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minoanmissA reader writes:
I recently started working full-time at the company run by my father. It has around 20 employees, and I took over a position from someone who left to pursue work in another field.
In taking over his duties, my company email account was merged with his. He had turned off his email chat feature, but did not delete any of the chat messages, and all of them became visible to me. They include long message threads with other current employees about how much they hate their boss (my father), not only critiquing his professional decisions but getting quite nasty about who he is as a person. They even say a few terrible non-professional things about me.
This is completely blindsiding, as everyone has been more than kind to me, and many have been working with my father for more than 15 years. I know reading these messages will be hard for my father, but I am not inclined to ignore this issue, especially since this is over company email. How should I proceed?
Oh no.
People get to blow off steam about their boss, but this sounds like more than light griping; it sounds personal and vicious.
If I’m wrong about that and it is just light griping that you could imagine seeing in a different job and not thinking was really out of line, then I would urge you to let this go. People do complain about their bosses, even bosses they like, and it’s just part of the job of managing people — unnerving as I imagine that would be to see as a daughter. If you reported that kind of thing to your father, you’d be ensuring your coworkers never trusted you and always saw you as a spy for your dad.
But if the stuff you saw was indeed egregious … well, of course you’re more loyal to your father than to people you just met who apparently have been trash-talking you both.
The one caveat I would give is to look at the complaints really objectively — try to see them the way you would if you didn’t have any personal investment. If they’re complaining about legitimate things, even very heatedly, give that a lot of leeway. They may have legitimate complaints! For all we know, they may have tried to solve them through other avenues earlier and not gotten anywhere. If that’s the case, I’d use what you saw as background information but not do anything further with it.
But otherwise, yeah, I can see wanting to talk to your dad. And it’s not about getting people in trouble — it’s that you now have this awful information about his company and the people he’s employing that he doesn’t have. I don’t think anyone would expect you to keep that from, say, a spouse, and if you’re at all close to your dad I don’t think it’s reasonable to have to keep that kind of secret in that relationship either.
If/when you talk to him, you might also talk about what this will mean for you. You presumably need to work with these people and it’s not great for you if they see whatever results from this as being your fault (even though they’re responsible for whatever they said). There might not be any way to mitigate that — the timing might make it very obvious it came from you — but it’s worth talking that through too.
I recently started working full-time at the company run by my father. It has around 20 employees, and I took over a position from someone who left to pursue work in another field.
In taking over his duties, my company email account was merged with his. He had turned off his email chat feature, but did not delete any of the chat messages, and all of them became visible to me. They include long message threads with other current employees about how much they hate their boss (my father), not only critiquing his professional decisions but getting quite nasty about who he is as a person. They even say a few terrible non-professional things about me.
This is completely blindsiding, as everyone has been more than kind to me, and many have been working with my father for more than 15 years. I know reading these messages will be hard for my father, but I am not inclined to ignore this issue, especially since this is over company email. How should I proceed?
Oh no.
People get to blow off steam about their boss, but this sounds like more than light griping; it sounds personal and vicious.
If I’m wrong about that and it is just light griping that you could imagine seeing in a different job and not thinking was really out of line, then I would urge you to let this go. People do complain about their bosses, even bosses they like, and it’s just part of the job of managing people — unnerving as I imagine that would be to see as a daughter. If you reported that kind of thing to your father, you’d be ensuring your coworkers never trusted you and always saw you as a spy for your dad.
But if the stuff you saw was indeed egregious … well, of course you’re more loyal to your father than to people you just met who apparently have been trash-talking you both.
The one caveat I would give is to look at the complaints really objectively — try to see them the way you would if you didn’t have any personal investment. If they’re complaining about legitimate things, even very heatedly, give that a lot of leeway. They may have legitimate complaints! For all we know, they may have tried to solve them through other avenues earlier and not gotten anywhere. If that’s the case, I’d use what you saw as background information but not do anything further with it.
But otherwise, yeah, I can see wanting to talk to your dad. And it’s not about getting people in trouble — it’s that you now have this awful information about his company and the people he’s employing that he doesn’t have. I don’t think anyone would expect you to keep that from, say, a spouse, and if you’re at all close to your dad I don’t think it’s reasonable to have to keep that kind of secret in that relationship either.
If/when you talk to him, you might also talk about what this will mean for you. You presumably need to work with these people and it’s not great for you if they see whatever results from this as being your fault (even though they’re responsible for whatever they said). There might not be any way to mitigate that — the timing might make it very obvious it came from you — but it’s worth talking that through too.