TIFU when I thought I won over a difficult exec and then insulted him.

I’ve been at this job for almost 5 months. Great job with a really good and well known company

Im an HRBP Director so as usual I have to spend a great deal of time building relationships, showing value, demonstrating I know how businesses work while onboarding.

I was assigned to the Marketing and Data businesses. I have 7 execs altogether - 3 SVPs and 4 VPs

Most of them are really great and I’ve been able to get some good headway with them and they are involving me and I’m watching the trust build naturally as I learn their orgs and start to build talent strategies and workforce modeling plans- but there is one I just clash with.

Let’s call him Andy.

From the start Andy treated me more like a dumping ground waiter instead of a business partner. In our first meeting it was basically “all of our employees are underpaid and you need to fix that” and just this general condescending “you aren’t worth my time attitude”

We got into a heated debate 2 months in because he wanted to change all of his employees to “managers” in title only as a way to employer them. I explained how this idea May not be wise as it’s not true promotions and the title of Manager had a distinct meaning at this company and doing this was a fake way to develop people.

He discovered he had the ability to change peoples external titles through Workday and sent me the list of his employees asking me to update their titles to Manager and help him come up with a comms plan. He didn’t like my disagreeing with him and escalated it to my boss and his boss (to be fair he wasn’t a jerk about it - just asked for their opinon)

Both were on my side and my boss encouraged me to work with him on a better org design and how to really develop his people - but ever since then he’s just been really cold and dismissive and seems to take an almost childish delight when I don’t know something or make a mistake

I discovered some interesting metrics in his attrition and during my last 1/1 with him showed him what I found. I could tell he was impressed and for the first time we had a really good conversation.

He decided to show me one of his plans for an org on his computer and our 1/1 went 30 min over from a great convo.

At the end of the meeting he closed the ppt and I could see his screen saver, a picture of his wife and children in the snow together. One older daughter, maybe 13 and a younger son maybe 8.

I commented that it was a great picture and like any proud Dad he beamed and told me about the ski trip.

I said his daughter looked like a professional skier and complimented the photo

There was a few beats of complete silence and then a cold: “Um- that’s my SON. He just has long Hair”

One step forward, 10 steps back.

TL/DR- in a meeting with a difficult exec, I thought I made progress until I referred to his son as a daughter