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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?
If they've been there for decades then it's considered acceptable behavior and nothing will change. Time to move on.
The submission adds that "Raising things through the official channels is out of the question, as is confronting the colleague in question directly
If you're not willing to use official channels and you're not willing to confront the person directly then you need to leave. That's 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.
Raise hell with him/her and with management about him/her. Be ANGRY. Say you'll walk.
And then, if you have to, do it.
I speak from experience in my past. You do NOT want to go down the road of trying to "make it better in a non-confrontational way." Do you know what that makes you? A weakling. A loser. Someone who has to tiptoe around. Someone who spends too much time thinking strategically about how to get from mundane point A to mundane point B without experiencing problems.
Your productivity will fall. Your self-esteem will collapse. And you will find that you also enable the behavior, and it gets worse, and then worse again.
You're already a victim, and you're letting yourself stay one. Don't make yourself a target, too.
I know the whole schtick about "it's not that easy," and finances and economic realities and justice and whatever else. Used to be there, too.
The fact is, you will regret it in the end. All of the consequences you are hoping to avoid will happen, because you will lose the respect of your co-workers, your bos(ses), and you will lose your own productivity. Long term, you have one choice: confront or not. And not confronting is a SURE loss (again, long term). If you don't confront, WILL be out of a job eventually, you WILL find that you have been made worse for it with respect to your ability to do the next job.
If you confront and raise hell, you have a CHANCE of coming out of things intact. A chance may seem like a risk you don't want to take. But the other way, losing is a certainty.
So accept the hard truth that someone has decided to fuck you over, accept the hard truth that unless you metaphorically punch them in the face they WILL continue to do it and will intensify the behavior, and then grow a backbone and take your best shot back. Even if you lose that way, at least you took a shot. You didn't sit there like a weenie (which I did for far too long) and take it, then whine like a little girl, lose your self respect, and then find out that that's what everyone thinks of you and that's why you got let go despite taking shit like a hero. You're nobody's hero if you take shit. Management does not want employees that take shit.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The problem with "gaslighting", as I wrote here, is that it tends to be used in two contexts, one legitimate (people lying about factual events) and one illegitimate (people disagreeing on interpretations of those events). Based on what I'm reading here, it looks like some of both: the unscheduling in particular seems like a red flag, but a lot of the other stuff is contextual and missing details. Furthermore, the fact that the author complains about coworkers' criticisms — and in particular, the criticism of someone they label as a "superstar" within the company, i.e. a person who has developed a sterling reputation — leads me to question the submitter's competence. So, I would advise,
Dog is my co-pilot.
Listen to AC, submitter. He's the HR director at the company I work at.
and if not, leave. The check is to first talk to your manager and if that fails to take it if with HR. If that still fails, hand in your notice as soon as you economically can. That may mean staying on a few more months, or may mean leaving immediately. It is neither your expertise nor your responsibility to solve that kind of problem. It is your responsibility to escalate it though, as it harms the organization.
Do not get your hopes up too much for the organization to be able to resolve this, unless you are essential and the piece-of-shit doing this is not, it is pretty likely that they will not resolve the issue and you will have to leave.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
We'd have department meetings and no matter what anyone else came up with, his idea was somehow always better. After a while we all just clammed up in the meetings, let him have his say, then we had our own, informal dept meetings without him over lunch. We eventually decided that the best way to get rid of him was to make him look good so he'd get promoted away. It took about 6 months but we made it happen. His boss saw what was going on and asked me about it and I told him the whole thing. My immediate boss ended up getting "promoted" to a position as an "individual contributor".
When they go low, you go high...
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.
Gaslighting isn't just being a douchebag.
Watch the original film. It's all about one person doing a spectrum of things to make the second person question their own judgement, their own recollection of facts, and even their own sanity. It's about undermining someone's OWN sense of their worth, abilities, and memory - not trying to make them look bad in front of other people. If they CAN make their victim so full of self-doubt that they won't even try to get a third party to weigh in, it's just that much better. But, as in the movie, the whole point was for a villain to throw his victim off the trail while he spent time searching the house for something valuable - to make her doubt her own judgement and soundness of mind that she wouldn't trust herself to question what he was up to.
The OP is completely mis-using the term.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
They are a bully, but NOT gaslighting. If they where, you wouldn't ever know it. The idea behind gaslighting is to make someone question their own sanity or "efforts to manipulate someone's sense of reality" This is a funny version of gaslighting. If someone is that much of an asshole, I'd be looking for another job ASAP.
They should probably try to find out if other people have had these issues with this employee. Talk to HR, as that's supposed to be "confidential". Don't mention names at first, just tell them the situation at first. Make sure THEY are documenting it. But, yeah, it sounds like it's time to move on. Make sure you update your resume.
I see the term gaslighting being thrown around so much in the last year, but most people really don't seem to understand what it means. This is not gaslighting. Gaslighting is *literally* trying to convince the *victim* that they are insane or misremembering real incidents or facts.
In this case their point is not to make the victim think they are crazy or wrong, it's to convince others that they are screwing things up. That's just basic bullying, undermining, or backstabbing. Not gaslighting.
The term Gaslighting does not mean, what the submitter believes it means:
The question itself remains valid, but the misuse of the term is so annoying, I'm not going to give my (very valuable) advice on the subject.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You shouldn't have given them ALL the passwords. "Sorry, that's all I've got. Jerkface must have deleted the rest. You deal with it." As a famous comedian said, "Always leave them wanting more." :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.