When you complain about a colleague’s behavior to a supervisor with the intention or even suspicion that the boss will then speak to your colleague about the complaint, you’ve done a very stupid thing.
Exceptions to this rule exist, of course. Criminal, unethical, and threatening behavior should always be reported, and employees should feel safe enough to do so. I’m referring to the more minor, less pertinent stuff:
A missed deadline. Substandard work. A perceived slight.
The kind of problem that grownups should be able to handle on their own.
By reporting these matters to your supervisor, you’ve essentially transformed your boss into a conduit for your complaint, thus establishing an awkward, unsettled, potentially hostile scenario between you and your colleague.
You and your colleague both know that you lodged your complaint with the boss, thereby establishing a chasm between you two that will certainly not be productive. At the very least, it will be awkward.
More than likely, it will produce resentment and animous.
You’ve essentially placed your colleague in an impossible situation:
“I know you told our boss that I did a bad thing, so the boss told me to stop doing the bad thing, but I also know that you told the boss about the bad thing, so now what? Pretend it never happened? Confront your colleague about the complaint? Apologize in what is almost certainly a forced and inauthentic way?”
None of this is any good.
It’s akin to conducting a parent-teacher conference with the child outside the room.
Also counterproductive.
The teacher tells the parent about the child’s performance, and then the parent relays the information to their child on the drive home, but the teacher and the student never communicate directly.
Why?
Why not just have the teacher, parent, and student sitting together? Why say something to the parents that the student can’t hear since the comments are about them?
This, of course, also has exceptions, so relax, you niggling exception police.
You know who you are.
It precludes children who are too young to process the information and the occasional bits of private information that teachers and parents might need to share. But if the child is old enough, why not have the kid join the meeting?
It’s odd if you don’t.
The suggestion I would like to make is this:
Situations exist in which an employee must report on a colleague’s inappropriate behavior. But in many cases, a direct, honest conversation between the two colleagues is a far more productive way to settle the conflict. It increases the chances of maintaining a positive, productive relationship in the future and avoids creating a chase of potential awkwardness, resentment, and animosity in the future.
All of this seems fairly obvious to me, but based on my experience in the workplace and as a consultant, it is not. Many people seem to prefer the short-term ease of avoiding the conflict entirely by passing it off to a supervisor, followed almost certainly by the long-term degradation of a professional relationship.
Addressing a problem head-on can be challenging, but this is what grown-ass people are supposed to do.
