hope you learned a thing or two from this incident:
- Complaining about your manager to his/her boss is a big deal. Only do it when you are sure that it will work and won't back fire. In this case, when you were caught unprepared in the conversation with the director, rather than spilling the bean about your manager, you should have gone safe by providing some excuse at the time, which will buy you time to go back and analyze the situation and if you decide that its a good idea to let the director know the truth, you can always email him and make another appointment about it. That being said, I don't think you are in trouble now based on what you said. Your director might have already been aware what's going on with the manager, all you did was probably just to give him some more ammunition to punish the manager. It's probably not going to hurt you much. You are lucky this time, but it may not always turn out this way in the future, so you really should be careful when you do so.
- Now what you need to worry about is to find out what to say at your next week's meeting with the director. Try to gather as much info as possible on the relationship between two of them. Is the director close to be fed up with the manager so he is just looking for reasons to get rid of him, or he doesn't have any problem with the manager - talking to you was merely part of his due diligency of finding out what happened in your team. This will help set the tone for your conversation next week. When talking with the director, always stay positive, never show any bitterness. Show your concerns about the manager that hurt the team and work. Feel free to let him know that you get confused often and not know what to do sometimes. But bottomline, you care about the work you do, always want to a good job.
