Some time ago, I had a boss who seemed reasonable enough. We had weekly meetings and everything was perfect… until it wasn’t. I saw her do several things that were ethically questionable and one was downright contrary to institutional policy. A time came when several staff complained to me about something she was doing, but they were afraid of raising it with her directly for fear of retaliation. I wasn’t afraid, so I told her about it in our next weekly meeting. That did not go well. She copped a defensive attitude and started to find fault with everything I did… she sent me snarky notes about my shortcomings… and our weekly meetings came to an abrupt end. After that, virtually all of our communications took place via email.
Eventually, the time for evaluations came, and she paid me back in spades writing lots of nasty comments about me and how incompetent I was. Typically, these evaluation forms have a space for the employee to comment or attach a separate sheet. I attached a separate sheet and explicitly spelled out that I believed the present evaluation was her attempt to retaliate against me for calling her out during that last weekly meeting. I included dates and lots of quotes of her previously praising me via email. This seemed to piss her off even more and she became downright evil to me (and others).
What Dr. Evil didn’t know was that her own Boss had privately approached me and asked me to “evaluate” Dr. Evil since I was the chief deputy who saw and worked with her every day and Dr. Boss only saw her periodically. When he asked me to do this, I asked Dr. Boss if my written comments about Dr. Evil would be confidential. He said “no, she could eventually see it one day.” So I thanked him for the opportunity but declined to participate. A few days later, Dr. Boss came to me again and said, “ok, your comments will be confidential.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Yes, I give you my word that she will never see your comments or know that any feedback about her came from you.”
“Ok,” I said. And I proceeded to evaluate Dr. Evil. I paid her back with lots of specific examples of her unethical behavior, staff complaints, and wasted money. Immediately after that evaluation, Dr. Evil was placed on probation… at the end of the year she was fired.
For the remainder of that year Dr. Evil was still evil to me, but I freely ignored her, because after her evaluation, Dr, Boss told me that I no longer worked for her—I worked for
him and that I should just do my job and not pay any attention to her because her days were numbered. Of course Dr. Evil didn’t know about any of this. She just kept getting madder and madder when I would ignore her. During her last week on the job she came to my office to harass me about something. As she was talking I cut her off, “…you still don’t get it do you?”
“What are you talking about?”
Calmly conscious of the power I exercised I smiled and said, “Evaluation is a two way street, Doc.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Hmm. You’ll figure it out… or maybe you won’t. In any case, this conversation is over. Please close my door on your way out.” I swiveled around in my chair turning my back to her and went back to work.
what I learned from this thread is not to mess with baygbm !
