Dear Prudence,
I have a colleague who’s been sort of a friend for over a decade—we were grad school classmates before we were colleagues. I am now part of the senior leadership team who evaluates her. We are not at all allowed to talk outside of that group about what is discussed in the meeting where we develop our evaluations, and after the meeting, employees receive a written summary of the team’s evaluation. This written report is edited to only include objective feedback, but it’s become common for non-objective factors to be part of our confidential discussion. She is significantly underperforming in one of the major evaluation categories, and her formally assigned mentor got really personal in her rant about this person’s year: “She cancels all their meetings while she’s working two other jobs outside of our workplace and is prioritizing her family and her community service and side-hustles over this job.” She wrapped up the rant with “And I know this because I’m on Facebook and I’m seeing everything.”
I think much of the objective critique is fair, but I’m concerned about the way this mentor is using social media surveillance to bring in personal factors to the conversation. Is there a way for me to tell this colleague to unfriend her mentor on socials without revealing it came up in this confidential meeting? The last part that complicates this is that I have already blocked this mentor from all my socials because she had bullied me in the past when I was a junior colleague—so there’s no way I could see that these two colleagues are connected on socials naturally.
—No More Work Friends