It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.
There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.
I am the letter writen who wrote in in the middle of a divorce from my boss, who left me for a younger employee. Firstly, I want to thank both you and the readers for your compassion and kindness. Neither you nor the readers gloated or said I got what I deserved, and I am so grateful for that. Your compassion and kind advice showed me that I was reacting normally to an utter untenable situation: you restored my sence of normalcy and my confidence, and I am so grateful.
The one and a half years since my letter was printed has been eventful, to say the least. To start, I work at the same company in the same position. As I wrote in my original letter, I wanted to stay in the job because my young adult daughter was seriously ill and in psychiatric treatment, and needed the insurance for her treatment. Furthermore, I am a top specialist in a very narrow field with few job opportunities, so a change of job would mean moving to another part of the country and I could not bear to leave my daughter behind without the support of a parent, and my ex-husband is not what I call a parent.
Half of my original problem is solved, as my ex-husband resigned as head of department a few months ago, to my immense relief. However, the time after my original letter and until his resignation was bonkers. As expected, my ex-husband/boss started belittling me and questioning my qualifications in meetings with me and my collegues, he started withdrawing my funding, and he started placing very important project meetings on the exact days and times he had sent me on jobs outside the institution. I believe his plan was either to force me to resign, or to make sure I had so many stress-related sick days, that the institution could fire me.
In the same period, two collegues, both excellent specialists, resigned (and resignations are very rare here), in protest of my ex-husband/boss’s ´treatment of them. Both of them had meetings with the director, where they documented the ways in which my ex-husband/boss was a terrible manager and explained that they left because of him. The director did absolutely nothing with that information. One commenter remarked that “a fish rots from the head” and that is certainly the case here: In our only meeting, the director stated that the indepencence and autonomy of the head of department (my ex-husband) was his first priority, so he would not put a stop to what he called the “alleged mistreatment” and that his second was to make sure that I conducted myself professionally towards my ex-husband/boss. He said that my objections to being managed by my ex-husband during a divorce process showed that I was overly emotional, because he had complete trust in my ex’s abilities as a manager. In my country (not the States), employers have a legal obligation to create a safe work environment, so he was breaking the law as well as being a jerk. I had to call in sick after that meeting.
The end came when my boss/ex-husband and the director in secret fostered a plan to get rid of me and another colleague. My ex/boss stated that I and the colleague, our most excellent senior specialist, were getting too old and needed to be replaced in a short number of years (we are 15 and 17 years away from the official retirement age). The solution should be to hire completely inexperienced recent graduates, order me and my colleague to train them to our specialist level, and then have them replace us while we would be fired because of “budget cuts.” To make matters worse, all senior specialists receive no funding from the department budget, but have to apply for our funding ourselves from external sources. This has been a long-time point of contention. My ex-husband/boss had for years stated that the institution was much too poor to fund even the slightest bit of the senior staff (and especially me). Now we learned that these new employees woud be fully funded by the institution. My boss/ex and the director fostered this plan and kept it secret in order to have it sustained by the board, but we got wind of it. The secrecy and the plan did not go down well with either us nor the other senior specialists, who would of course be the next ones to be deemed too old and fired on the flimsiest of pretenses after having trained their successors.
I asked for a meeting with my boss/ex in order to discuss the plan and if possible avoid a big blowout at the next department meeting. That meeting went badly: my boss/ex said I was being paranoid as usual. (The “as usual” refers to an incident that took place in private a year earlier; I then confronted him having learned from a colleague that he was having a long-time affair with another of his employees. That affair apparently started while my mother was in hospice care 5 years ago.) Asked about the issues with funding, he stated that “of course the senior staff would receive some compensation for the time we used on training our (fully funded) replacements.” I still don’t know how I managed to refrain from tellling him exactly what he could do to himself.
The next department meeting was dramatic, to say the least. All senior specialists opposed the plan, the funding, and opposed the way my ex-husband/boss had handled the process, and the mistrust towards him was palpable.
My ex/boss resigned from his position as head of department and took a demotion a week after the meeting: apparently he and the director realized that the only other choice was to fire 10 renowned specialists, which would lead to very bad publicity.
However, not all is well: Upper management still suck and is not going to change. the director has hired a person with absolutely no prior management experience to fill the now vacant position as head of department. And of course, the “generational transfer” is going to come back. Management is even talking about “re-integrating the ex-boss into the department again ” — good luck with that. Morale in the department is at an all-time low, and upper management is working overtime to free themselves for responsibility for the dumpster fire they have ignited.
The good part is that my daughter is doing much better. In six months, perhaps a year, she will no longer need the level of support she does now and then my institution will see my dust.
I realize that this update is tragicomic and the whole process seems grotesque. However, being in the middle of it felt like a nightmare, as I fought my way through an acrimonious divorce from an emotionally and financially abusive husband/boss while my work life was under attack from said husband/boss, who was given free range by a director telling me I was “overly emotional” for even suggesting that I did not trust said abusive boss/ex-husband’s ability to manage me while divorcing me. At that point I seriously questioned my sanity. Thank you for coming to my rescue.
As Alison has pointed out, toxic environments can twist your sense of normalcy, and I am so grateful to Alison and the wonderful readers for giving sound and sane advise, kindness and compassion, that restored my sense of normalcy and my confidence and put me in a place where I am finally ready to move on.
