Last year I left a job because after the manager who hired me was fired for treating her employees horribly, and we were without a manager for 3 months, they hired a new manager who was 10x worse!
Oh she was super nice, sweet, and smiling during her interview! But shortly after she started, it began…
She made the whole team rearrange their lunch breaks even though we’d all been taking the same lunch breaks at the same time for almost 2 years with no issues. She claimed “it’s for capturing more traffic” which was total bullshit because I’ve worked there for almost 2 years and our lunch breaks was the time our office was the slowest. I immediately recognized this as some weird power play. You know the : im the manager and I can change any rules or practices if I wasn’t because I’m in charge
Then she started the gossiping. She had it out for our assistant from the start, which is crazy because our assistant was the one who got her into the job in the first place! Apparently they weren’t friends, but had mutual friends, and our assistant recommended her for the role. She would pull me aside many times throughout the day to gossip to me about our assistant and asking me questions about her. I didn’t play along, I never do. I don’t do work drama. She’d also leave a lot randomly throw out the day claiming to be “picking up things for the office” but would return back with the most unnecessary, unrequested things like toys.
Anyway, I just new this was a sinking ship, put in my notice and left. I just knew if I didn’t leave I was going to be terminated. It was very apparent she didn’t like our team and wanted a new one. We were a great team though! A week after I left my former assistant called me and told me she’d just been fired because the manager told our VP she called her a b!tch.
Fast forward to this year, I’m at a new company, manager who hired me leaves for a different company, they bring on a new manager. Very soon after he started, it began… he never would speak to me directly except for once when he first started and have 1 on 1s with everybody. Even if it was a project or file I was working on, he’d go to other people to ask them about it, like intentionally not speaking with me? At one point I decided to have a conversation with him about an area of weakness I felt like I had, hoping to get some support or guidance. He assures me we’ll work on it and it’s “in the books”. So I’m like, ok cool. A few weeks later we had an incident with another employee, an extremely mild incident that a simple conversation with her would have gotten everything straight. But no, he spends the next WEEK trying to build a case on why she should be let go. Telling everyone by next month she’ll be replaced. Once this happened I immediately start thinking that I should start looking for new employment because this man is unhinged.
He then spends the next few weeks turning molehills into mountains with different vendors we have. He spent weeks trying to convince our VP to replace every single vendor we had. When this happened I got super nervous, realizing that this man is very unpredictable because all the issues he had with these vendors were all trivial. It was like, if anybody did the slightest thing that annoyed him, you needed to be replaced.
Well, as of this week, it was me. Fired me over what? The same issue that I had brought up to him weeks ago and I asked for his support on. All the “we’ll work on it, it’s in the books” talk, complete bullshit. Never once did he offer support or guidance or help. He then tried to lie to and tell me that our VP was the one who wanted this. I called her immediately afterwards because I was so confused. Her story didn’t match up with his.
When I was fired my coworker hit me up and was so distressed. None of it made sense to her either. We had a really great team and great flow.
Is this a thing? Do new manager have a thing where they feel like they need to assert dominance by destroying good teams?