Ask HN: Handling new director who doesn't seem great?
About two months ago my company hired a new director, my skip manager.
A lot of things are off about him, IMO:
- he hasn't met the engineers on the team except for his three teams' leads, including me. - he worked in the same broader area, but in a different domain, and is insistent on applying things that worked in that other domain to this company. - he's top-down and doesn't know much about the facts on the ground. - he gives inconsistent information and direction to me and my direct manager. - he's introducing processes that aren't necessary. - he doesn't ask questions about the platform. - he's extremely focused on one particular aspect of the platform but doesn't know anything about the other goals of the platform - he second-guesses our hiring decisions before we make an offer; in one case, he re-interviewed a candidate we had approved of; in another, he was skeptical about an internal candidate.
Normally I'd give a new director a lot of leeway since they're still gathering context and information, and they were approved by my org's leadership in interviews. But enough is odd that I don't know if I'm going about things the best way.
So far I've attempted to extend our 1:1s to try to broaden his concerns to other parts of the platform, and to show the span of work we could do is much larger, and his suggestions aren't necessarily the best things we can work on, or at least should be contingent on doing some diligence before acting on them. That works to some extent. I thought it might be that he came in with some amount of distrust for me and this team -- that still might be the case, but it's clear that among his three teams, mine is the least problematic, at least right now.
But enough things smell wrong that I don't know if I should be doing something else, like giving him direct feedback, especially about being curious and orienting him towards being more bottom-up, or even going above his head.
Anyone have experience with a situation like this?