I'm not especially fond of the man who works under the Senior Manager with a personality disorder, but I recognize that he is a productive worker and does the best that can be accomplished under such unusual conditions, the conditions being that the senior manager is barking mad. I tried not to care when the senior manager inexplicably (but then almost everything he does defies linear thought) turned on him. The underling is often left to clean up messes and actually accomplish tasks and it was as per usual except in this case, the senior decided that the underling had overstepped. Never mind that the underling was the only reason work was proceeding while senior manager concerned himself with sending out diatribes of spam-like quantity and increasingly unhinged accusations (always blame, never solution).
So for the past week I have had a front row seat to numerous humiliating emails sent out to all of the consultant teams, instructing us to no longer address any items to the underling as he no longer had decision making authority. By yesterday evening, upon reading the last email in its Comic Sans, multiple font and color glory, I could only shake my head at why the seniors of the senior manager had not yet discreetly reminded him that spewing your internal conflicts to your external consultants was probably inadvisable.
This morning during one our our numerous weekly coordination meetings, I told found myself complimenting the underling for how he managed us over a complicated interface issue, in front of all of the senior managers. Underling looked over at me in surprise (recall that we aren't especially fond of one another). Sometimes when you are shipwrecked together on an island, you find yourself sharing shelter for a moment or two before reminding yourself that there is no room for humanity, and then you go back to trying to cannibalize each other.
So for the past week I have had a front row seat to numerous humiliating emails sent out to all of the consultant teams, instructing us to no longer address any items to the underling as he no longer had decision making authority. By yesterday evening, upon reading the last email in its Comic Sans, multiple font and color glory, I could only shake my head at why the seniors of the senior manager had not yet discreetly reminded him that spewing your internal conflicts to your external consultants was probably inadvisable.
This morning during one our our numerous weekly coordination meetings, I told found myself complimenting the underling for how he managed us over a complicated interface issue, in front of all of the senior managers. Underling looked over at me in surprise (recall that we aren't especially fond of one another). Sometimes when you are shipwrecked together on an island, you find yourself sharing shelter for a moment or two before reminding yourself that there is no room for humanity, and then you go back to trying to cannibalize each other.
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