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It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager and I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.
Remember the letter-writer worrying that her client’s new employee was trying to take over her job (#3 at the link)? Here’s the update.
Thank you for your thoughtful response to my question, and also to everyone in the comments who responded.
I wrote my original letter at the end of a particularly frustrating day, and left out a few details which may provide more clarity. There were a few people in the comments who assumed that Sally, as an employee of the company, was also the client. The business is mostly staffed by freelancers, the majority of whom are remote and have their own areas of specialty. Sally is also freelance, but in a different area of the business from me. I had been working for my client for several years when Sally came on board.
Sally was taken on to gain experience in a certain part of the business. She has a related background to her own area, but no experience whatsoever in mine. However, as soon as she came on board it became clear that she was also keen to learn how to do what I do making comments on my work and “offering solutions,” as well as pointing out what she thought were “mistakes.” I was patient with her and even spent some time explaining the work I do, but she continued with the same behavior.
Sally then set up a new system where we could all access our to-do lists whether we were at home or in the office, so everyone knew what everyone else was working on. However, I could never access this system. I said so repeatedly, and Sally expressed concern, yet never did anything to allow me access. I do wonder whether this was possibly deliberate.
My client, in the meantime, was going through a lot in her personal life as well as trying to manage the expansion of her business, and she was frequently overwhelmed. Sally kept putting more and more “systems” in place that were supposed to streamline things, but actually ended up making more work for everyone. (For example, she came up with a system for naming documents with lengthy dates, status, etc., and every time anyone made a change to that document a new version would have to be saved with more initials, etc., so the drive ended up being cluttered with multiple versions of the same document. She then changed her mind after a few weeks of this and decided to use another naming system, which meant I couldn’t actually access any work for a couple of days because she asked us all “not to touch” anything while she renamed the entire drive full of documents in her new system. Looking back now, this seems like madness.)
The final straw came when my client gave me a project to work on with Sally. I had been setting up templates for a lot of the regular work in the business, based upon the guidelines I had created over the past few years in conjunction with my client. Sally was working with me to learn more about the templates, and also how to work with them. However, Sally seemed to decide that her actual role was to manage this process so, whenever I would send something through, she would tell me what she didn’t like about it and what I needed to do differently, even if this was in direct contravention of the guidelines I had in place. This ended up making the project longer and far more complicated than it needed to be, so it took twice as much time as necessary. One of the commenters asked if I was going to charge for the extra hours Sally added to my workload and yes, I did charge for the extra time.
This was when I wrote to Alison. I did end up speaking with my client, asking her why Sally had been put in a position of oversight of my work, especially when she has no experience in my field, and detailing some of my frustrations, including the fact everything was taking longer. My client responded that she heard my concerns, and would get back to me. However, she instead stopped giving me projects to work on, while at the same time asking me to look over a proposal from a company who offered similar services as me but at a much lower rate (so low that it actually wasn’t feasible they would be able to deliver what they promised). The ending was so abrupt that I didn’t even get to go back to the office to collect a coffee cup I’d left there on a previous visit! I was hurt and a little shocked by this, but I wrote her a polite note with my feedback about the other company and wished her well.
I then started to see work in my old area from the company that was full of errors, and assumed that Sally had taken over my old role. There was nothing I could do about that, so I removed myself from the situation entirely and chalked it up to the unstable world of freelancing.
However! A couple of months later, I ended up running into my old client at a mutual friend’s event. She was thrilled to see me, hugged me, and told me that she was sad she could no longer afford to use me and that she’d been doing my old work herself (which explained the errors). Sally was still working for her, but had been essentially demoted to doing basic tasks. I’d heard there was some instability in her industry, so was sad to hear she’d been affected. We ended up having a lovely conversation; we so often don’t get closure on situations like this, so it felt like a real gift. I genuinely wish my client well, and would be happy to work for her again in the future.
The post update: client’s new employee is trying to take over my job appeared first on Ask a Manager.
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