Me 28F and a small team at work are planning a conference later this month. It’s not huge but it’s still a lot of work. so our supervisor let us know about two months ago to start preparing. One of my coworkers, “Maya” (late 20s F), found out about it yesterday and is pretty upset that no one told her.
For context, Maya and I are actually closer than most coworkers. We sit near each other, eat lunch together a lot, and occasionally hang out outside of work. We’ve both joked before that we’re “work besties,” so I think she expected that if something big was happening at I’d be telling her all about it, especially since she’s big on conferences and loves networking (I personally don’t care for them.)
The thing is, Maya works in a different department. She’s more on the outreach/communications side, while the conference is mostly being handled by the operations team. The supervisor specifically asked us to start planning before we opened it up more broadly. So, we’ve been meeting for about two months now and it was only yesterday that she overheard a couple of us talking about the conference in the lounge room and asked what we meant. I explained about the conference and that we were still in the planning stages and would be posting it to linkedin pretty soon.
She seemed surprised and said she would have loved to help with something like that, especially since events and communications are literally her job. She also mentioned that she has contacts with a few potential speakers and sponsors. I told her that makes sense, but that the supervisor picked the team and I didn’t feel comfortable adding people to planning meetings or looping others in without checking first.
She said even if that’s the case she’s not an outsider who’d only hear about it on linkedin after everything is finalized and it was weird that I I never even mentioned it even in passing. I told her I didn’t mean to specifically keep it from her but I wouldn’t go out of my way to tell other people about it when the supervisor wanted to sit quiet on it. Anyhow we kept talking about other stuff and I thought it was all good but she was acting distant later in the day and I saw she posted about "snakes" at work.
Now I’m second guessing it. I didn’t think it was my place to talk about the conference but I also get why she might feel hurt. AITA for not mentioning it to her?
Not the asshole. Not your place
NTA
You were handling this exactly the way your supervisor asked you to handle it.
And now, you know why you were asked to handle it this way – Maya & others like her.
Getting pissed off because she didn’t have the opportunity to shove her way into a project that she was not invited to participate in, and doesn’t have anything to do with her job responsibilities tells you exactly who she is…
Keep it professional with her – she’s not a friend.
And let your supervisor know what went down.
NTA, sounds like you weren’t really allowed to share details anyways so regardless it wasn’t your place to tell her about it.
NTA if your supervisor desired for the team they chose to ‘sit quiet’ on it, that definitely means members of a different department can’t know either
NTA because the team was picked, the supervisor did say to sit on it and keep it quiet. However now that she knows I would approach the supervisor about adding her to the team. Explain it really wasn’t personal or against her just that you were respecting the supervisor’s wishes because it was barely in the planning stages. It’s honestly normal in the world because different departments mean different responsibilities. Would she go running to you and talking about something her department was doing if she was supposed to keep it on the low?
Tentative NAH at the moment, because from the outside it looks like one person following the instructions they have been given and another person being confused that they feel they are being shut out of something that is in their mind directly related to their job (first by not being included in the planning and second by having it actually kept secret from her). When that happens, no one is the asshole and the only thing you do is bump it up to whoever is supervising this project for them to make it clear who is involved and why, and who is not involved and why.
However
>I told her I didn’t mean to specifically keep it from her but I wouldn’t go out of my way to tell other people about it when the supervisor wanted to sit quiet on it.
Maybe you don’t mean to, but these feel like contradictory statements. Either your supervisor wants you to be quiet about it and so you were purposefully not bringing it up outside of meetings, or not. Consider that you could have simply said “yes, we were asked to sit on this during the initial stages out planning and not involve other people by X. Since they are in charge of the organization of this event, if they say you can hop into planning we would love to have you join”. When you both pretend that you weren’t keeping something from someone but also hint that you were told to keep something from someone, it’s confusing and doesn’t create a good work environment.
Just for info, I was trying to say it wasn’t personal, like, I didn’t choose her specifically to not talk about it but it’s for everyone
maya’s reaction is kinda telling tho, like the supervisor specifically said to keep it quiet and you followed that instruction. the fact that she immediately went to post vague “snakes” stuff instead of just asking if she could help suggests shes more upset about not being in the loop than actually wanting to contribute, which is a her problem not a you problem
I think it’s because OP wasn’t very clear when she was confronted. “I didn’t mean to keep it from you” “the supervisor told us to keep it quiet” are somewhat contradicting statements. She did intend to keep it quiet because the supervisor said to. Maya probably heard that and thought it sounded like OP just trying to smooth things over and placate her as opposed to what I’m guessing she meant “we weren’t excluding you specifically”.
I think you should encourage her to talk with her supervisors and one of them talk with your supervisor. If her job is very related to an event like this, your supervisor wanting to keep things hush seems more like some office politics or a power play.
That said, you don’t want to be her intermediary. You have given her the info. She can work through/with her supervisor to let the supervisors hash out whether she should be working on the event.
NTA Some people have a need to know everything, even things that don’t concern them. These are the people who will overhear a bit of conversation and then intrude on that conversation to find out what it’s about. It never occurs to them that if their participation was wanted they’d already be in that conversation.
This may be against the rules, but this sort of feels like a disconnect in how your company collaborates. I don’t think you’re to “blame” per se, but as someone who sits in communications… I feel like you missed out on an opportunity to leverage your friend’s expertise and also just sort of sucked at being a good friend.
One of my biggest pet peeves at my job with marketing is being out of the loop on things that… need marketing. This conference absolutely sounds like something that would/should have been in her wheelhouse and unless there was someone else on the communications team involved in the project it sounds like your supervisor didn’t pick everyone he needed to. That’s not your fault at all.
But I’m not sure why you wouldn’t feel inclined to actually alert your supervisor that maybe you guys should be including someone from the communications team to help with promotions, the launch, etc. She’s probably pissed because she’ll probably end up being asked for help with promoting said conference last minute (another pet peeve of mind), when she should have been looped in from the beginning.
NAH but you’re damn near 30 and not a junior employee. You should feel inclined to speak up at work and talk to your supervisor if you feel like someone or something would be a good addition to a project or team.