Identifying details anonymised as much as possible. Apologies for the length!
Context:
I work for a European based charity but unlike many of my colleagues come from a public service background where information sharing is usually tightly controlled. I love working for the charity since I started this year and I’ve been progressively given more responsibility and praise for my work, I also have specialist skills that are unique in my team. We have a very flat hierarchy where managers and regional directors are on drinking terms with colleagues.
I have a line manager let’s call ‘Claire’, a director let’s call ‘Jim’ and a mentor who is a junior manager who will call ‘Ben’.
Our office is very small and hot desks for everyone, you can also hear everything. Because of hybrid working it’s often just me and the director Jim in the office from our team as it suits our personal lives. He often likes to ask my opinion on decisions , kind of a testing the floor so to speak.
Prior Event:
3 weeks ago, I overhear Jim talking about expanding our team and my name, among others, is mentioned for a potential Junior manager position (this would be helpful with the cost of living crisis).
“Great “ I think, “I’ll drop in something in my next appraisal about enjoying peer mentoring and more responsibility and hope this edges my name along, I can also big up the rest of my team who equally deserve promotion”. I leave it at that.
Cut to today:
Jim is on the phone to his manager and other directors, I walk in to grab my coat to leave early and it’s clear from his conversation he’s talking about me but something non promotion related.
I get home and go to fire off a Teams message to apologise for walking in, he’s busy and I click on his outlook calendar to see when his meeting finishes…
The meeting details are open with no security. The meeting is with a national head and basically outlines his 3 choices for restructure. (This information is almost certainly not known by others or intentionally public).
1) He promotes my line manager Claire to a junior director role.
2) He promotes my mentor Ben to a full manager position.
3) He promotes me and another colleague to junior manager positions.
Dilemma options:
1) keep quiet, hope for the best (my wife’s advice).
2) Raise the matter with Jim in a non direct way, perhaps through speaking about my work and enjoying more responsibility and see if anything gets said.
3) inform my manager and/or Ben so they can decide what to do with the info.
4) Come clean to Jim and open the discussion directly.
5) something else…?
Reddit mind – what would you do?
Tldr; my director shared sensitive information on his outlook calendar that has promotion implications and I accidentally found it. What do I do?