Manager ignores employee’s written requests, then blames everyone else for work mistakes, leading employee to confront him in front of client: ‘I stopped letting vague instructions become my responsibility’ – FAIL Blog

Is it really that important to ensure you have written proof of everything important you are told to do at work?

Anyone who has worked under a boss or a manager will tell you the answer is always “absolutely yes, always document everything.”

Why, you ask? Well, because managers don’t love to be held accountable for their mistakes, so if they get a chance to pin them on someone else, they will take it without a blink of an eye. All you can do to keep it from happening to you is to have as much proof as possible that you did your job right. That proof can only be explicitly written.

Which leads us to how collecting these proofs should be done: Basically, every time your boss gives you a task or a note, you should go to your email, start a new one, repeat the boss’s instructions, and ask for confirmation. Don’t make any drastic changes without said confirmation. That way, even if your boss asks you why this one task didn’t get done, you can pull up that email and show them that they never confirmed execution.

That was how the employee below got their manager to finally start replying to written requests. At first, the boss only gave vague instructions verbally, so if something went wrong he could pin it on his employees, while they had no way to prove that it happened differntly that how he described it. After taking the blame one too many times, the employee decided it was time to teach the manager a lesson and took it upon themselves to make a change. So, instead of following the boss’s vague verbal instructions, the employee asked for confirmation via email. They obviously didn’t get a response back, so they didn’t do what the boss asked, and when it was time to present the presentation to the client, there was clear proof of the boss’s lack of communication.