i (26F) started my new job a few weeks ago. the managers have been great, however, i have had to take initiative and figure a lot of things out bc there is no one training me 1on1. i’m an assistant so i send lots of emails and also as a young, black, woman who is new to the corporate world, i want to make sure i am standing up for myself when i need to.
my one supreme supervisor is an older white man and usually has an ok temperament. there have been a couple times where he pops out of his office to correct what i’ve said in an email. in this situations he sounds kind of exasperated, yet animated at the same time. it’s a weird energy and it feels kind of rude but i’m not really sure what to make of it yet.
today, i sent an email to acquire some reports for last year and i wrote “April 2022-Nov 2022”. the company sent me the reports for April 2022 and Nov 2022, as opposed to April 2022 THRU November 2022.
boss comes over to my desk and was like “you know that email where they only sent 2 of the reports you need?” and i was like “yeah i emailed them back asking for the remaining items.”
he started getting that weird animated vibe again and said “you need to be actually literate and write stuff like that out, you don’t know if you’re talking to someone from another country, etc and if they won’t understand you.”
of course i understand what he’s saying, but i think that him telling me to “be literate” was inappropriate. he may have meant i need to “literally” spell things out? idk, but i was thinking of having a convo with him tomorrow to professionally tell him not to speak to me like that or clarify what he meant. would that be reasonable? i’m new in my office and i don’t want to seem difficult, but as a woman, i feel i need to set a precedent for how i expect to be treated, especially bc i am willing to take any feedback i get, my boss doesn’t need to be so harsh when he talks to me about that. thoughts?
TLDR: new boss just told me to “actually be literate” over an email where i abbreviated some dates. would it be overkill to talk privately about this and say i don’t want to be spoken to that way? or would that be overkill?