At the end of last week I walked into a meeting between a new coworker and a newer manager, and the new manager was giving very condescending and demeaning criticism to the employee. Mainly, they mentioned that he’s been on his phone too much. The new guy was clearly defending himself and asking for more information about when he had been told to put it away, but the new manager wasn’t having it. For a bit of context, a new store is opening and we’ve had new employees being thrown in departments with little to no guidance, so there’s a lot of downtime between tasks for the new folks and it’s understandable that they wouldn’t want to just stand there anyway.
Regardless, the conversation was clearly one sided, and most importantly it was in front of me. I’ve had this sort of meeting before, and it’s just supposed to be a formality. It’s also supposed to be in private. I feel like if I were the new person not only would I be feeling defenseless, I would also be feeling humiliated for being told off right in front of someone else. It made me so upset to see I’m considering sending a message to my manager about it hoping they’ll get an apology. Would that be viewed as overdramatic, or am I in the right for thinking that was messed up and worth mentioning?