I work in healthcare, more specifically elderly care. I’m the head of a department in an assisted living facility so middle management basically. I’ve done this kind of work for over ten years now, most of my adult life. I have a lot of horror stories, like most in this line of work do. But the thing that keeps me going is my genuine love for it. I love the residents I work with and I love making an impact on their lives for the better.
The facility I work in recently got a new Executive Director. She started last week and was immediately hostile. We have a really great team, not only in the management positions but our general employees as well. COVID has obviously been a struggle for us, and like most places we are experiencing a labor shortage. But the staff we do have show up and care give our residents amazing care every day. During a management meeting earlier this week, we pushed back on a new policy our new ED wants to implement, telling her it would cause a lot of our staff to leave. Her response? ‘Well they can walk then. I don’t care.’ We were mortified.
Cut to this afternoon. The Director was (thankfully) out of town for training at our headquarters. So we were expecting our first good day in the two weeks she’s been with us. Yet she still managed to terrorize us with constant emails, texts and phone calls, berating us or complaining about every little thing. Then, in the afternoon, our Business Office Manager called us to her office to show us something: whereas normally any emails sent to a specific team member would (obviously) go to them, they are now being forwarded through our Executive Director. It doesn’t matter what the email is about or whether they pertain to her at all. They’re all being sent to her first. I’ve worked for some extreme micro-managers before, but I’ve never experienced something like this.
I’m mostly just posting this to vent. And to see if anyone has ever seen this before. If so, how did you handle it? How should we handle it?