Hello reddit,
I am writing because I need advice. I worked in academia since I finished my PhD and overall I was doing okay, I supervised several students and learnt a lot. I found a fair deal of toxic people in this country, and it was a shitshow the last place I was: PhD students who left because of mental health concerns caused by other postdocs, shouting matches, data stolen, toxic competition, racism and fatphobia. Anyway, I left because I found a job that seemed to match my interests and people seemed to be normal during the interviews.
I moved to industry and I started a couple of months ago and I already want to quit. My job is product manager in a biotech company, I basically provide consultancy and technical expertise for projects that require working with sequencing data. I like talking to clients and understanding their questions and then devising an experimental plan for them to answer and understand the mode of action of their product. Everything was goin well and I have actually met between 1-2 new clients per week. But, the manager of the group I belong quit one week after I arrived. Thus, the CSO was commissioned to take care of the group and take over tasks and he asked one of our fellow managers for help. This other product manager is a horrible person, she is rude, overbearing, talks over everyone, bad mouths people and had said that the technical staff “are not like us” and that students are “free labour”. Last week she realised me and an account manager were working on a price quotation and she entered in our conversation, berated me for proposing some statistics that they don't do (which is wrong, but okay) and asked me to be included in the loop. I talked to the other people involved in my product and they mentioned that I needed to be a bit patient but I could refuse to include her in the production of the quotation. The manager in question went psycho, started sending me messages saying that I needed to include her, that she needed to approve what I was propose, and it turned out that she “wanted to learn what I was proposing, for future quotations”. I ignored her, so she called me on Teams, she sent me another long email, she hijacked the common mailbox of the managers and emailed management to tell them that she was originally assigned to the project in April. She then entered to the conversation in the CRM system and saw the statistics and bioinformatics pipelines I was proposing and she insisted in being informed about them. I found her this morning included in the CRM emails and she requested a meeting to “know the status of my project”.
She is not officially the general coordinator//manager of the product managers and she basically told me she has to be informed of all my proposals and she has to approve them. Of course if it goes well she will take credit, the other managers warned me. She will also throw me under the buys has the occasion arises. My question is: how do I get her off my back. She doesn't believe in my opinions, in the focus of my product line and she looks like she wants to hijack or block it. I am foreigner working in this country and the other managers told me how she turned people against othercoworkers. I didn't need to be told that, because I realised when I arrived that there's an environment of “them vs us” throughout the company. My question is: I like the job, I like my colleagues, I think I can make a difference for the clients I work with. How can I deal with this lady???? Thanks in advance 🙂