Awhile back I noticed my supervisor at work was not doing his job properly.

Steve had joined our team a few months prior, and for those first few months, I noticed he wasn’t doing what he needed to do but I figured he was still learning the ropes, and I decided to give it time.

Two months passed, three, four. On that project I had to deliver a Syria conflict report at the end of every month. Get the data in from the field; analyze it; write it up; repeat.

I’d send my reports to Steve and have his comments in my inbox a day or two later. Then I’d revise according to his feedback and prepare the final draft for the client. That’s how it was supposed to go, anyway.

In practice, he didn’t seem to be grasping the details, and the comments he made on my reports didn’t make sense. I ended up rejecting most of his edits, responding to his comments explaining (politely) why they were off the mark, and undoing typos he’d put in.

I got frustrated each time I sent him a clean, relatively polished 30-page report and received it back full of typos and off base or inaccurate claims. It’s not that I think my reports were perfect. I’m sure they had plenty of room for improvement, and some typos here and there. It’s just that his reviews weren’t making the quality better; they were making it worse.

Besides adding in typos to my work, his comments made clear he wasn’t grasping the details of our work and what we were reporting on, which was a core part of his role to do.

To give an example in non Syrian conflict terms, he would ask things like, “Why didn’t you include cinnamon or nutmeg when you baked this apple pie?” and I would respond, “This is actually a lemon tart.”

I thought after a few months of saying “this is a lemon tart” in different ways, fixing his typos and rejecting his track changes, he would gradually improve his reviews, but he didn’t.

To make matters worse, he often asked me to do things that were not part of my job, like drafting emails for him to send to our client. He had a very wave-of-the-hand “Take care of this for me would you?” mentality when dealing with me and the rest of the team – ten of us scattered across five countries, all working remotely in our own time zones.

Against my better judgment (in hindsight, I wish I hadn’t) I drafted some of his emails for him. He would then edit my drafts to make what I’d written less accurate and send his edited versions off to the client. More than once this led to confusion.

The client would come back to us saying, “We thought you were doing lemon tarts??”

We would respond, “Sorry, yes, we are. Please disregard that other email.”

As this went on it became increasingly difficult to do my job. It seemed everything Steve touched needed to be redone, and it slowed me and others on the team down a lot. I often worked overtime to fix something he’d messed up. This wasn’t helped by his condescending attitude. Team morale and our reporting began to suffer.

Steve was the number two on our team, so after several months of dealing with this and becoming more and more frustrated, I decided to speak to number one: Bill.

I knew Bill wouldn’t have noticed what was going on because, as the director of the project, he had limited engagement on the project. He had several other projects on his plate. His role was a top-level managerial one, not a get-in-the-weeds one. He didn’t see the day-to-day.

I scheduled a call with Bill to talk about what was going on. I was nervous. Steve was more senior than I was, after all. As a mid-level manager I shared the number three spot on the hierarchy of our team with another colleague of mine – who happened to be excellent at his job and was facing the same problems with Steve as I was.

So number three goes to speak with number one about number two: somewhat a risky move, but I felt I had done more than enough trouble shooting on my own, and the problems were getting bad enough, that I had a good justification to go over Steve’s head.

What happened next made everything go from bad to worse, and before I knew it, I had a very different type of problem on my hands.

On the call with Bill, I tried to be both polite and firm. Diplomatic but honest. I didn’t want to sound like I was complaining, so I tried to be very objective. I described the situation, gave examples, and explained how it was negatively impacting my work and the team’s overall output.

Bill’s response surprised me.

“Sometimes people have different ways of working,” he began.

Not a strong start, I thought, but okay, I’ll give him a chance.

“It seems like maybe you and Steve work in different ways. Steve is a really good guy, though. And he’s been with the company for a long time.”

“I understand that,” I countered, “But as I mentioned, his reviews on my reports are not useful and I end up needing to delete most of his inputs. Then you have the issue of sending inaccurate things to the client, who keeps getting confused by his messages…”

So began the circular conversation Bill and I would continue for months, which can be described less as a conversation and more as an exercise in banging my head against the wall while being gaslit by my (white, male) boss in regards to my other (white, male) boss’s performance on our team.

To be continued next week in Part 2.

All names changed.