My manager replies to everyone else's messages with full sentences and exclamation marks. Mine get "ok." Last week she praised the whole team in a meeting and listed everyone except me. I've started rereading my own emails to find out what I did wrong. I've been there 14 months. Do I confront her, quit, or keep pretending I haven't noticed?
— Tired in LeedsYour boss doesn’t hate you. Hate is a form of attention. You haven’t earned that yet.
She’s replying to you between meetings, in a lift, while mentally restructuring someone else. The exclamation marks go to the people she’s worried about losing. You get “ok.” Not even “Ok.” Lowercase. You are the one thing in her inbox that isn’t on fire, and in management, things that aren’t on fire are not looked at. They’re just assumed to keep existing, like the office plant, which is also dead.
Fourteen months in, and you’re doing forensics on your own emails at 11pm. The only crime scene here is your evenings.
Leaving you out of the team praise is not a conspiracy. It’s worse. She forgot. Somewhere there’s a slide with everyone’s name on it, and yours fell off in the third draft and nobody noticed. Including her. Including the slide.
Here’s the one useful thing, and I resent saying it: book fifteen minutes, ask her plainly how you’re doing and what she wants more of, then shut up and listen. Quitting over an “ok” is how people end up in a new job, getting “ok” from a different manager, in a worse building.