One of my staff sent an ill-advised email today. His basic point was valid and productive, and I honestly don’t believe he intended it to be as aggressive as it came out, but his EQ is...not the best, sometimes.
The person he sent it to apparently took it in the spirit it was intended in, but their manager (who’s at my level in the org) reacted badly and gave my guy a public spanking, cc’ing in the CEO, rather than just forwarding it to me and asking me to address my guy’s behaviour.
So instead of just sitting my guy down and explaining (again) about dialing it down in emails since you can’t get non-verbal cues that you’re causing offence, and making him retract, apologise and rephrase, I’ve got to calm him down about the other manager’s out-of-line behaviour, make it clear to the other manager (who also has the EQ of a cardboard box at times) that he’s fucked up as bad as the original offender and see if I can get him to apologise to my guy (slim to zero chance), and then deal with one of my best people being demotivated and grumpy for the next few days or weeks rather than this whole thing being a 5 minute flareup. Way to surrender the moral high ground, dude!
Plus I’m now sufficiently pissed about the whole thing I can’t concentrate on the personal stuff I have supposedly taken the afternoon off to deal with, so I’m cruising Oppo instead.
Bring on the fricking robots; the sooner I don’t have workmates the happier I’ll be.
Some out of line behaviour for your time: