I've been talking about this for a while. Just to recap:

I have a coworker who used to be in my job. She was moved out of my job because she was terrible at it. But she was moved to a job that she had no experience in and was also terrible at. I am in charge of a fundraising campaign, and she reports to me horizontally because she still handles a few donor accounts that fall under my campaign.

She has consistently made bad deals on behalf of our organization. I instituted a new policy that all sponsor proposals be reviewed by me before they go to the sponsor, so that I could review the language and make sure it is accurate to what we can offer. This policy was with full support of the CEO and our supervisor. She has failed to follow this policy and in doing so has promised benefits we cannot fulfill and has caused conflict between sponsors that I then have to clean up. She makes deals in which we lose money.

On top of that, she continually contacts representatives of donor accounts in my portfolio and solicits them, which is directly against our department policy. (It also messes up the current solicitation that I am working on with that donor because now they have been contacted by a different person in our organization, which is highly unprofessional.) I discussed this with my supervisor, who told me to continue reminding her not to do so. After the umpteenth time of her interfering with my accounts, I have started not being so nice about it and my reminders have turned into reprimands. She gets upset about the tone of my reminders to her, yet continues to do exactly as she pleases. In the meantime she does not get any of her work done. When I ask her to stop doing my work and that I have it handled, she replies that she has a million other things to do. So I don't know why she is sticking her nose in my business if she's got other things to do.

I discussed with both my supervisor (who is an interim consultant) and my CEO that I want her taken off all accounts in my campaign, and I listed the reasons why her work was not acceptable and why I wanted her taken off those accounts. My CEO agreed that after Thanksgiving she would be instructed to remove herself from those accounts.

Apparently some other things happened and she was basically told to resign or be fired. She resigned. This was just shortly after I sent her a very strongly worded (but not unprofessional) email and copied my supervisor to stop contacting people in my accounts and stop doing other things related to my accounts (it's hard to go into detail but she just creates utter chaos and conflicts). So my supervisor reported back to me after Thanksgiving that the co-worker had resigned and was leaving at the end of December.

In the meantime, she continued to contact a representative from a foundation that is in my portfolio. When I had found out that she had scheduled a meeting with this representative, I privately emailed my supervisor and expressed my frustration again. My supervisor responded back that she understands and that she'll be gone soon anyways. I asked the coworker what the nature of the visit was and she told me it was to introduce our education manager to the foundation rep. I said okay, no I don't need to be there.

My supervisor emailed her separately to ask about it, and my coworker responded with a much more lengthy response about how there was an endowed fund at the foundation that was for scholarships for one of our programs and we hadn't received the funds in few years so she was following up on the fund by meeting with the foundation representative and that I knew about it and was okay with it. So that was a direct lie. She had not shared that information with me, and I had not okayed this manner of meeting. This is not the first time she has lied to the supervisor (and I have a paper trail to prove it) about why she is interfering with my work or not doing her work.

In another instance, I had asked her very simply if I was forgetting anyone who needed to be invited to a meeting on a project she had been told to hand over to me. I was simply asking her to look at an invite list and see if anyone major was missing. She responded that she was going to come to the meeting, even though she had been instructed by our supervisor to not put any more hours towards this project. When our supervisor saw her in the meeting, she emailed and asked her why she was in the meeting when she had been instructed not to spend time on the project. The coworker responded, and copied me, that this was the first meeting of all the stakeholders and that I had included her since it was just the first meeting and that she wouldn't attend any further meetings about it. She made it sound like I had asked her to come to the meeting. I responded privately to the supervisor that she was misrepresenting what had actually occurred, which was she had invited herself to my meeting. Also, just for reference, when she does attend meetings, she tends to go off on tangents and derail the meetings and keep us from actually getting things done.

So back to the current misrepresentation, I could have let it all go and just shrugged it off that she had done this again, since she's only going to be here for 10 more days, but I can not take the lying or gaslighting or whatever it is. I don't understand why but her perception is just not grounded in reality, and it's hugely triggering of my PTSD for me.

So I responded to this email and said, "No, I did not okay this. What you told me was only that you were introducing the education manager to the foundation rep. You did not tell me that this was about an endowment fund in arrears. You did not convey any of this information. If the education manager came to you about this account, you should have directed them to me, since it's my account. You keep saying you have a million things to do, yet you keep taking on work from my portfolio. I have asked you a number of times not to contact people in my portfolio. At this point it is totally unacceptable and totally unprofessional. I do not know why you think it's acceptable to do this to a co-worker. When a similar thing was done to you over the summer, you were livid. Imagine how I feel that you do this on a daily basis? And no matter how many times I ask you to stop, you continue to do so?"

That was the gist of my email response to her, which I copied my supervisor on. Like I said, I could have let it go, but when a lie is told that involves me, I'm sorry I'm done. I cannot be "nice" about it. It's time to be clear that this behavior of not following departmental policies is just unacceptable.

She followed up later in the day about another account that was hers and included a line that said "ALSO, if any further reprimands are to come, I prefer they come from "supervisor's name"." Now this might upset her, but I was told by our supervisor that the only way to get it through to her that she needed to stop doing these things was to keep repeating these things to her. I have repeated them numerous times, and each time have become more firm and strong in my wording that it's unacceptable. If I get any flack for my email, I'm just going to revert right back to the fact that my supervisor told me that this is how to deal with her, and that it seemed to me that I had no real support in the matter, because there's clearly no repercussion for her doing this. (Obviously she's leaving so at this point there is no repercussion anyhow.)

I am so upset about this whole situation that I have had to take a personal day tomorrow. I'm too frustrated and upset to be able to be in the office.

At this point I have cancelled all my meetings with her regarding the transfer of her accounts. There are two accounts that she wanted to meet with me about, but I do not have the energy to think about it right now. I will wait a few days and reschedule the meetings.

So, I guess I've ranted about this enough. I just do not understand why she was allowed to stick around so long and reek so much havoc. Literally we would be better off if her position had just been vacant since she was removed from her previous position.

Everyone is pretending like she's leaving because she got another offer from a different organization. The people on our team know that she went to that organization and engineered a position for herself. They don't know what they are getting into with her. I think they will regret it. She does not work well with others. She will do whatever she wants, won't tell others about it, and then end up costing the organization money. The truth is she was forced out of our organization with an ultimatum of resign or be fired, it's up to you. And yet we're all pretending like we'll be so sad without her. We're even doing a farewell lunch for her. Since when do you do a farewell lunch for someone you've basically fired?

Okay, end rant.

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