Heres the situation: I’m a new industrial engineer supervisor for a company whos responsibility is to be in the office most of the time working on behind the scenes stuff. One of the areas I’m responsible for is taking measurements of distances that workers walk on the job, the time it takes to do tasks, etc and look for areas of improvement.

I just graduated university and new to the company and the operations area is pretty new to me and to prepare I was floating around and people watching to get a better understanding. The center manager comes by asking me “are you lost?” in a condescending way. I give a quick serious reply stating what im doing but i feel like this is breaking frame. Before I’m even midway through a sentence hes got his back to me walking away. I get a clear message that he doesnt respect me and I wish I could have said something snarky instead but I’d prefer to stay tactful for obvious reasons.. This isn’t the first time he’s come across this way to me. I didn’t really think much of it after and kept doing what I was doing. This sort of disrespect used to happen to me more frequently before I learned how to assert myself. I’d like to be able to nix this sort of behavior as soon as i encounter it.

I feel like being short is a factor here as I’m only 5’6”, I notice people have to get to know me a little first, before i get that respect. I lift and I dress well, I wear slim fitting business casual to work.

I’m looking for constructive criticism. How would you handle this situation? What are your thoughts about gaining respect at work especially when new?

Also its been a while since I’ve visited trp, what happened to the main page??