So I mentioned in an older post that my team (we’re all technical writers) got a new manager who I’m realizing is kinda actually terrible. In my older post, I mentioned how my coworkers and I were feeling overworked and how this new manager sprang projects on us last minute. Moral was (and still is) low so we came together as a team and presented in a meeting to managers the problems we were having and proposing solutions. Long story short, we asked for an extension on two deadlines the new manager gave us and he said no, arguing that it won’t take much time to do the projects he asked us even though we said we were overworked. Needless to say, that meeting left a sour taste in a lot of people’s mouths.
Flash forward to now, and he’s still here (although some coworkers talked to HR about him, but I’m not sure anything will come out of that). And I realized that, aside from that one interaction with him, what’s been bothering me about him so much: he’s rarely involved in our day to day work as employees.
All our other managers regularly contact us via Slack, meet in 1:1s, have team meetings, etc. This new manager, to my knowledge, never posts on Slack unless someone messages him. And he also regularly misses team meetings. If my other managers are going to miss a meeting, they always let us know. He never does. One of our newer managers (who left the company today) was more involved than he was and communicated regularly, so it’s not an excuse of him being new, but him simply not bothering to get to know us as a team.
And to make things worse, he keeps springing last minute on us. I’m not talking small projects, either: big ones, like revamping our entire 40+ page in house style guide. He just emails us these assignments and expects us to get it done in a short amount of time even though we say we’re busy. And he would actually know what we’re busy with if he bothered to interact with us regularly, but he rarely does that.
I’m supposed to be working with him and other coworkers on a side project, and I’m nervous. I’ve heard some people have had far worse experiences with him than I have, and I haven’t interacted with him much 1:1, so I don’t know what to expect.