Hi -

I work for a person who HAS to be in charge of EVERYTHING - ALL THE TIME! She hires on people who are quite competent to do the work required by the position she wants them to fill, then makes them feel incompetent by insisting on overseeing everything they do. After a point, the employees start to BECOME incompetent because they just get to a point of not caring whether they do the job right or not, and therefore make stupid mistakes,,

For example, I'm the receptionist, and I had been a receptionist at an almost identical practice for 2 years before switching jobs. The office manager who was at the new job when I started gave me two days of "training", in which she basically gave me the rundown of how we do things here, presented me with a packet of written instructions on how to use the operating system (which was exactly the same as the one I had been using at the prior workplace), and then told me "You're on your own". The owner of the company (the afore-mentioned control freak) had supposedly been the one to put together the instruction packet so that the receptionist would be doing exactly what she wanted done - but after almost a full year there, I'm still almost constantly in trouble for doing things the way they're written in the packet instead of the way she just decided it really SHOULD be done.

Suffice to say, we've lost two office managers, three doctors, and five technicians in the single year that I've been at the new job - and I'm almost ready to change jobs again because the owner is making me crazy! I want to tell her the truth - that I'm starting to look for another job and why - but am afraid that all I would do is piss her off so much that she would take it out on any co-workers I leave behind and not change her attitude even a smidgen!!

Any suggestions on how to get the point across to this woman that she has to learn to trust her "trusted employees" without making her go off the deep end?