In your situation, it's end of year review time. He might be softening you up.

Why not mention to your manager that CEO supported you? Are they working with different data? I get these may not be fun to press on right before the holidays.

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gwbas1c 2 days ago | parent [-]

Don't make assumptions. My employer does not do end-of-year reviews.

To make a long story short, my manager got angry because I wrote a quick and dirty tool that bypassed a lot of confusing abstraction layers, and is significantly easier to use than the tool the company currently uses.

When my manager got angry, I first told my manager that we shouldn't argue in front of the entire office. Then I went to the CEO for advice. The CEO gave me advice that I used on my 1-1 with my manager later that day. (The CEO was also quite happy that I made a quick-and-dirty tool that made peoples' lives easier.)

> Why not mention to your manager that CEO supported you?

I suggested that my manager discuss the issue with the CEO when they told me that he didn't think he could "sell my tool" to the CEO.

To make a long story short, this is a case where my manager started the company, and people / project management is not their strong part. The limiting factor is funding, otherwise we'd have hired a proper project manager and promoted my manager (the founder) to a thought leadership role.

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caminante 2 days ago | parent [-]

>I suggested that my manager discuss the issue with the CEO

Point blank:

Why not tell your manager you already spoke with the CEO instead of

1. Not mentioning you already overstepped your manager

2. And the skip-level boss/CEO liked the idea.

This seems like potentially good intentions being easily perceived by your manager as passive-aggressive. Maybe your skip level told you to use that phrasing.

Regardless, good luck.

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gwbas1c 2 days ago | parent [-]

I think you're misinterpreting the situation, because I didn't "overstep" my manager, and in a small company everyone has a relationship with everyone. (IE, what I did was taking initiative and making good use of dead time.)

I'm not comfortable discussing this further in a public forum at this point, but you're welcome to look at my profile to contact me directly if you want to.

	▲	caminante 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I understand and don't have your context.