2003-08-25 - 10:48 a.m.

Politics of Pressure

As a state employee, I should make my professional judgments based on what is best for the public good. Last week was one of the most stressful for me, and not because of the rampant viruses knocking out networks and hard drives. It was because a project manager (not my boss) whom I've been working for was putting incredible pressure on me.

The real issue is that he has been doing a poor job managing one of the projects I work on all year. Usually I like to plan things well in advance, as I believe panic made decisions are faulty. Or rather they aren�t the best solutions to problems, but instead tend to focus on ending the crisis with little regard to long-term impacts. They are impulsive and dangerous.

Anyway, I gave this project manager a memo dated July 17 with all of my water quality modeling results. I gave him my draft presentation on August 15 (and even offered to give him earlier drafts of my presentation for him to review). On Monday the 18th he freaked out when he looked at my July 17th results. He claimed that my August presentation contradicted my July results and conclusions.

I was pissed for him to call me out like this in a meeting, because my July 17th results had no conclusions. I gave him tables and numbers and a list of work in progress. Yet, he or his staff republished my memo. They released it to the public, but added conclusions to it, conclusions that weren't mine and were incorrect. So at the meeting I told him, "It is impossible for me to contradict my earlier conclusions, since you didn�t give me time to write any." I then handed the guy a copy of my original memo and said, "See, no conclusions. And yet I noticed and wanted to talk about the fact that somebody added conclusions to my report and that they are wrong."

It got worse. For the next two days he'd argue with me wanting me to not report violations at one location. To not call the violations "violations", and to call something else a violation that wasn't a violation of any standard, but a simple change. Basically he was wanting me to conceal the negative water quality impacts of this project.

His pressure was getting so bad and uncomfortable that I spoke to my bosses and told them what he was doing. So the morning of my presentation he grabbed me by the arm and dragged me over to my bosses and started to get me to say things as FACT that I'd not yet modeled. That is wrong, so I refused to do it. But he was shocked when my bosses turned to him and said, "[Contour] has say what he believes in." Basically my management stood up for me, but his timing was terrible. He chose to pull me aside and have this discussion off the record 5 minutes before my presentation, while standing in front of the very audience he wanted my to mislead.

Everybody saw a project manager bullying around his environmental engineer and knew something was up. But I've never been so pissed before while giving a presentation.

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