Dealing With Difficult People

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to schedule a difficult conversation with a woman in my group who really is a nightmare. She's older, feels that everyone should treat her like she's in charge, and she thinks she can order everyone around. All of this is done in a very passive agressive manner. The reality is we are peers. I don't work for her and in fact manage my own team. I've always known that she has resented me and probably feels I don't deserve the position I have in this company (I do. I've worked hard). Over the past few months, she has really escalated her campaign against me and I've decided it's time to stop ignoring it and to say something to her about it. She's badmouthed me to our boss, which is really over the top. She also tracked the attendence of one of my employees for an 8 month time frame. I found that out from HR. And, we have a project to complete. She's the project manager, I have one of the workstreams. She's trying to prevent me from completing the work that I have to do...she resents every conversation I have on the project, she tries to slow things down, she is trying to micromanage everything, she assigns me random tasks without discussing them with me..the list goes on and on. It's now negatively impacting the project, which is ridiculous. Her comments to me during team meetings border on the ridiculous. So, I'm going to have the difficult conversation today. Something I've been trying to avoid because, quite honestly, I think drama in the workplace is a bad thing. These types of issues make everyone look bad and I actually resent her for putting me in this position. Does anyone have any advice for me? I've ignored this as long as I could - try about 4 years - and now I'm just fed up. She went too far this time.

I'd like to help but it's hard to offer much advice at this point. Hopefully you don't mind answering a couple questions first. What are you planning to say? More importantly, what outcome do you want?

TIA,
Gail

Your post is confusing and hard to follow.

Your first criticism is that she’s "older” – what does that mean?  Older than what/who?  Do you resent her age, or do you assume she resents yours?

You’ve made a lot of bitter generalizations and assumptions about what she thinks, and what she feels – how do you know what she thinks or feels?

Specifically how is she impeding your work?

wow...

Okay...she's older than me. Because she is older, she feels she deserves more respect. You are right. I am making an assumption with this statement. But having worked with this woman for the past 6 years, I do know a bit about her and I think I"m correct in my assumption.

She is impeding my work. She is the manager of a project. I am assigned to one of the work streams in the projects. Because of her poor management skills, I am spending a lot of time scrambling around trying to figure out what my action items for this project are. In order to cover for her own faults, she complained to our boss about me.

Our boss has been in place for 2 months. He is new and just getting to know all of us. Having someone go directly to the boss in this situation is not great. She did not come to discuss any of her complaints about me with me.  I think this gets in the way of me being able to do my job. Wouldn't you?

I did talk to her. She spent 30 minutes telling me how terrible I am and how I have "bad behavior patterns.". This attitude really doesn't make it easy to work things out.

I wanted to talk to her because we need to complete this project and she is causing a lot of problems.

While I realize your boss is new, have you approached him yet to let him know the situation and how you plan to handle it?  While I think it's best to deal with co-workers directly, sometimes it takes a mediator to hear everyone out and to sort through the drama.  I think you also need specific examples of how she has impeded your work, does she hold back information, does she not get back to you when you send her emails to list the project tasks for which your team is responsible?  You have not yet really given concrete examples, and the point of her being older is completely moot, you need to concentrate on the tangibles which in this case is the bottom line.  Unfortunately, that's all any company thinks about in these types of situations, we have some horrible people who work here but they are good at their jobs, so complaints fall on deaf ears.