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Ask Slashdot: How Would You Deal With A 'Gaslighting' Colleague?
An anonymous reader writes:
What's the best unofficial way to deal with a gaslighting colleague? For those not familiar, I mean "bullies unscheduling things you've scheduled, misplacing files and other items that you are working on and co-workers micro-managing you and being particularly critical of what you do and keeping it under their surveillance. They are watching you too much, implying or blatantly saying that you are doing things wrong when, in fact, you are not...a competitive maneuver, a way of making you look bad so that they look good." I'd add poring over every source-code commit, and then criticizing it even if the criticism is contradictory to what he previously said.
The submission adds that "Raising things through the official channels is out of the question, as is confronting the colleague in question directly as he is considered something of a superstar engineer who has been in the company for decades and has much more influence than any ordinary engineer." So leave your best suggestions in the comments. How would you deal with a gaslighting colleague?
The submission adds that "Raising things through the official channels is out of the question, as is confronting the colleague in question directly as he is considered something of a superstar engineer who has been in the company for decades and has much more influence than any ordinary engineer." So leave your best suggestions in the comments. How would you deal with a gaslighting colleague?
...is to be a bigger bully. Or call on someone to be a bully for you. So figure it out, beat them back down, or cry out for someone to do it.
If the person truly feels under threat it's because they are not as good as everyone else thinks.
Write every. single. thing. down.
beat their ass after work in the parking lot
Just go and ask for a raise. If they don't give it to you, leave. If they do give it to you, you will be considered more important than that sociopathic asshole and you will be able to tell them that that guy is a jerk and you want him fired or moved out of your department/team.
I agree. It is entirely possible the whiner is an incompetent fool who can't take criticism and refuses to believe they're terrible at their job.
We have a kind of toxic environment where I work. Very intense competition, managerial structure is pitiful at best. I am myself gaslighted on many occasions -- more verbally than actually through actions, but inaction can sometimes be as damaging as direct action.
I follow the non-confrontational way. It doesn't work all that well, in fact... at least regarding the consequences for my sanity and self-confidence. It helps that I'm old and have been thru a lot of success stories, so they really can't take that from me.
A colleague decide to go the confrontational way like suggested by the parent posters. In our culture, that is seen as a sign being weak and childish. Besides being bullied, he ended up being seen as weirdo, short-fused, unpleasant. All in all, reacting only gave the aggressors a lot more satisfaction.
I haven't got any answer or solution. What I know is that for some people, you must be pushed down so they stay afloat. There's no talk with them, they don't want to form an understanding. The best advice I've seen is to look for good people to foster friendships and build relations -- just for creating a breathable environment or maybe even for mutual interest. The jerks won't do: they would rather lose provided they can see you sinking. Short of a miracle, there's nothing really one can do to bring them to the light.
It's sad, and if you're a normal person this might look worse from a social and even religious point-of-view -- realistically, though, you'd trying to fix people who want to be bad.
I worked for a company that was doing some MSP work for a client. It started when a co-worker kept asking about a long configuration I did, I sent a reply, and he sent a reply to managers with what I said changed which didn't help me look good. I quietly turned on message signatures via S/MIME, problem solved there.
It really came to a head when I was doing some work on a broken web server. I had some backups saved of config files. I made a modification, it didn't work, went to back out changes... and my backups were gone. I then looked to see who was on, and the only other person was this co-worker. A quick look at .sh_history in his homedir showed he blew away each file one by one, with typos. I popped screenshots of this.
The code approval system used URL links to an internal code repository as well for fetching and testing. Normally, developers were supposed to put different dates and keep every rev and URL of releases unique, so there is a history of artifacts that eventually get archived off. Well, the co-worker had some working code which passed QA tests. I went to move the file from testing to production, checked the hashes... the file was changed. Even though he swore up and down that no files were changed, the hashes and dates were different. I let management know with my screenshots and documentation. They told me to STFU and deal with him. However, because the guy was from another group, he had no repercussions for his actions.
Things went on like this for a while. Thankfully the co-worker was too stupid to understand what RCS and etckeeper were. He decided to play games of deleting config files while stuff was running, after excluding them from the backups.
Management would not do a single thing, because his manager was well away from IT and didn't give a rats's ass what IT's problems were. I couldn't yank his access because it was explicitly granted from much higher on.
Had a production machine seize up during business hours. Found /boot empty. Looked at the logs I had remotely hidden away, found the machine went down just after someone ssh-ed in from the IP address belonging to this co-workers name. Went to HR and management, got told to stop whining and "lrn 2 deal with other departments" [sic], so I handed them my badge, a special piece of paper with all passwords and such, told them that I would be letting myself out the back door, and that I took an Uber to work (I had a feeling it would come to a head that day, so didn't drive), so you don't have to worry about my car in their parking garage.
Now here is the ironic thing:
It has been a long time since I've left that company. The job description for the position I left is still there on job boards and is constantly renewed.
Because it's easier to believe someone has a paranoid delusional psychosis than it is to believe that a company somewhere has unhealthy office politics? And the "proof" of the plausibility of that psychosis is that the managerial layer of the office hierarchy is unresponsive to employee concerns? I'm assuming you either have little exposure to varied social environments or that you are a part of the unhealthy social environments in which you take part.
I wouldn't recommend that unless your country has no laws against libel.
Check your local laws of course, but writing something bad about someone in a private setting (i.e. in a non-public letter to a corporate HR department) is almost never grounds for a libel lawsuit, as far as I have ever heard. If that were so, there would be no such thing as customer service surveys, whistleblower laws, "mystery shopper" feedback, etc.
Libel is generally reserved for covering "public" pronouncements, typically in the form of journalistic stories. And even in those rare cases where, for example, a business has sued a private citizen over a bad Yelp review or some other public lambasting, they have pretty much universally lost.
In addition, most corporations have as part of their employment conditions that you can't sue the company or other employees as a result of negative opinions expressed as part of "official" company communications, such as an employee review or exit interview. (Otherwise no one could ever give an employee a bad review!) There are limits of course - if you allege that someone has committed a crime on the job, that obligates your employer to take it to the police, and depending on how that goes you could be opening yourself up to other things if your accusations of criminal activity are found to be negligibly inaccurate. But I assume you're not going there.
Libel law has many twists and turns which shouldn't be underestimated, but don't take it as a blanket reason for why you should never say anything bad about anyone - especially if it is provably true - in a context that is not intended for public consumption.
"95% of all Slashdot
It's not worth it. period. There are better jobs out there.
My previous job I was at was micromanaged severely, which isn't exactly the same thing as Gaslighting, but it screws with your job performance and sanity in similar ways. It was so bad I had to make an app out of Google forms on my phone to literally log everything I do every minute of every day on the job. And then get bitched at because I missed 10-15 minutes or so on the report it generated (or missed logging the ticket in one of the three different ticketing systems and the calendar we had) cause of unexpected things turning up, like climbing a scissor-lift at 3 in the morning on a Sunday at one of our clients cause a UPS three stories up in the ceiling decided to shit the bed and then not get paid for half of it cause I had to wait an hour and a half for the skeleton maintenance crew to actually find it.
The other thing you need to understand is that you come first. Everybody, and I mean Everybody that worked at this place had something that I could only describe as Stockholm Syndrome. Everyone under management hated the way the company was managed and how they were treated but they were real close to their coworkers and nobody wanted to leave because they knew it would screw the rest of the team or the company would go under if they left. We thought we could get management to see the light but got nowhere. This kept me there for almost a year longer than I should of stayed.
I finally got out, and was willing to give them two weeks to transition my duties, but my new employer wanted a reference from my current employer, Which they refused to give positive or negative because it "was their choice to do so". When I called them on it they literally called me and my coworkers into a meeting and wanted me to repeat the question to everybody so that they could 1) divide the coworkers up and turn them against me. and 2) show them what will happen if they tried to leave. As the meeting was talking place my new employer called and would accept me without the reference if I would take a 6 month probationary period, Which I accepted over speakerphone, handed them my office keys and walked out of the meeting and the door. No way I was giving them two weeks either way and let the bosses screw my career over by making shit up about my performance after they pulled that stunt.
I am now working at a place where I am being Paid less (with better benefits that offset the loss however) and working twice as much but I'm not being micromanaged and that's good enough for me. I'm not as stressed out, I've lost weight and I'm not on call 24/7 (although I'm still on the old companies alert system. during Christmas break I would have got called out no less than 10-15 times) so I can sleep at night and actually take vacation time without worrying that all hell was going to break loose when I was away.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
I worked for a small company -exactly- like that. I not just had to log minutes on my phone, but the manager wanted to watch people's screens via some remote app, and if you made a single typo, he would demand you do your work in a conference room or an office, so he can come in and bellow at you more easily. I was doing 100+ hours a week as an IT person, and it wasn't IT work. It was conference bridge after conference bridge where all people did was bicker and try to get their pet project in.
The entire place had complete Stockholme syndrome. In fact, when I told the manager to fire me on the spot if he didn't like something, he went into the passive/aggressive, "nobody has ever spoken to me like that, there will be consequences to pay for that" mode. In a small company with people who were VERY intelligent and knew their stuff, they were all scared as shit of this guy. None of them planned a single weekend outing other than when on vacation, because they likely would be called in to work at anytime.
My doctor told me that I'd be dead by the end of the year if I continued to work there due to the stress alone.
Needless to say, a couple weeks later, an offer of employment came to me from another company. The manager at that place refused my two weeks notice, so I made it an effective immediately notice.
It was a big pay cut. Hurt like hell. The new job's commute blows goats as well. However, I actually look forward to go to work now.