update: my boss is doing 27 events next month … the average is 4

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

Remember the letter-writer whose new boss was planning 27 events for the next month when the average was four (#2 at the link)? Here’s the update.

It has been about a year since my letter to you, and I will start by saying I am still in the same job with the same team. Your advice was really helpful … but somehow, I missed that my answer was posted!  I’m kicking myself because you were very correct in the path forward.

Thankfully, I took the approach you suggested in our next 1 on 1 and focused on how overloading events ripple-affects my workload. Unfortunately, I wish I had had your scripts, because my boss’s takeaway from the meeting was still that I need less on my plate. Over the next three months, I was taken off more and more projects, and felt iced out of the department. I took it as a sign to start job hunting, as I wouldn’t have any ongoing events to wrap up. However, being in a niche competitive field, I didn’t get any offers.

My boss was so busy we didn’t have a 1 on 1 until October, where I broke down in tears over how I had nothing to do and had no communication on what the team was doing. The response I got was, “Well, I gave you what you wanted, why are you upset?” I communicated that my workload was drastically changed with no follow-up or check-in, and that something in our work relationship needed to change. We established biweekly 1 on 1s to communicate better. This helped, but I found that the meetings would become her telling me how she was upset over something I said or did that had happened days or weeks before that I had no awareness of, and most of them were misunderstandings that would have been cleared up immediately if she had time to talk to me in the moment.

In March, in one of our meetings, she opened up about being hurt because of something she overheard. My partner attended one of our events and told our friends how much I had worked on it and my boss took it as she did not do enough to help me. This was brought up in our 1 on 1 almost a month later. In response, I made a very unprofessional move that I regret, and I asked if she had considered therapy. She took it well in the meeting, but that was the wake-up call to me that this dynamic was unsustainable. I went to my grandboss and requested that the three of us meet.

The meeting went way better than I expected it to. I came in with serious self-reflection and admitted the places I went wrong, and she did the same. There’s a serious lack of trust between us, and we both would assume the worst in the other’s intention. She would think everything I said was a backhanded jab at her, and I would see her not sharing information as spite when it was just falling through the cracks because, again, her workload is triple everyone else’s. I established things I need to know for the job versus what I want to know out of curiosity. The three of us agreed that if something upsets her, she can and should send me a Slack message about it so I could either correct the misunderstanding immediately or self-reflect on it until we meet.

I feel positive about this going forward. Either (1) the miscommunications will stop, (2) I can point to the agreement from the meeting and ask her to follow that, or (3) if there’s anything truly inappropriate, I will have it in writing. Our grandboss seems to be more aware that the root issue is workload, as she had asked in the meeting for my boss to prioritize office time for drop-in conversations. I’ve learned my lesson of staying in my own lane and only bringing up things that affect me. Overall, things have been good since then, and the three of us will meet quarterly to make sure communication is still going well. I’m in a position where I can keep an eye out for openings to move up and can continue working here until then. Issues aren’t fixed overnight, but I have the structure and support to thrive in this position regardless.