Submitted by avsultana on
in
Forums
Evening all,
I’d be grateful for any advice on how to handle this situation I faced today with a peer.
One of my DRs sent an poorly worded and frankly damaging email to one of our customers today, which I quickly addressed by asking the DR to go back and make amends. In the interim my peer from another team sent a separate email to the customer which undermined my DR.
Essentially it said, disregard my DR as he doesn’t know what he was talking about and he will re-educate the DR on his job description. Suffice to say I thought this was wholly inappropriate and decided to give some constructive feedback, where I sympathised with his concerns about my DR, but put forward that the manner he responded could be seen as making the team look incompetent or airing dirty laundry in public, and that there could have been a better way, or at least come and talk to me as the Manager. The guy is prone to taking periods of stress related leave and has walked out of meetings in the past. Conscious of that, I approached the conversation tactfully, or so I thought. Regardless, the guy walked out midway through and went home. I didn’t pursue it further today as I wanted to give him time to vent.
I highlighted the incident to the peers manager (also my peer) who I get on very well with. He shrugged the incident off and isn’t planning on taking it further so not to upset the individual; however, I’m not convinced this is the right approach?
If this were an isolated incident I would probably have been more prepared to note it for now, but there has been a pattern of behaviour over the past few weeks between this peer and my DR. So I plan to wait a day in the hope for an apology and/or constructive talk with the peer, but failing that I think it would be worthwhile asking him to a meeting with his manager and my DR to resolve/mediate their issues. I’m not sure my manager will support this however, as the peer is seen as a high performer and is generally handled with kid gloves.
To further complicate matters I’m leaving this job in two weeks and so far I’m leaving on good terms with everyone and this incident has the potential to upset a few people, so I’m questioning how much I should commit myself to. On the other hand, professionally I think the right thing to do is to ensure the two teams can work constructively.
Any thoughts would be welcome?
Thanks in advance