Summarily Demoted for defending Work Performance

Paul S

I was summarily demoted for defending my job performance in an e-mail reply sent to the company CEO. Additionally, Since then I have been subjected to extreme hostility and abusive behavior by my supervisor. I need practical advice on what to do next.

Background:
I am a department manager for a small company in Michigan (40 employees). Our staff is made up of highly educated, highly skilled, generally intelligent and responsible staff. Functionally I report to both my supervisor, who is the company's operations director (all managers report to her) and the CEO. It is a normal part of my job to work with and be accountable to the CEO. I regularly meet with him and submit reports of various types to him.

My boss is a very emotionally unstable person. Her regular managment style includes yelling at employees for mistakes or percevied mistakes, asking questions for which she doesn't accept answers, insults, sarcasm, assigning blame...you get the picture. Whenever the CEO is out of the office for extended periods she gets completely out of control. Once he returns she is like a completely different person. Virtually every manager has been sugjected to her tirades, insults and hostility, but she is so vindictive and mean-spirited that nobody has had the courage to complain. Compounding the problem is our CEO is a very laid-back person who avoids conflicts and problems. Also, because he never sees her extreme behavior and because she tends to "get things done" he excuses her.

Problem:
We recently had a significant, but correctable, product-quality problem. I am generally responsible for product issues, so this falls in my sphere of responsibility. The problem is that my boss disregarded my concerns and advice about this product's readiness. She ordered it shipped when it had not passed our Quality Assurance testing. As I feared, we had a problem. And as I feared she began throwing blame around.

In an e-mail to both the CEO and to me she accused me of mismanagment and of failing to properly test the product. I was out of the office when this e-mail went out. Because of her personality, I decided to wait until I was back in the office to discuss her accusations with her in person. However, I did reply to her comments to the CEO, essentially defending my staff's performance and saying that we tried to head of the problem. I informed the CEO in my reply that I would talk with her in person after the weekend.

Before I had the chance to talk with her, she went snooping through our e-mail system and had pulled my reply to the CEO off the servers. She confronted me, accused me of going over her head and summarily demoted me on the spot. I was given no chance to respond, explain or question. She ordered me to never e-mail the CEO again.

This was 2 weeks ago. I have made 1 attempt to talk with her about the matter. She screamed at me, made some unfounded accusations and cut off the conversation. Since then she has been vindictive, insulting and hostile toward me. She screamed at me in front of my entire department and ordered me out as if I were a misbehaving dog. She screamed at me in full hearing of our sales department and actually threw me out of her office. I have been very publicly shamed, blamed and humiliated.

I believe I am gultless in the "going over her head" matter. I was giving an account of myself, which her e-mail demanded. I have requested a meeting with her and the CEO. I feel as though she has been pushing me to quit by giving me unpleasant work assignments and her abusive behavior.

I have never been disciplined or reprimanded. My most recent performance review was positive.

We live in an at-will state. Any practical advice?

Hatchetman

Well, if you want to give anything one last try...

first review all your comapny's policies and practices about what it is suppose to do or has done with managers or emplyees in your situation...being able to skip senior management to talk directly with executive management. But it doesn't sound like the CEO cars about subordinates not giving him good information about the conditions of the company.

Then do contact the CEO..but I doubt that even if you do that, he'd do anything from the way it sounds.

Or may be you and a couple of other managers, you trust, can get together after work to talk about mutual problems and how best to solve themn with what you all have to work with within the compnay.

Other than that..with a supervisor who is as you describe and a CEO who doesn't care, and your own personality (like mine) a little on the "take the abuse and shut up" approach, there's only two words that will really do the trick: "GET OUT."

I'd include "NOW" but with the economy the way it is, it may be better just to take the heat and wait for things to improve. On the other hand, you want to leave, when you do, with a postive response if your currently emplyer gets inquired about your record from a prospective one.

So, in the medium run, see if you can work something out..if you have to stay with the dmeotion, can you arrange to work in another part of the compnay, not under her control, let alone direct control?

Paul S

Thanks for the reply. I have feared that quitting will be the only real solution to the problem. But as you pointed out, with the job market being tough it may not be an immediate solution.

Let me clarify a couple points briefly.

We have no policies describing how employees should or should not communicate with management or the CEO. While most employees and the other managers don't interact with the CEO regularly, there is nothing prohibiting it.

It is a normal part of my job to interract with and report to the CEO about product issues, etc. We talk on a daily basis. In fact I file a weekly product status report directly to him.

I have talked with a couple other managers about the situation. They are afraid of reprisals. The CEO has never seen the side of her that the rest of us have had to endure. And he depends on her for the daily running of things, most people think he won't replace or discipline her. And because of her vindictive streak they are afraid she will "punish" them for telling on her.

Most of the other managers and several key employees, I think, are doing what you advised: waiting for the job market to turn so they can bail.

This is a tough situation, because in many ways this can be a dream job.

Mentel

Get some time alone with the CEO and lay it out for him. Do it in a positive "I'm doing this for the good of the company" way. As I have said before, being honest is always your best bet. You don't have to be vindictive but show the CEO the email that was meant for him that she took off of the server. You can point out that this is the only email that you know of that she has kept from him but there is no way to tell what else is being kept from him. He may not even know about your demotion or has some really distorted view of what happened. Get the CEO to at least ask other managers about their relationship with her. This is the only way to open his eyes before he loses his staff.

Trinity

One note: While your CEO can ignore the implications of one manager being humiliated and leaving, I doubt even one as "laid back" as you say could dismiss a whole dept. of managers complaints. While it may be difficult, I strongly suggest that you try and explain to your manager co-workers about safety in numbers. All of you need to be documenting every incident that happends, especially the ones when the CEO is out of town, keeping abusive emails, etc. Then TOGETHER entreat the CEO to a meeting. If there are only 40 of you and 15 or so are threatening to leave or worse under abuse from a supervisor, the CEO would be crazy to ignore it. Just my thoughts