue.

Years of propagandistic horror stories and urban legends about easily offended co-workers, not to mention the ongoing transformations of office life bequeathed to us by the pandemic, have made everyone a little too cautious about approaching co-workers directly about minor, easily resolvable issues.

Granted, “annoying humming” is a somewhat less awkward nuisance to address than more intimate office irritations like body odor or halitosis. But by speaking with your colleague, you wouldn’t just be ending the terrible reign of an officer hummer — you’d be creating a workplace culture where problems in general can be addressed, politely but frankly, without fear of offense or embarrassment.