Hi all,
Just want to share an incident that happened at work today that’s still been on my mind.
I’m in a small sector team at a company and things are getting pretty tense due to high workload.
Today one of my colleagues actually lost it and started shouting at me because I asked our offshore team to prioritize one of my tasks over his.
Honestly, I had no clue he even had work sitting with them at the time, but he took it as a personal attack/sabotage. I know banking is high pressure, especially with the team’s future up in the air, but I feel like screaming over a workflow mix-up is a bit much.
Am I actually the asshole here for not checking the offshore queue first, or is he just projecting his stress about the MD situation onto me?
Facts of the situation:
1) I chased my offshore colleague for a piece of work and said it was ‘high priority’, but at the same time didn’t know my colleagues work was sitting with him
2) My colleague said I shouldn’t have asked the offshore guy to do it, despite him having a similar piece of work being done by offshore
3) I have no ill intent, I was just trying to finish a piece of work as I had pressure from above too
In summary I just thought he had a valid concern, but the delivery of his issue was completely unprofessional and borderline rude. It could have been addressed in a stern email to me stating the facts and feedback
INFO
Who specifically did you ask to do the work a team member or the manager of said team?
Why this matters? If you want to a team member, you are an AH. You are circumventing processes to take care of yourself on the backs of others.
If you went to a manager, you aren’t an AH. You are following protocol. It is that manager’s job to determine whether your request has merit or not and what its actual priority should be.
I spoke to the offshore colleague (team member), I said this task was ‘high priority’ but didn’t explicitly tell the offshore team member to discard other projects aka the work requested by guy who shouted at me
YTA
(or your company or the offshore team has bad processes)
The team should have a manager, someone who collects all the work and then doles it out to team members. That is who you bring work to, not team members directly.
If it was my team, the member would have known to direct you back to me. I would listen, be aware of all other work and that works priorities and schedule yours accordingly.
Thanks for being honest. I still feel upset over what happened is this normal
Your colleague should not have shouted like that. Very unprofessional, ass-holeish behavior. (I probably should have said ESH.)
Truth is that your work should have processes in place to prevent your request from preempting someone else’s important work.
I still feel that what you did was not right.
I’m gonna say NTA because it sounds like asking off shore colleagues to help with work is a normal thing to do in your work since he’s also done the same thing. You had no idea he had the same person helping him with something and this meant he’d be pushed behind your piece of work.
This doesn’t exactly sound entirely your fault either, that offshore colleague now has both of your pieces of work and has made the decision which one is more important, they decided it was yours. Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not. Maybe they’re equally important and you’re both at a point where you have very important work that needs to be done and you’re kind of swapped and you don’t have enough time in your day so you’re asking from help and it just happened to be from the same person.
They’re not just unprofessional, but shouting at you at work is more than rude not ‘almost rude’. You’re not allowed to just start shouting at people on the job for doing what you did. Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day and they’ll realize they shouldn’t have done this and mend things with you, but this type of thing can be the beginning of hostile work environments. Hopefully everything works out well very quickly.
Thanks for the advice. Do you have any advice on moving post this from my perspective, I still feel uneasy and quite disappointed this happened. I feel like I can’t be friends with my colleague who shouted at me anymore, am I being childish?
For me it would depend on what they shouted. You work together though, if this person has been amazing for a very long time, maybe years, and this is a super busy high pressure time maybe try to do something very relaxing tonight (whatever that might be for you) then go in tomorrow and just talk to them in the break room to clear the air. Do it as soon as you can so you can just get it out of the way and it’s not building up and you don’t get nervous all day long and things get weird.
Say something like, hey I know we’ve all been swamped. I had no idea what’s his face was working on your project. I never would have intentionally done that and I hope you know that. However I really don’t feel great about how you talked to me yesterday. Id really like to move passed it and put it behind us.
Then get back to things as they were, or be slightly more distant depending on how close you really were with this person. Some people hang out with their work colleagues outside of work, I dunno if it was like that for you. Unless he yelled something insane at you, or a talk like this doesn’t fix things I don’t think you should need to involve your manager or HR. If things escalate then tell them. If you try to talk about it calmly like this and they scream again then tell them something is going on, but for now I think it’s likely a one off bad moment they also likely regret.
Maybe I’m an optimistic person though. Many people I’ve worked with have had bad moments and they were singular moments from bad days. I hope this is that and you 2 can fix it.
NTA, yelling at a colleague is never professional.
I don’t know much about your line of work but I assume you went through the proper chain of command, you both had high priority tasks, sometimes that happens and the person responsible for determining what high priority task was more urgent made the call they needed to make. If it wasn’t the right call or the one your coworker wanted, that’s not on you.
INFO: Your post is super unclear because you literally state that “I asked our offshore team to prioritize one of my tasks over his” yet then immediately claim that you didn’t know he had work sitting with them, so… what was actually said verbatim?
Hey, I found out my offshore colleague had other work sitting with them AFTER my colleague shouted at me.
I’m writing this post after I learned of all the facts, hope that makes it clear
You literally did not answer the question of what was said to the offshore employee verbatim.
That kind of non-answer leads me to believe you said something that would make you TA. At the very least ESH.
Why did you use the “spoiler” tag?