A profoundly emotional letter to Human Resource Department

Dear Mr. HR;

Something about my manager keeps bothering me for the past few weeks. It took me quite a while thinking how I can turn around the situation and resolve the issues all by myself. It is not just a conflict management that facing the organization it is an ethical dispute entailing a dominant individual’s inappropriate act.

I have been dealing with an inexperienced and unprincipled manager for the past 4 months in QA department. It started in the department “meeting” earlier in the morning. The whole meeting was about a manager trying all out to cascade over all her frustrations and nervousness to her downstream to satisfy her own interest more to as a round-table where all employees of the department can meet, raise concern, escalate problem and brainstorm the solution together. The outcome of the meeting by means of solving a problem and sketching out some long-term solutions is ZERO. We meet every day, but that amounted to NOTHING! I feel “down in the dumps” and uninspired after the meeting.

My superior has been emotional unstable for the past couple of weeks, and her moods swung unpredictably. She has been acting deceitful when handling departmental issue. She was yelling, shouting, scolding using disgraceful words during a meeting, and shut out all discussion and escalation to her. It might continue for as long as she is still having that hatred feeling flaming inside her. She has been using abusive language against her staff during a meeting. Insulting and irrelevant descriptive words such as “Look in the mirror yourself”, “You think you are beautiful”, “You’re such a busy body getting involve in Process Engineering’s thing”, etc are kind of expression we receive in return upon feedback problems that required higher management consideration and decision.

She made a lot of unfounded and irrational claims about the work performance that has responsible for the recent customer’s complaints and product quality problem. Paradoxically, almost all of the claims and accusations originate from her misconduct. Frankly, I was not just shocked seeing this on someone I knew within a reserved, close-knit community, I was traumatized knowing that no action has been taken so far to bring it to an end without more ado.

She humiliated someone in front of others openly and over and over again using a public communication – email or tele-conversation or during a meeting. This happens every day, and frequently. Still, there is no evidence of “general strike” to put a STOP on it. Apparently, she is quite certain that nobody dared to take legal action against her over her outrageous act. She can act dreadfully and wickedly, yet, she seems like a powerful management staff. How could we let this happen to this company, and more so in a well-mannered society?

I am writing this email because I expected HR noticed them already, and has planned some actions. I feel somewhat reluctant at the beginning to describe the problem to someone outside QA, but I think my position is terrorized as long as this tricky thing is happening within this organization. I need your attention on the issues I just highlighted. For the sake of everyone who has been in some ways upset by this inexperienced and unprincipled management, I am prepared to provide all the evidences and proofs if HR has decided to act upon it.

I fully comprehend my letter has put HR in an extremely difficult situation, but who else we can approach for the legal act if it were not from the HR department. Please let me know your decision.

Sincerely,

An office bully’s casualty.

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Wai Ping Lee/Sept 2011