Work Enemies: Actions You Can Take to Protect Yourself From Bad Relationships
Work Enemies: Actions You Can Take to Protect Yourself From Bad Relationships
You won't always get along with your co-workers. What can you do to protect yourself?
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.
As a small, inconsequential update, I’ve switched name generators for my articles. The previous tool felt a bit limited in the breadth of the names provided (I was seeing numerous repeats). Anyway, just thought I’d mention it.
We just returned from an approximately 5-week vacation to France & Moldova. So I’ll be sharing those photos for a few weeks, I suspect. This set of photos is from my phone. In the coming days, I’ll get the camera unloaded and start doing those instead.
As a senior leader at Amazon, I always had some ongoing performance issues I had to deal with. This is an explanation of one of them.
Clara came into my office for her regular skip-level meeting. She’d asked for them a few months ago, and I found the meetings to be acceptable. As an introvert, I got more than enough socialization each day, but Clara was chill enough to not drain my remaining energy.
She asked a few questions about how the OP1 process was going across our peer departments. I had insights into how those meetings were going with our SVP, and Clara was interested in hearing the backroom gossip of senior leadership. I didn’t mind sharing. It struck me as a mature line of questioning.
I decided to bring up a new topic. Clara’s manager, Vidar had listed Clara as a potential underperformer in our last performance meeting a week before. He said that Clara wasn’t demonstrating an ability to work on her own, that she continually needed guidance. Clara struck me as generally curious and mature, so there was a bit of a disconnect in my mind.
“So Clara. Have you received performance feedback from Vidar recently? I’d like to hear your thoughts.”
This was a multi-purpose question. First, as Vidar’s manager, Clara should realize that I hear all performance related feedback. So she should be open with me about it. Second, a common manager problem is that they’re not clear with their employees, so I’d like to hear Clara’s point of view on things.
Clara nodded. “Yes, Vidar has said a few times in the last two weeks that he’d like me to work more independently. Which I’d be happy to do. However, before this point, he’d asked me to run many smaller actions past him before moving forward. For example, any time I want to email our product managers, Vidar asked to review the email. This makes it difficult to work independently.”
I asked a few more clarification questions. From Clara’s point of view, Vidar was oscillating between micromanagement (she didn’t use that term) and being disappointed that his team wasn’t working independently. She mentioned that she was not the only person on the team getting conflicting feedback.
It was an interesting clarification. Prior to talking to Clara, and in an absence of any other information, I’d simply accepted Vidar’s feedback as factual. I assumed Clara needed performance improvements, and was waiting for Vidar’s feedback on the topic. Now that I had more information, I needed to research more.
I met with a couple of people on Vidar’s team, who essentially confirmed Clara’s story. Vidar was both picky that things be done a precise way, and he also complained when people didn’t show independence. I met with Vidar.
Through a long and complex conversation, I essentially heard that Vidar was extremely inflexible in how things should be done. He had a long list of the way that things should be done, and it annoyed him when people didn’t have the exact same view.
From that point, I met regularly with Vidar, coaching him on avoiding his black and white approach to management. I also helped him remove Clara from coaching, once we clarified that his expectations for his team weren’t fair.
As is common with managers facing performance problems, he announced shortly afterward that he found a new position outside of Amazon, and was sorry to say goodbye to everyone. Managers tend to see the writing on the wall.
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About this article.
We don’t always have a great relationship with our co-workers. Sometimes there are people we just don’t see eye-to-eye with. For the purposes of this article, I’m going to call that person your enemy. Because repeatedly saying, “The person you don’t get along well with, or tend to argue with, or tend to disagree with far too frequently, or sometimes even calls you names.” would get really wordy. And calling someone an enemy sounds over the top enough to make the article fun to write. I enjoy being a bit silly sometimes.
I want to talk about how to deal with your enemy. This enemy could be your manager, or it could be a peer. It could be a strong enemy relationship where you call each other names and feel intense hatred. Or it might just be a casual dislike where you don’t respect them all that much.
Regardless, having trouble working with a co-worker is a common issue. And I thought it’d be fun to write about it.
Leaving is always an option.
First, if you hate your manager (and particularly if the feeling is mutual), you might want to just change jobs. Life is too short to stay in a job you hate. I’ve talked about leaving jobs in the past.
But if you’re not leaving now (because you need to find that new job first!), or you want to bang your way through this, I have some advice to give!
Don’t talk privately.
Performance reviews are a manager’s word against their employee (like in my story). The employee almost always loses in this situation. But even if we’re talking about peers, you don’t want hearsay to ruin your reputation.
Assuming you think you’re in the right, you want your conflict to be based on reality, not on someone’s hearsay or selective memory. Misinformation is a very common performance issue.
“Dave was horribly rude to me, he called me Loser Lenny.”
“Dave said he’d get that report to me on Monday, but it’s Wednesday now.”
I’ve repeatedly heard disagreements on what was said in private.
“Did you get that in writing?” - “No, I shared it in our one-on-one”
“Your manager said they told you repeatedly that you weren’t performing well.” - “No! I never heard a thing!”
Drives me crazy. If you feel you’re a good performer, and you’re acting appropriately, you want everything in public, and / or in writing.
If you talk in public, you (and them) are less likely to say unprofessional / rude things. And people will observe you being polite, which will help preserve your reputation.
If you similarly set expectations and receive requests in public, you’re less likely to have purposeful or accidental wires crossed. It allows others to verify your perspective, since they were actually there.
“Dave said he’d get that report to me on Monday.” - “Um no, I heard him say that he’d get it by the end of the week.”
Keeping your conversations in the open is your best defense against misinformation.
What if your manager asks you to do something in private, or shares performance information in private? Get it in writing. Managers frequently use this tool in performance situations (they frequently get their feedback in writing for the HR department to use as legal defense material).
“Just writing down these notes from our one-on-one to make sure we’re both on the same page. I will get you a report by Friday of all customers who have used our feature, so that we can contact them for feedback. And I’ll have the survey created by Friday so that it can be sent out by our UX team.”
Communicating in writing is not a terrible idea for anyone, and a great idea if you’re not getting along well with someone.