Employee Was Ordered By Her Manager To Get Every Email Approved Before Sending, So She Made The Boss Review Each One Until The Rule Collapsed

Benjamin Cottrell

2 days ago

Pexels/Reddit

Some bosses mistake control for competence and criticism for leadership.

So when one detail-oriented employee was told her emails “never made sense” by a micromanaging boss who barely understood the projects herself, she was ordered to get every message pre-approved.

It didn’t take long for the boss to tire herself out.

You’ll want to keep reading for this one!

Every email? You got it boss!

For some reason my boss very, very much disliked me.

I am somebody who wants to understand everything so that I can work well, organize myself, and prioritize better.

She did not like people who are this way. She was more of a chaotic spirit, and that is generally fine.

Still, this employee did her best to handle the work the best she could.

But business is business, and I need the info I need to do what I do.

I had a bunch of projects, some bigger and some smaller, but because this was a large international company, many things had to be communicated through email because of time zones.

It just made it easier to work smoothly.

She describes her writing style as very thorough.

Obviously, having several projects with stakeholders all over the planet, I wrote a lot of emails (duh).

I have a very clear and detailed way of writing business emails, which so far everybody had liked because there were never questions left to ask.

In the rare occasions that questions were left, I was more than happy to explain or go into more depth. No issue there, but it really didn’t happen much.

But of course, this clashed with her boss’ personality.

This manager, however, always had questions.

The reason for this was that she had absolutely no grasp on the subject matter and made no effort to understand the projects or explanations.

She generally didn’t understand the field of work for which she was managing, unfortunately.

This put the employee in an uncomfortable position.

And again, everybody else in my team, everybody who would just be in such an email chain for visibility but not directly involved, would understand.

I really need to drive this home to avoid misunderstandings before I move on.

I was not the only person in the team that she would pick on, but I was the one she picked on so much more that other people noticed it.

So one day the manager called attention to her email writing skills.

Well, one day we had one of those 1:1 meetings and she told me that “everybody always” had questions and I need to write emails clearer, nothing made sense, etc., blah blah blah.

She went on about it for about 25 of the 30 minutes.

The employee tried to remain curious, all to no avail.

I tried to probe with questions to find out more because no questions had ever reached me, and people there tended to ask me lots of questions, so there wasn’t an issue with people not asking if they had a question.

My probing was completely ignored. No examples were given. It was just another rant of hers.

Her boss had some pretty big demands too.

She ended the meeting by demanding that from now on, every time I wanted to send an email, I was to let her check the email before I would be permitted to send it out.

Malicious compliance so extremely engaged. You can imagine what happened next, I suppose.

She decided she was going to give her boss a lot more input from this moment on.

Starting immediately, every time I wrote an email, any email, to anybody, for any reason, I would have her come to my desk and read it.

She never found anything to correct other than write a different greeting, very literally just that.

She refused to send anything without explicit approval.

I continued whether she was in a meeting, busy, talking to somebody, etc., no email was sent from my computer unless she would come over physically to check it.

Once or twice she did not come over, trying to ignore me, and I made a screenshot and sent it to her through the chat to check.

Finally, the boss gives up.

It took her two days until she came back to me, clearly more than slightly annoyed, and told me I did not have to make her check all my emails anymore.

Before long, others started to notice how incompetent she was too.

And by the way, she continued to ask questions in email threads I started, even when the answer was already in the email, and people started getting more and more annoyed with it because she still clearly made no effort to understand the projects we, as her team, were working on, and very especially my projects.

I ended up quitting after 2 years of her bullying.

Bet this boss wishes she had kept her mouth shut.

What did Reddit think?

Experiences like these often offer an opportunity to grow a thicker professional skin.