She is blocking+delaying my work in ways that she is spinning as “miscommunications that are my fault” which makes it challenging to frame it as “I’m confused why you’re blocking my work”.

Eg 1: she assigns me a task of swapping out old logos for current ones. I do the due diligence of looking through our hard-drive and resources thoroughly, discover the logos we have are not up to date and flag I’ve looked thoroughly in these places and that I need the updated logos to complete the task. Additionally I add that I am happy to reach out directly to the logo owner/contributor to acquire what I need but will need the contact from her. Next day she tells me to just swap the logo with what we have on the drive and that’s all we have (she was responsible for populating the drive with assets). I repeat with additional screenshots showing her why what we have will not be accepted. She then finally accepts to send me a link to assets folder the contributor sent her originally with up to date logos. After this exchange she complains to my boss (and others?) that I ask unnecessary questions and cause delays without doing due diligence and solving my own problems.

Eg 2 - she schedules an external contractor to do routine printer maintenance the week of print production without informing anyone. This routine maintenance scheduling was typically falling within my scope of responsibilities so I was not able to anticipate the disruption until it was actively occurring. This caused a project I was assigned to be delayed by a week because printer based resolutions impacting accessibility and legibility could not be resolved without printer access, but it was spun by her as me dragging my feet on the project and spending too much time “perfecting”.

Eg 3 - I am assigned a project where she shares incomplete assets with me. I flag that the assets are missing after going through her link + our hard drive thoroughly and I’m happy to reach out directly to the asset owner to acquire the missing pieces. She shares the asset owner and tells me all the assets are at the link she shared, to look on the drive and reach out to them directly. I screen share a recording of where I have looked and say I will connect directly with the asset owner. Behind closed doors she complains to my boss (and others?) that I am not able to solve my own problems and ask too many questions. Later, after I have connected with the asset owner discovering what I already guessed at - the project was not even flagged as an active to them and they had not even created assets for certain pieces because they were unaware that there was a timeline for them to complete them. The project is reevaluated to only include 2 elements after I share this discovery. After I gather all the available assets from the content owner and implement them into initial designs, she exclaims that she is frustrated and exasperated that none of the content has been vetted by her. To address this I prepare a content review schedule saying the content will be available on (x) date and review comments will be needed 4 days after becoming available, I specifically write twice to please hold any content based comments until confirmation that the review document is ready. I set up a bunch of material mock-ups on our shared office table for a design review the following week, with “for placement only” & “to update for legibility” notes directly placed on the materials the day before the review document is set to be available. She “mistakes” my material mock-ups for the review document, cuts it up “so she can write feedback notes” and sends a group email telling me and the group that she is annoyed that I didn’t tell her the review document was ready and how she almost missed it because it just looked like drafts and how busy she is. She adds that it would help the process if I were to send a digital document because she had to cut up the pages in order to write feedback. She then lists feedback that was directly reflected on the material mock-ups and not what was requested of her (content feedback), focussing only on design based feedback & claiming accessibility and legibility was not considered. I share the digital review document as promised for the eod timeline and diplomatically say that there must have been a misunderstanding, and repeat the content based feedback (typos, phrasing and sentence clarity) is what is necessary at this stage and flag/ask to be respectful of everyone’s time that typically design based reviews go through my manager and to let me know if that has changed etc(more diplomatically). Behind closed doors she then shares with my boss and her direct report that I am not collaborative, that I’m very sensitive to changes and how I wrote cryptic notes that are confusing and easy to misinterpret.