I swear to god, my manager always has to immediately disagree with me no matter what it is I'm saying. Even if I am asking a question with a this or that answer, I end up getting a third response or “No.”
It's to the point that I can almost game the system where I can respond to a coworker's question with an answer my manager gave previously, and Manager will respond and contradict his previous answer. So if there is a procedure I don't care for or think is poorly thought out, I can just make sure to bring up, “Oh, Manager mentioned we need to do XYZ,” and within minutes, he responds with a different opinion.
There are two recent examples that I feel really show this. One was related to after hours work when requested by project owners. Obviously, like most companies, we try to minimize OT including by rejecting meetings outside of our working hours. We'd also been told that we aren't beholden to participate in last minute meetings (IE receiving invites day-of) to dissuade other departments treating us as always available, on-demand service.
I received a meeting invite at 3PM local time to join a meeting at 5PM local time, which is when I go off the clock. I'm also the last person online, so my other coworkers were even further off the clock than I'd be. It was the first one we'd had in a while, so I messaged the group asking to confirm that I could reject the meeting and reschedule.
Manager responds that, unless I had an appointment, then I should join the call. The call is also during “standard” office hours for our company, just not our department. I will get OT (at least), but unless I had something pressing, I should make every effort to join. I didn't have anything to do, so I made the meeting. “We should only reject meetings in cases where we're just absolutely slammed.”
Last week, we had the same situation; we're sent an invitation for 4PM at about 10AM. A coworker pops up this time asking if we are expected to take it, so I reply: “Yes, Manager said that as long as we aren't doing something else, we need to make every effort to join these. You'll just get OT to do so.” Not 2 minutes later, Manager responds saying he's reaching out to the customer to ask them to reschedule, citing OT as problematic and that it's not acceptable to be “sent a last minute request.” Right.
The other example is much more minor, but still frustrating. I've got three projects in my queue waiting on authorization, so I asked my manager if I should expect auth to come in today or Monday. He replied “No, it will be sometime next week.” I say no problem. He responds, “I'll be sending auth for 1 and 2 today.” Okay… so the answer was “Today, with the exception of 3.” Why did you have to instantly say “No?”
These situations are pretty minor, but were easy to explain. There are several instances that were much higher stakes. I've even had situations where in a DM about how to handle a customer, I get one answer, then when I reply to the customer with that answer, my manager steps in and undermines me publicly. Even though I just said what he told me to, he finds a reason why it wasn't “correct” or adds another caveat that wasn't explained.
Is this some sort of management strategy? Is it an ego thing? It feels awfully close to negging or even gaslighting (at least in the situations where I'm publicly reprimanded). My last manager did it too, but much less frequently. It's almost comical how quickly I can get him to change his mind just by saying the opposite of what I think should happen.
Note: Most of our job duties don't require manager involvement whatsoever, but we've been going through layoffs and consolidations lately resulting in new job descriptions and responsibilities. Eventually (I hope) these will be worked out, but we still have a lot of changes we have to address individually until we finally get official procedures done. Trial and error and all that.