That is so disappointing. If you had to hire another one to do her job, what interview questions or questions to her references could help you screen for that bullshit? Is there any way to screen for bad team players. (I know of two companies that make employees read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team -- I don't know if they test them after. Situation #2 is awful. Situation #3 is worrisome. I hope you test out okay.you're clearly motivated by intimidation where empathy and understanding don't work
It's not really an "interview question" sort of thing - it's like hiring a lawyer and then discovering that they have no notes on any of their cases for six months. You can't really say "so... when you meet with clients and discuss their cases, do you promise to record your discussions and findings?" because c'mon. It's implied? So when we looked at this yawning chasm of charts we went "...what's going on in your life girl?" and worked around it to the best of our abilities. It is my practiced opinion that sociopaths are performatively better in the room than they are over the phone or email and that certain situations can get entirely out of hand when someone can charm you into not caring. We've been charmed for about eight weeks now because it's always easier to go along than to put your foot down and fix things (see: Jan 6) but things have gotten objective as late which I imagine she sees as punitive. I'ma check that book out. Our DEI consultant recommended I read Radical Candor and halfway through I wrote him an email objecting that one of his guiding principles is an underlying justifying Sheryl Sandberg's sociopathy as genius. Should have been a warning sign.
I’ve read 3/4 of Radical Candor a few months back and it’s fucking bullshit. It reads like a big boring sales pitch for her business consulting gig, while reminding you that your employees are people that deserve empathy. I can’t believe people in Silicon Valley need a graph with quadrants for them to visualize when they’re being assholes (top left) or pushovers (bottom right).
The thing that really bugged me about Radical Candor is it reads like a manual for animal husbandry, not human resources. "be sure to change the straw in the stables at least once a week" rather than "the person in front of you who isn't meeting your expectations is, after all, a person and maybe you should find common ground rather than feigning common ground." The sociopathy is London fog thick.