BUS 520 Organization Behavior: Time When You Felt Powerless, Weak, and Insignificant

I used to have a director that extremely difficult to deal with. Thanks God he is not my direct manger but one hierarchy higher, unfortunately that is still bad enough. He is a very smart person, but his ego is also so strong. The worst part is: he cannot control his temper. He can praise a person a minute ago but the next minute when he found a minor flaw from the report. He will start popping up nasty words in every sentence and chewing the staff up in the next 15 minutes (together with the manager). Everyone being call into his office we knew there was not much good news. We all knew he keeps delaying all the staff annual reviews for at least 3 months, therefore even good news like raising salary also eventually became soured.

Here is my story….

There was once I got a tough and urgent customer return case to work on. After a quick review I knew this was not easy to deal with at all. Since my director criticized technical approaches always not diligent enough. This time I changed my strategy. I asked his instruction and did the job step by step on this assignment. Fortunately and unfortunately, the case cannot be solved and pending there. As expected he called me into his office. While he starting to lecture me, I advised him that I did follow everything base on his instructions. But you will be stunned about what he told me…

He said: You are the ENGINEER, how come you don’t have your own engineering judgment from the beginning…. Again, no matter what, he is right and others always wrong.

By then I made my mind that I will not take any negative words from him since nothing sounds right and reasonable. Even it is a stable job and good financial incentive. I told myself that I took all the beats and heats not because I accept and tolerate what he did to me. As right timing comes I will leave such a working environment.

I still remembered later I resigned and at the last day of the work my manger escorting me out of the building. Surprisingly my manger asked me any job opening from the new company I working for. He told me he cannot take the heat anymore either. As later the economic turns around, 90% of engineering staffs including my manager left the department one after another. Only one lady chose not leave but I knew how much stress she got. I have seen her lost most of hair after then.

Here is the lesson I learned: respect and take care of the staffs work for you. Everyone makes mistakes and there is no need abuse someone by using nasty words or give negative feedback.

After all I still want to thanks the tough director. He let me know what a bad example is and remind me not make such mistake as later I became a manager. Besides, thanks him now I can endure and take more heat from anyone else.

Best wishes to all.