Hi! I posted last week about going to HR because my boss yelled at me. It was a weird mix of being validated for my feelings and no manager should be yelling, and trying to get me to see her POV and why she might have yelled. And also that we both made mistakes and now the door policy is clear for everyone and I should not be ruminating on this. I’d say it was successful.
But now I have a new problem. Basically, at my performance review a few weeks ago, my boss and her boss said that I need to get more independent and that my boss needs to be able to give me a task and know it will be completed.
Which I’d be ok with, but I genuinely have no idea how to do that. I feel like I don’t have any agency. I also can’t always get to tasks she tells me to do immediately, especially if there isn’t a due date, so sometimes she’ll send a “reminder” the next day. Maybe that’s part of it?
My boss is the one who oversees everything I do. All the supply orders go through her, she also checks on the supplies in the kitchens (which is my job) and lets me know if they’re “low” and I need to restock. (They are not low, they’re just not filled to the brim.) if there’s a printer issue I have to be the one to fix it, but I can only do so much. If they’re not on a contract we have with a printing company, usually because they’re so old, I can try to google and fix it but I’m not a magician. So then she and her boss usually give it a shot. Any projects people want to give me have to go through her (so she can manage my workload and make sure I don’t have 50 things at once). She’s the first one in her position, and before that I think her boss handled a majority of her job.
Like the other day, and to show my line of thinking, my boss asked me to fill up the coffee packets in one of the kitchens, because one of the other kitchens has a coffeemaker that’s out of order and people might go to the first kitchen (we have three kitchens of varying sizes). So, I took the coffee from the defunct kitchen and moved it to the second one, because I knew it wouldn’t get fixed until the end of the week at least. But then she sends me an email asking why there isn’t any coffee in the defunct kitchen and reminds me that people drink coffee all day. Which I know, but they can’t use the coffeemaker in the defunct kitchen….. so I go and refilled the defunct coffee bin. Should I have instead said that I thought the coffee was full enough or something? I think the main thing I have any agency over is the supplies, but even that, she checks and lets me know if something isn’t up to her standards. I’d love to say this is just a me problem, but I watched her do the same thing to other clerks – get on us for supplies being low or not doing a project same-day.
I am also unsure because I don’t want to be labeled as someone with an “attitude problem.” Unfortunately I watched a previous office clerk get fired for that exact reason.
So, I welcome any advice.
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