Ok, here we go: I’m a guy who’s as a team leader and project manager (some projects), my team was formed by two women and me last year, and both of them became, eventually, friends.

Becoming friends made it difficult when I had to reprimend one or tell them to do their tasks and stop “helping each other” if the “helping” was just enabling bad behavior. Eg, woman A wouldn’t study something because the other one was better at it, even though woman A needed to know it anyway.

Eventually one of them got transferred after she tried to undermine me and get me to lose my position. The other one remained, and I got a new guy as a replacement.

I recently found out, however, that the woman who works with me regularily chats with the other one about me and my “negative sides”.

The one who got transferred, in turn, spills all of this to other people in the company, and it already got to my manager.

For example, during one of this chit chat events, my manager’s secretary (another close friend of the ex-team member, and an ex PM who couldn’t do her job and got demoted) is now suggesting that they tell my coworker to talk to my manager about me because “I’m not in charge and I need to stop treating my team members like interns”

All of this is worrying me because the whole thing is aimed at undermining me, and it’s done by people who aren’t even working with me.

How on earth can I protect myself against this and go to work with complete ease? I can take my team members complaining about me because, well, I’m the boss so that’s to be expected, but I cannot tolerate that every single complian is a tragedy blown out of proportion because it’ll end up costing me my position.

And the woman who’s enabling this is using it to cover her own ass. If I end up as the dictator asshole who wants to boss other people around, her own deficiencies, that actually require being bossed around, can be forgiven...

So, she strikes from afar, saying “see? Not even her current saint of a coworker can tolerate him...”, spin, casually, in the direction of my manager...

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All of this is being framed as me not being able to do my job, and the people doing this have been isolated for their inability to do their jobs (except they were not told specifically that to avoid hurting them):

  • First it was about “how I was a good techie but bad at managing people because I had to cut slack to those who did things differently (ie, didn’t want to work)”.

  • Now it became “he’s too micromanaging and can’t do this with seniors”, or otherwise

  • “it’s not his job to check on other people’s work because he isn’t the boss (ie, manager/owner), he asks for X, let the coworker do X and shut up about the rest”.

And I swear to god, if i lose my position because of this, I’m gonna raise so much hell with the owners that these two will either get fired or seriously reprimended... but I don’t want that.

What can I do guys? Any advice on how to stop them from attempting to destroy me like this?