I’d get people doing weaponised shell-game on me:

I’d write a two-sentence email and people would get dark on me for it.

I’d write something flowery like that and people wouldn’t read it.

I’d write something that would open with the lede, turn flowery for a paragraph or two, and then close with the lede and it still wouldn’t be okay for whatever reason.

There were people who couldn’t fucking answer bullet points when it was completely explicit.

Idk, part of it was that the staff felt overworked, a lot of it was that the role I was in represented a significant change especially with regards to the power balance in the organisation so staff were digging their heels in so as to obstruct my project by any means possible, part of it was just people being inscrutable jerks.

I pissed so many hours up the wall talking to managers to get them to performance-manage their staff on getting them to read and respond to their emails and “wrapping around” communication so that shitty staff wouldn’t get away with basically lying about the expectations I was placing on them or what was being asked from them to achieve tasks. That place had a really weird culture.

I know it probably sounds like I was working as a hatchet man but that’s the opposite of what I was actually doing. I don’t really want to give specifics so I can maintain some anonymity but in round about terms my role was straddling the lines between compliance with regards to accreditation and internal policy as well driving devolution of power, mostly through organisational change.