Georgina Tweedie | Former Colleague of Mike Rinder

Georgina Tweedie worked directly for Mike Rinder. Crossing him even in the slightest meant, for her, being insulted in front of 80 or more staff and reduced to tears. The end of a day was a relief and the beginning of a new one a source of dread.

TRANSCRIPT:

He had this air about him that he was the best professional, very trusted, he knew everything. But factually, it was a façade. There was no real person underneath that. There was nobody you could go talk to. There wasn’t actual communication and interaction occurring, which is necessary in any business field, in any organization. It was just very difficult to work with him.

And what I found was, even though he was my direct boss, he was just ignoring me, basically. He would just sort of ignore me like I wasn’t there. The only time we would interact would be at a meeting in the morning to do with the daily activities, and it was usually a very unpleasant meeting for myself and the other people from the other departments that were at that meeting. It was something that I couldn’t wait till it was over each day—and dreaded, actually.

So I would stand up and I would start to give some data about what was happening and he would shoot me down in flames in front of 80 other staff members. I would just be in tears afterwards. Nothing I said was right. I was trying to very simply explain to everybody how search engines worked and what I was handling and what I was doing. It was beyond critical, it was just beyond critical. And it wasn’t just me. This was being done with other staff members as well, and so watching it and watching other people in that position was very, very upsetting. It was extremely upsetting, because it was like nobody could do anything right in his eyes. And it’s very hard to work with somebody that feels that way about you.