A reader writes:
I’m a front line manager with a few direct reports who was promoted from within the team. Many of the other candidates voiced dissatisfaction with my promotion, resulting in a senior leader sending a group email saying that the process was handled incorrectly. I think this unintentionally created division and distrust between management and direct reports. In my first six months I raised concerns that the team didn’t trust me or communicate professionally with me. This was chalked up to differences in communication style and I was threatened with a performance improvement plan. At the same time, there was new process overload and many people quit.
Recently I gave out realistic performance evals and one particularly influential (think gossipy) report was told they needed improvement. She stated that she agreed, but then requested a transfer through the senior leader. Following this, my other entry-level employees, including one completely new hire (who spent a lot of time with said influential report), began to complain directly to the senior leader. Now I’m being placed on a performance improvement plan for negative attitude despite never being offered any formal training or coaching. All of this is being handled by the senior leader who is not my manager.
As a new manager, I have to know, is this common in management? I have interviews for other management positions, but I’m not sure I want to proceed if office politics are always like this. Do entry-level employees typically reach out so freely to and so easily sway senior leadership?
It’s not common, unless (a) there are serious problems with their own manager or (b) it’s a very dysfunctional culture.
It does sound like there have been serious problems of some kind here — maybe with the hiring process itself or the communication around it, maybe with the way you approached the job, maybe with the way your own managers did or didn’t have your back when they should have, or maybe a combination of all of that.
There’s not enough here for me to know exactly what happened, although based just on what you’ve described — and particularly the fact that multiple people quit and others complained over your head, plus the fact that you were the one put on a PIP — I’ll be honest that it sounds like at least one of the factors was the way you approached the role. Maybe your team didn’t trust you or communicate professionally with you, but if that were the situation, then part of your job as their manager would be to sort through that and resolve it, which could mean anything from figuring out how to build trust to firing people who weren’t conducting themselves appropriately, depending on what was going on. But again, there’s not a lot here for me to go on, and it’s not like you’d be the first person ever to be put on an unfair PIP.
On your employer’s side, they should be offering any new manager training and coaching, and it’s a problem that they didn’t.
In your shoes, I’d want to get a better understanding of everything that went wrong and other ways you could have managed the situation. If you go after other management jobs without first figuring that stuff out, there’s a real risk of ending up in another bad situation — maybe not with these same exact details, but with some of the broad themes.
