A few months back, my company basically threatened the team with layoffs if we didn’t get our project done 2-months early,
with several new features added that we didn’t initially plan for. This was a day after I received the project lead position (without any pay increase or promotion, despite quadrupling my workload with 9 hours of meetings every day), and they “congratulated” me for the position after the layoffs threat, laughing at how much work I had ahead of me.
I managed to find ways to bring in our schedule while implementing all changes they requested and have been staying on track, but every single meeting/presentation I have, is followed by another meeting criticizing everything I do/say. I get criticized for saying/doing things slightly differently than how my manger would. Eg saying I “had” someone on the team do something, rather than “asked” them too… I do ask the team rather than demand, and am very respectful to all of them, but me telling my manager I “had” instead of “asked” then to led to a 10 minute speech about how I need to be careful what I say.
Another time after a 10 hr day with a long afternoon meeting, I get a call from my manager right when I thought I was done, to yell at me for getting one minor detail wrong in our meeting, even though I fixed it immediately in the meeting.
When I lead the team in decisions, I’m yelled at for being too controlling. When I lean on them, I get yelled at for not being decisive.
Today my manager gave me a speech about how layoffs should be motivational to continue proving our worth… is every company like this?