By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
I am planning to quit my job for a new job and my manager got upset and said he’ll bad mouth me to my new employer. Is this legal?
WOW! What a charming manager!
I’m Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter. I coach people and organizations around hiring more effectively, a better performance in a job search, managing and leading more effectively, a whole host of different things related to being effective in the workplace. Get this situation.
I’m planning to quit my job for a new one and my manager got upset and said he’ll badmouth me to my new employer. Is this legal? Wow! You’re working for a real special person there, aren’t you? Here’s my thinking. When you give notice to your boss and you do that in writing, you look across at them and I want to start off with an assumption.
The assumption is there’s no reason for them to give a bad reference and that you’re smart enough that if it were true what they were threatening, you would go to someone else to provide the reference. So, with that as an assumption, we want to, shall we say, challenge your boss one time and just simply say, I have a friend who’s an attorney and I just want to be clear. If you act on that threat, I will own your house.
It will take time but if you cost me a job because you want to keep me there, I will own your house and more and your firm will fire you because the fact is you’ve exposed them to litigation. So, it’s your choice. I don’t want to do this but when you threaten me in my livelihood in this way, I have to respond to that and move from there.
So, tell me what do you plan on doing? Now, you can’t be more direct than that and it’s true what you’re saying. You will sue them and sue him personally because he made that threat in advance. So, that’s one way of approaching it.
Another way is when it comes time to give notice, you walk into the HR office and not into his or her office. We don’t know the gender and you say to HR, I’m giving notice today. I’m going to be leaving on such and such date.
I want to be clear. I would have done this with my manager but he made a threat and the threat was he would give a bad reference. He did it in order to ensure that I wouldn’t take this job.
I also want to be clear that if he acts on that, I’m going to take legal action. I would appreciate it if you had a conversation with him in order to ensure that we don’t have to meet in court. That should put an end to the nonsense.
People like this try to get away with bullying less expensive people, less experienced people and you don’t want to be bullied. You want to get as far away from this person as you possibly can. Great choice to leave because if this is their way of conducting themselves when they believe you’re leaving, I can only imagine what it’s like while you’re working there.
I’m Jeff Altman. Hope you found this helpful. My website is TheBigGameHunter.us. Go to the site.
Go exploring the thousands of posts there to help you. If you’re interested in one-on-one coaching, schedule a free discovery call at the website. On the home page, there’s a button that will let you do that or schedule a coaching call and if you’re watching on youtube very simply what i want you to do is on the home on the lower right sorry on the lower right there’s a little icon there click on that subscribe to my channel you’ll get notified whenever I release something new.
Have a great day and take care
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