Here I am again, trying to figure out how to deal with this job. My boss's boss just called me at home and left a message saying he wanted to talk about how to "best satisfy the client."
Can I ask my boss's boss (let's call him Jimmy) what the client said?
As I said a month ago, my boss is a jerk. So much so that I am afraid if retaliation of I said something and it got back to him.
I can tell my boss is overwhelmed, and it probably doesn't help that he takes vacation a lot. He has been rude to the client, he also doesn't read his emails so when the client asks him to do something he either misses or misunderstands it and sends us staff on a wild goose case doing work they never asked for. Some clients are fine with that or don't care. I'm not sure where our client stands, I haven't heard at all from the client in a couple months actually.
For example the client asked us for a comparison of the work done at two locations. So I created that and worked on it a lot and submitted it to my boss several times as a gentle reminder of what they actually asked for. But he insisted that what they wanted was a guidance/ framework so we spent two weeks and long nights creating a "guidance" which he never reviewed, and had a person on a different team review who isn't familiar with our work at all. I was able to get the comparison into the final submission but it took a lot of gentle reminders.
What I think the biggest problem is is that he is not familiar with accounting policy. He is not familiar with laws and regulations and what policies are supposed to like. He is a project manager and he oversees 3 different teams. Strategy, bonds, and accounting. So he probably doesn't need to be an expert on accounting. BUT my co-worker runs to him for every little thing. So he can't leave her and I to manage the project. She also isn't familiar with accounting laws and regulations. The only thing she is good at is formatting and making pretty grids. But she sucks up to the boss and that makes it OK.
I'm also the only person coming up with recommendations which is what we are being paid to do. But my boss and co-worker will spend weeks arguing with me about my ideas because they don't actually understand what my idea is. Another example: I recommended that the client use sharepoint to approve a document. Every day by boss kept asking me why they would put a document in sharepoint, you can't do approvals in sharepoint, sharepoint is just a database. I gently explained to him 5 times that you can use sharepoint to do an approval (it's called a workflow approval). I think he got it. When my co-worker finally got what sharepoint is she complained to the boss that my recommendations were "incomplete" because I didn't recommend using sharepoint for every...single...process.
Now, I'm fine with doing all the heavy lifting and giving my co-workers credit for doing nothing, I have learned a ton about working with difficult people. But I don't know what to say to Jimmy. I don't want to lie to him. I also don't want to make myself look bad by complaining about all this. I also want to keep this job for at least a another year.
Now that I've talked about me, me, me here's some background: the person who wrote the policy work statement for our contract quit. Then the manager quit. They hired a new one, then she quit. After 6 months they got a new one and she was just formally instated. it seems to me that these new people don't understand what the contract says either. The first time they seemed frustrated they said they didn't believe we were doing any work. I had been dragging every one on my team into doing research into the client processes so we sent them a bunch of stuff we were working on. Then they asked us to pivot and do something not on the contract. We turned that in and I made sure they got what they wanted. I was very proud of that (this was before the guidance). So I'm not sure what their upset about now.
Thoughts? I have no idea how to manage this situation.
TL:DR my boss is a jerk, should I tell his boss?