Some time ago a manager from another department organized a meeting to discuss about tech stack to use for rewriting a small internal application. He gathered more tech oriented persons from various departments for this.
However, members of his department used all the allocated time, so that the invited persons had very little input and there were no conclusions for this meeting.
He asked several people to provide feedback for the meeting, but most of us declined this feedback. Personally, I had some urgent things to tackle, so I had to decline it. This decline was replied with a message like the following: "I am very unhappy for you unwillingness to provide feedback".
After this, I decided to stop any collaboration with this manager unless it is really required (e.g. unless my manager tells me to) and this decision is based on the following facts (gathered in about 2 years of meetings from various persons who complained about these issues):
- very dogmatic (when in his best interest)- when the discussion is related for his team to change anything to improve a process, he becomes very dogmatic, so that nothing is going further
- malicious - when a team member from another department makes a mistake that affects his team, instead of focusing on solving the issue, he will often complain in e-mails with lots of CCs. Also, he often interprets what you say using the worst meaning ("anything you say can be used against you")
- disruptive - he often starts off-topic discussions during meetings and time is consumed. This leads to meetings with no conclusions, topics on the agenda not being discussed at all etc.
- declines responsibility - in the vast majority of cases, he declines any responsibly and even tries to put blame on others for mistakes made by his team
Personally, any discussion with him disturbed me by leaving a very unpleasant mix of feelings: "wasted time", "machiavellianism", "chameleonism", "dangerous creature" and "lowered morale". Several of my collaborators reported similar issues when they had to discuss with him.
I am tech-oriented person (my position is "technical expert") and I am not very good with office politics. Despite the politicized environment, technical experts enjoy some freedom and can focus on actual technical challenges and less on office politics. Also, none of my projects involve him as a stakeholder.
A close collaborator warned me that my decision might not be the best one, so now I have a dilemma for the "Workplace".
Shortly put, I feel that any relation with this person is clearly harmful for me, but from an office politics perspective, I should keep a minimal relation.
Question: How to deal with a manager that is (unintentionally) wasting my time, and also makes me feel very uncomfortable?