Il Duce's Impotent Revenge

In the end, Il Duce didn't get his way. I was neither fired nor moved to a different part of the company. I didn't hear from him after that for about a month, until it was time for my mid-year review. (Yes, we do these twice a year.) Again, I wrote volumes on all of the good work I and my team had gotten accomplished that year. When I met with Il Duce for the review, he ignored all of my salient achievements and simply talked about how terrible a manager I was.

As he talked, I wrote out a list of his key points. On the left side of the page I listed the positive things he said about me. There was only one, which was that my team was doing good work and therefore I deserved a little credit.

On the right side, I listed his negative points about me. There were fourteen. All of them revolved around my single "mutinous" meeting with my managers. His examples of my poor management were either twisted or fabricated completely.

When he was done, I told him I'd like to recap his points. I read them back to him and asked him to clarify if I had missed anything. When I was finished, I said, "So I've done one thing right this year and fourteen things wrong. Is that what you're saying."

"Yes."

"Just out of curiosity, did you read my comments at all?"

"Yes."

"And of all the accomplishments I detailed, you don't consider any of them noteworthy?"

And this is what he told me: "Because of the problems we're having, I can't see any of those things at all." Ah. Déjà vu.

Then he said: "You have lost my trust, and my trust isn't something given, it's something earned. You are going to have to find a way to earn it back."

Right, I thought to myself. Let me put that at the top of my priority list.

He said he was going to set up a regular monthly meeting with me so we could get back on track and to give me a chance to voice my opinions and concerns so they didn't "bottle up again and come out in inappropriate ways." He sounded as if the idea of meeting with me regularly about this was a particularly painful one and not his idea at all. (I suspected Tiberius' insistence, here.) He asked me if I thought that was a good idea. Sensing his uneasiness at the notion, I said I thought it was a fantastic idea.*

[* For the record, we only had one of those meetings, at which he asked me if there was anything I wanted to talk about, anything that he was doing that was bothering me. I asked him if there was anything he was doing that I should know about. He said that no, but he said that in the past I was worried that he was going to my employees behind my back and giving them instructions that were counter to my own. Being well aware that he was, in fact, doing this all the time even still, I asked him outright if he was doing this, to which he lied and said, "No, of course not." I replied: "In that case, if you're not, then I don't have anything to talk about," ending our one and only meeting on how we could get "back on track."]

We ended the conversation on that not too terribly surprising note. This was in September of 2007. We've spoken perhaps a half-dozen times since then.

The fallout from Il Duce, sure, I was prepared for that. It was the fallout from my own team that caught me off-guard.