Roughly 5 months ago, I started a high-level IC role at a largish company. I was hired for my network, subject matter expertise, and strategic vision. I am my manager's only full-time report, though he borrows two staff part-time from another department. Recently, things much busier, and I ended up being told we needed to organize a trip for a director. It was a massive nightmare – something like two dozen different places to go. Like most office workers, I can do basic logistics, but it is not my main skill set. It takes me time to do right, and it had to be right, because a trip like this is all downside risk. But fine, I'll be a team player. I wrote up a plan, got sign off, and set out to implement it.
It was the most horrible month of my life. Almost immediately, the plan was tossed out. Instead, my manager – maybe because they were super stressed out – would bark out curt instructions 10-15 times a day. As in, every time he read a new email or had a new idea, he would immediately send me a message, telling me to drop everything and work on this new thing. So on any given day, I would email or call people to change the times of meetings, uninvite ourselves to meetings, reinvite ourselves to those same meetings, send out new invitations to places we hadn't previously intended to go, etc. I would be yelled at for not responding to emails I wasn't copied on, I would get constant emails asking me if I had sent other emails, and was chewed out for not writing a memo during all this chaos two weeks ahead of time (at that point I stayed up most of one night to finish it, and no one ever even read it). I tried to push back on the constant fire drills so I could focus on getting everything else done, only to be told to just “do it” and “everyone is busy.” At one point, I told him I couldn't add anything else to my plate and still reach people during business hours, only to be berated during a meeting and bullied into it. My manager constantly finagled with the people attending the trip, requiring me email new rosters out over and over, and even uninvited me from meetings I had set up using my personal network.
Despite all that, the trip went off pretty much the best we could have hoped for. Just the expected minor snags, and nothing we could have predicted in advance. But the next time I met with him, he just chewed me out for over an hour, over things as petty as not creating triple-redundant lists for where to eat lunch. The kicker is that that he has mentioned that one time I pushed back at least 10 times as evidence of insubordination, that I am clearly incapable of this task, and that he will need to hire someone more senior than me to take over half of my responsibilities.
I'm an adult. I've worked with difficult people, I've worked in some extremely busy and high-stress places, I don't need praise all the time (some would be nice). Yes, I've made mistakes here – nothing consequential – and I am trying to learn every day. And yes, I probably should have seen the signs in advance, like the fact that every single thing I ever wrote for this manager turned out to have missed the mark in some major way. But I've never seen behavior like this. (I've chatted with the borrowed folks on the team and they have had/are having similar experiences.)
I like this place, I like the job when my manager isn't around, but I just can't work with someone who acts like this. (These are more issues but I'll stop now to keep this from becoming a novel.)
Is there anything else I can do before just up and quitting?