2008 and 2009 were interesting years for this young woman. She put her head down coached the two highest producing sales teams , headed the United Way Fund raiser for the office, (which won the award for the entire region as the office that raised the most money for United Way), traveled extensively and became certified as a trainer then traveled to train managers and contract people to be ready in the event of a pending strike due to a year long negotiation between management and the union.
She was married to her high school sweetheart, a marriage that was unraveling as many very young marriages do exacerbated in part by the fact that her boss insisted that if she were unable to travel it would put her job at risk albeit none of the other 6 managers were asked to travel. During these two years she was called in for the following reasons:

1. She had lost weight , down from 190 lbs to a slim 160. She was told that the boss lady was not going to have her prancing around in high heels. She looked nice after having lost weight but she was attracting the wrong kind of attention wearing high heels. So she started wearing flats.
2. Albeit her teams were delivering the top sales numbers she was being too nice to them. It was not a personality contest. Just because everybody liked her she had to understand that these people would throw her under the bus at the drop of a hat so quit being so nice.
3. She was being secretive because she did not discuss her personal life with the other managers and her boss so she was not being part of the team and refused to sit in the break room for several hours a day with the other managers.
4. She was causing problems for other managers because their team members were coming to her with questions when they were unable to find their managers because as the reps put it, “the breakfast club” was in session in the manager’s break room. She was not to help people who were not on her team they were to be told that they would have to wait and ask their manager when they were available.
5. Two different male reps were called into the boss’s office and asked if they were having an affair with her. She wasn’t having any affairs, she was in the middle of a divorce that she had filed in Nov. of 2009. She had told no one at the office.
6. She was accused of being 3 to 5 minutes late on several occasions and lying about it. A check of the security key card records showed that in fact she had been late once for a total of four minutes when the weather was extremely bad and streets icy. When she explained that she was unable to get there because the school and daycare had opened a few minutes late due to icy weather she was told by this lovely lady that her kids were not the problem of the company and she would be written up for being late if it happened again and would show a pattern of lateness.
7. It had been reported that she had been seen in the car with an Hispanic man who was not her husband. It had been her uncle who was in town for the holidays and had picked her up for lunch albeit he was not Hispanic. This sparked another witch hunt with her boss asking other employees in the hall if they ever saw her outside of work. People started coming to my candidate asking her why this nutty woman was obsessed with what she was doing outside of work.
8. She was told that she was making the other managers look bad because if there were disagreements among the reps as to how something should be done she was going to the written policies and printing them out for her reps who then showed reps on other teams the written policy thus proving that the other manager was wrong so to quit printing them out.
9. She was called in and told that it had been reported that her facebook page was unprofessional and had pictures on it that were taken in the office which was against the code of professional conduct as no pictures of anything in the office were allowed to go outside. The pictures on her facebook page were one of her with her two little boys in front of a fireplace and one of her in a car wearing sunglasses that was just a head shot. Rather than make an issue of it she took her facebook page down and cancelled her facebook account after the profile being up for about three weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Just after Thanksgiving her boss's sister-in-law who also worked in the same office came to this young lady and told her to watch her back.  Over Thanksgiving dinner the boss had made the comment to her sister and her sister-in-law that this young woman thought she was going someplace with the company but..she wasn't.  The sister-in-law told the young woman that she didn't know why but the boss was out to get her, she thought it was jealousy and the fact that the boss had not been able to break her and make her quit.

When she came to my office in tears asking for advice about what she should do I suggested to her that it might be time to look for another job as it appeared to me that for some reason , nutzella did not like her and was obviously on a quest to either make her quit or find a reason to fire her. My candidate indicated that she loved the company and loved her job, was very close to being the only manager with a college degree and wanted to try and hang on until she could finish her degree and/or transfer out to another job within the company. She was trying to get her divorce over with, move from an apartment into a home that she wanted to buy then be in a position to apply for other jobs within the company.

Ok, my suggestion was that she take steps to apply for other positions within the company and might try letting her boss know that she was getting a divorce as perhaps my candidate might be stressed with a divorce going on and two small children in the mix. Let her boss know that if she seemed secretive it was because she didn’t want to bring her personal problems into the office but to explain to the boss that nobody was having any affairs, neither she nor her ex. He was not happy about the divorce because she was the bread winner in the family and he was throwing a serious fit that he might have to pay child support so if there were some strange gossip filtering into the office in this small a town it could certainly be the soon to be ex doing what soon to be ex’s do when they realize they are going to have to support themselves and pay child support.

Well, in hindsight what I thought and she agreed might be good advice and perhaps stop some of the craziness and witch hunting simply started a whole new chapter and sent the gossip mongering lunatic into full tilt boogie.

Stand by for Part III It brings new meaning to sexual harassment , retaliation, discrimination, bullying and every other obnoxious thing a boss can do to an empl