I have been working at this place for more than a year and have never handled any kind of data, data sets etc. I work as a generalist and it has never come up so far. Today my manager asked me to handle a live dashboard in front of him and show him a few things, it was just the two of us initially. I unfortunately didn’t know how to do it and he berated me quite a bit, saying what do even know if I don’t even know how to do this. Apologised and said that I’ll learn this by next week.
He then repeated in this entire conversation when our CEO was standing next to us.
Now needless to say I am very embarrassed and humiliated and I feel like I can’t show my face at work ever again because they heard what he was saying to me.
But how do i move on from this? What do I do? I feel like every time I am pulled up for not knowing something I completely freeze up and start making more mistakes. I am feeling very incompetent and just an overall mess who has sobbed countless times in the ladies room today.
TIA
Comments
“I’m sorry, I haven’t been trained on how to do this yet”
I’m sorry your mngr was a dick.
Honestly?
You fucking quit.
If you’re being berated for not knowing something that’s outisde your area of responsibility, and which you have never been trained on to the point where you’re running to the bathroom to cry in private that’s a toxic-ass working environment, and you should be looking for a different one.
I promise you there are companies out there that won’t treat you like shit!
Let your boss figure it out his damn self when you’re gone (since clearly he doesn’t know either if he was asking you to do it and couldn’t show you how).
Go to HR. Relate the convo and the circumstances. Insist on training for anything with which you’ve not handled before. Let them know this was inappropriate.
I’ve spent more than a decade in quality for medical device manufacturing, and in the medical device industry, it is literally the law that management has to define training requirements, execute that training, and document that it has been effective (21 CFR 820.20 is about management responsibility, and includes 820.25 which is about training).
My point is that this is literally your boss’s failing, not yours. If I was auditing your company and I discovered that you lacked a critical skill, I would be immediately having a conversation with management. Where is this skill defined, how is training performed and evaluated. How is management making sure their personnel are capable of doing their jobs?
I would recommend following up in an email to your boss, asking where the training requirements and resources are defined for your job, because you want to make sure that you have all the required skills needed. It should be documented, and he should be aware of what you have been trained on and what you need to be trained on.
I suspect that none of this is actually defined (and if you are in an unregulated industry, it doesn’t have to be, but its still bad practice). But please don’t take this as some kind of personal failing. This is absolutely a system failing.
One of the main pillars of quality manufacturing was William Deming. He had a lot of interesting things to say about how to set up effective systems.
Quality is made in the boardroom; a worker can deliver lower quality but cannot deliver better quality than the system.
A bad system will beat a good person every time.
More than 80% of failures are because of deficiencies in the systems and process rather than deficiencies in the employee.
Ultimately, we do not rise to the level of our ambitions and expectations, we fall to the level of our systems.
If it’s such a common thing to do why has he never asked for it before.
If he is such an expert why was he coming to you at all?
Fuck that loser, he’s panicking because he’s worried the CEO is going to find out he knows nothing, so he turned his attention onto you
If the CEO is competent he will see that your manger was the incompetent one in how he handled the situation