Creepy/boring work environment - When I first started working in my team, I was surprised to find how awkward every meeting was. I don't think it was like this for every team, but the general mood of most of my team's interactions consistently oscillated between apathetic and inappropriately hostile. I got the immediate feeling that something was weird, but everyone was still trying to act normal in front of me, so I didn't find out the reasons until later. In a weird attempt at lightening the mood, my manager would often order people to discuss their personal vacation plans during meetings. After getting back from a vacation I had to reschedule due to my manager pressuring me to do so, she kept asking me to send her 3 of my favorite pictures without me having offered which I thought was kind of bizarre. I never did because I didn't think she needed to see my vacation pictures or show them to the entire team for that matter. It gets weirder because she then later dinged me in my performance evaluation for things that happened at work while I was on vacation. She had a poor sense of boundaries in general where she seemed to need to know about everything happening in your life to assess whether it was actually more important than your job. Another coworker after being asked about her vacation during a meeting, flatly responded that it was nice simply because she wasn't at work.
Management - After awhile, I realized that my manager had more far reaching issues with people skills. During task oriented sessions, she liked to blindside people with subtle accusations about their work without any previous communication. During my one on ones she would explain her frustration with her observation that people acted defensive during meetings, so she didn't seem to have any idea how her actions came across. When I suggested simple things like creating an agenda or making meetings more focused on individuals involved without involving everyone every time, she would acknowledge that I spoke and that's as far as it would go. It became a theme over and over again that my manager simply did not listen or retain information. If she forgot something someone had told her or the status of something, she would quickly get angry and blame a coworker who would then have to explain the last conversation on the topic for the 2nd or 3rd time. She had major trust issues and assumed that anything bad that happened was due to the ill will of some guilty party that needed to be ferreted out - she did not seem to understand or even entertain the idea that any breakdown was some fault of her own or just a crappy process (there were many). Much later she would tell me that she was working with her boss on "being okay with being wrong", so upper management appeared to be aware of an issue but did nothing about it.
In summary, this type of work environment made it unbearable to be there, and I soon realized why everyone acted and seemed so defeated in their interactions. The turnover within the group was high - I had replaced someone who had left the team for similar reasons and during my time there, someone else had transferred out of the team after having loud public arguments with the manager on the floor.
