Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot about how to “fire” a client; but what about when you want to fire a co-worker? We’ve all worked with people we’d LOVE to be able to fire; people who (due to incompetence, or maliciousness, or just a complete lack of anything resembling social skills) we never want to work with again. For those of us who work for someone else, that’s just a pipe dream; but for me, it became a reality last night.
Let me give you some background. I work out of my home on various enterprises (three at the moment); as owner of Simple Meal Plan, as a blog contributor at The Security Catalyst, and as a client manager (and sundry other jobs) at a software company. In the past month, I’ve been working with another person at this software company to get our software installed on the website of an internet radio host, so that he can try it with his audience. The process has been – shall we say – challenging, for several reasons. To give you an idea of what ‘ve been dealing with, out of the four or so conference calls and software demos I’ve set up, four have been cancelled and rescheduled. AFTER the fact. That’s right, after I’d already begun the demo, I was informed by my co-worker that it was rescheduled. As he’s my point-of-contact for the client, he’s the one responsible for letting me know when the client is unable to make a meeting. But rather than let me know about cancellations when he finds out about them, he lets me know after the meeting start time. He’s also done things like call me for a conference call when I made it clear that I was only able to participate via chat. Crap like that.
Last night was the final straw. Not only was a demo scheduled at 6:30pm (smack-dab in the middle of meal time, which is more than a little inconvenient when you have a six-year old whom you need to feed), but no one showed up for it. HALF AN HOUR LATER, he informed me via email that the demo would have to be rescheduled because no one else could make it.
Well, it’s going to have to be rescheduled by someone else, because I have had enough. I let my boss know what’s been going on over the past few weeks, and he agreed that this was becoming a huge waste of our time. He subsequently let the co-worker know that if he would like to handle this client on his own, that would be fine, but that I would not be providing any further support.
So, moral of the story? Don’t suffer in silence. Let your boss know when you’re having difficulty working with someone, whether it’s a client or a co-worker. Admittedly, the last thing you want to do is sound like a “whiner”, but your manager might be able to help you problem-solve a way out of the situation. Make sure that you present your situation calmly, without letting emotions take over, and you could be surprised at the resource your boss could turn out to be in a situation like this.
Have you ever been in a similar situation with a client or co-worker? Did you talk to your boss about it? If so, what happened? Tell us about it in the comments!
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Lets call her Alice. Because that was her name. She was an accountant. We know this because she reminded the rest of us in her workgroup about once a week that because we didn’t have a master’s in accounting like she did, we failed to see the ‘big picture’ and therefore didn’t understand what were doing. (At this point I’d been doing what I was doing about 15 years.)
She was a profoundly enormous kissup to the bosses, but completely evil and hateful to us. I think of her every time I watch that scene in ‘Return of the King’ where Gollum swears he would never hurt his nice Masster and then turns around and gives Sam that evil smile. She’d say ugly things about pretty much everyone as soon as they were out of earshot. She finally got fired when her actual incompetence became evident to our Benevolent Overlords (after they spent 6 months telling us we were over-reacting when we tried to convey her stupidity and evil) and we spent another six months cleaning up her mistakes.
Wow – you might have just been working with the Antichrist. Although from the stories I’ve heard, she’s far from being a rare specimen. Jeebus.