I approached my asst. manager to ask a question, but he was speaking to our manager, so I just waited nearby. Then this conversation happened:
Mgr: (looking at me) You don't happen to know why [a very high-profile KPI] shot up drastically recently, do you?
Me: Has it been about five weeks?
Mgr: Almost exactly.
Me: And has [a much less-referenced KPI] gone down by a similar amount?
Mgr: Let me check (sends instant message)
Mgr: (gets response) Yes! You do know. Tell me.
Me: What's in it for me?
Shit, meet fan.
Now this manager could have taken it in the playful manner it was intended and offered to buy me lunch, but alas, no such luck. He decided to escalate the situation to upper management, and now they're basically accusing me of stealing intellectual property, when in reality, I just added 1+1 without a calculator. If my manager had spent even a few minutes in “figure this out” mode, he'd probably have figured it out on his own the same way I did. But instead, he went directly into “tell me right fucking now” mode.
Turns out this KPI was spotted by an exec on a call a month earlier and my leadership group was asked to explain it. They couldn't and said they'd research for the next call. This process then repeated itself three more times, so at this point, execs are frustrated and my team is embarrassed, so tensions are running high.
There was no way for me to know any of this, though, and now I feel like I'm between a rock and hard place. The information isn't really even valuable. It's not like we figured anything out. We're just tracking time differently and for some reason, they don't realize it has to do with a change they implemented.
But now I feel that my reputation has taken a beating and I'll never be able to fix that.
So, what do I do?