my boss complains about me when I’m sitting right there

A reader writes:

I’ve got an etiquette question for you. I (female) work in an open plan office and sit about 15 feet away from one of my managers. He has a close, mentor-like relationship with my (male) coworker and about once a week they will sit together at his desk and chat for about an hour about their professional ambitions, the state of the company, and other industry-related topics. They keep the volume of their voices down to indicate that they’re having a private conversation, but they’re not whispering — I can still hear everything they say. Plus, I’m sitting two seats away directly in their line of sight.

One of the things they’ll sometimes talk about is … how difficult my manager finds it to work with me. To be clear, much of what he’s saying are legitimate issues that I’m already aware of, like the fact that I’ll often misunderstand his directions. I don’t object to the content of what he’s saying, it’s more that it’s really awkward to sit there and pretend I don’t hear anything while he vents to my coworker about me specifically. I honestly can’t tell if they’re aware that I can hear them. Given that he already has a poor opinion of me as an employee, should I continue to politely feign the illusion of privacy, or should I ask them to hold their conversation elsewhere? What would I even say?

For added context, I get along just fine with my other two managers, it’s more that this particular manager’s communication style and freewheeling problem-solving approach are very different from my own very methodical, point-A-to-point-B style, and we just don’t work together well.

What on earth? Who complains about someone while sitting two seats away from them? Even if they were whispering, it would be wildly inappropriate (particularly for your manager), but they’re not even bothering with that?!

Your manager has extremely bad judgment.

Often, if you’re accidentally exposed to this kind of information about what your manager thinks about you, it’s can be best to just file it away as useful background info. But this is ongoing, and I’m sure very distracting and demoralizing while you’re trying to work. (And weird! It’s very weird!)

So if you’re comfortable doing this, you could let him know you can hear him. The next time you’re meeting with him about something else, you could say, “This is awkward to raise, but I wanted to let you know that when you’re talking to Cecil, I can hear your conversations pretty clearly. Some of it sounds private, so I figured you’d want to know.”

If you’re not comfortable saying that, a much less direct option is to make a point of having a conversation yourself while they’re over there — even just a phone conversation at a similar volume might demonstrate for them some remedial principles of how sound behaves in closed spaces.