There has been a lot of turnover lately on my team and one of my coworkers has been segmented out to work on my product line part time. He filled in for me with an important customer during a week while I was on PTO and he has been asserting ownership over our interactions with this customer and involving himself with other customers ever since. He is not bad at his role by any means but we have very different approaches. Sometimes he makes decisions that negatively affect my product line because he does not always have the full scope as he is only focused on the product line part time. In summary, he is more of an idealist where I am a pragmatist.

This important customer has been visiting this week and there have been some missteps. He has given information to this customer that I don’t quite agree with and I’d imagine I have also said some things about our processes that maybe he doesn’t agree with. The problem is that roles and responsibilities have not been defined and we constantly step on each other’s toes and “correct” each other which really doesn’t look good in front of our customers. Furthermore, coworkers in other departments communicate with me for some things regarding the customers and him for others so we never have all the information, which has led to some significant communication issues this past week.

I don’t have any authority over him and vice versa but we have the same manager who has typically been pretty hands off. I’d like to speak to my manager about this and have him specify who is to lead certain customer relations. Of course I would prefer to handle this myself and ask my coworker for help with specific things when needed since I am more knowledgeable about the product and the culture surrounding it. I don’t plan to spin it to my manager that way but I do think not assigning one of us to be the sole decision maker is really hurting our customer relationships.

If my manager says my coworker should be lead on this customer I am willing to accept that, even though I am apprehensive about what he promises this customer vs what we have the capability to do. I am nervous about bringing this up to my manager because I don’t want it to come off like I’m putting down my coworker or trying to have my manager solve our personal problems. But both of us really don’t have to be involved in every customer interaction and I don’t necessarily trust my coworker to give accurate information.

I have tried speaking to my coworker about our resource constraints but he thinks our priorities should be shifted to align with his ideals. We work in biomedical manufacturing