I believe that at any given time we’re faced with management that is less than… kind, intelligent, forthcoming, empathetic, organized, supportive, etc. What makes life unbearable is when you have a manager who is a narcissist and gaslighter. As a hired gun, a consultant, I’ve seen it all. I was recently at a large financial institution where I was presented with a project that was in distress. We call that a red project requiring rescuing. What I was not expecting was a department manager that relished in torturing his victims, with misdirection, lies, denial and story changes. He chewed through a new PM every 45 days on the project that I was involved in. I looked up the prior PMs in Linked in to discover that most of them had 20 years experience. Statistically, they all would not have been bad, but the nasty comments this manager made about the persons once in the roll that I was in were damning. For any PM who has been on a project, how would you like to be told that you are being hired to rescue a project, but when you arrive you find out that you are not permitted to engage the project team, you are not provided access to any project documentation or project meeting invites.
I can tell you that as a consultant, there is little you can do when you are faced with the Trump of IT management, except to do whatever you can to remove yourself from that person’s sphere of influence. So give yourself a plan B and look for a new position while you bring to upper management attention that you would like a transfer.
After
30+ years experience dealing with the nonsense of Office Politics working as a Consultant or as a Vice President in Corporate America, my books are now available on Amazon.