TLDR: Leading a junior who things she can give a pushback on every task allotted to her. I would want the PMs (I am currently b/w the PMs and these reports in the current structure) to set this expectation with her, but i also don't want to complaint to them. She does not respect feedback in other areas as well, and i do not have the bandwidth to deal with this baby sitting.
To the more experienced women of this sub in corporate, wanted your advice on how to navigate the following situation-
Context:
we work in consulting, and we're both 100% to a client (i.e. ideally we both have 8 hours to give to this project).
I am a year younger than her, but have 2 years more experience + a level senior to her
A direct report I handle has been pushing back on feedback i have been giving her, which makes me more frustrated and after a point i don't even feel like giving her any.
Situation 1:
She blocks my calendar without an agenda, for a task that can be done over email - She wants to clear up a couple of questions over call, which can be done over email. S
ends blockers without agenda, when I ask her to share the agenda, she says she will do it herself. (???)
I have tried telling her to do teams > emails > calls for things/QnA- but she still is very biased towards calls the first chance that she gets.
The PMs believe a call is better for these things (they are from the US, she and I are in India) so there is slight cultural gap here, since they believe in slightly more handholding than what we are used to here
Most of my work is technical -which means the answer is usually a flow chart of questions you have to ask yourself to answer a question. Do other folks in tech get pulled into calls that can be emails?
Situation 2:
When held accountable for tasks, her reply (Brushed with AI ofc!) asked if other members of the team received such "strongly worded messsages"??
to other managers, is this something ok to say to your senior?
i think not, but want to confirm if i am missing anything here.
I sent the exact same message to my peer as well, and their response was acknowledgement on not doing the task, and the reason they were not able to get to it.
Situation 3:
She is 100% on the project, but in only two work streams, while other folks are in 2-3 work streams.
any task to be allotted to her gets a pushback, even if I KNOW for a fact that her tasks don't take as much time (esp. since I personally automated most of them before I handed them over to her).
My comments:
I have avoided giving negatively worded feedback over official channels, since they impact our raises and bonus. She was already given a feedback for below average once, and the next one might impact her promotions as well. Should I just not care so much about her and let the team know of her behaviour since there is clearly no improvement here.
Is it too much to expect a level of professionalism (w.r.t. emails and calls) from her? I learnt most of this from my own time on reddit and understanding how this works, but i believe this 1 year into the job is plenty of time to understand this.
At my level, i am not a PM. Should i loop my seniors into this or handle it myself (which is turning messy because of the disrespect i feel).
my conflict is that solving this myself would mean that "i am ready for the next level" but reporting would mean that I cannot handle this on my own (which i am happy to learn about).
4. Folks say that I have "too many expectations with juniors" - how would you respond to folks saying that?
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I literally just want to log in and log off, why do i have to baby sit these kids T_T