This is a shitty leader.

Praise in public. Correct in private.

Not that I even agree correction was warranted.

Yes, 100%. That's more than a red flag. A red flag is a warning sign of a problem. That's just a problem.

red flag imo. especially when it comes to fork trucks and safety implications it shouldn't be a big deal to call a mechanic to check and ensure they are in proper working order.

Shitty boss. Another boss might have been like "yeah you made a mistake and spent time looking for a mechanic, but thanks for showing inititative and trying to problem solve"

Your boss was on holiday that implies that the boss was out of the office for at least a day.

I am confused by your situation. You couldn’t start two of the forklifts, so you went to get help with that. It seems you couldn’t so what else did you do for the rest of the day?

As far as your boss asking you “to explain yourself” in front of others. Whether or not that is appropriate is situational.

I often have techs explain to a team of people how they resolved an outage or how they are going to set things up. That way I can get everyone up to speed on the effort or maybe other team members will identify things the lead had not thought of.

If someone was late for work, that would be a conversation I would have in private.

I would have addressed you boss in front of those people, why he thought it's okay to leave while not keeping people up to date on handling heavy machinery.

The goal is to have a good working environment to live good lives and do good work.

The fact that your boss pulled in other coworkers could be interpreted as a red flag, as something fundamentally wrong with your boss. However, without more information, I think this situation could be workable. In other words, there are things you can do.

Again, the goal is to have a good working environment to live good lives and do good work.

I think a good working environment is one where errors can be talked about openly and without fear. I do not think the solution is “praise publicly criticize privately”. I think the solution is for your team (including your boss) to create psychologically safe environment. How? By emphasizing the goal, the purpose of your work. By admitting to mistakes or lack of knowledge to accept fallibility. This is especially helpful if your boss does it. By appreciating when someone openly shares concerns or mistakes. By creating rituals or habits of inclusion, such as well run meetings or effective information-gathering methods.

Do all of those recommendations sound hard to implement and naive? I think for many teams they are. But the reality is that psychologically safe teams exist, and they perform better than teams that don’t have it.

If it’s hard to implement it, why am I bringing it up? Because I think it’s important know exactly what went wrong with your meeting with your boss. It’s better to have an accurate map that shows a steep canyon than a fake map that shows a nonexistent bridge.

So what do you do?

Here are a couple of suggestions:

• learn about psychological safety. Amy Edmonson is the authority on the subject.
• learn to have Crucial Conversations. It’ll help you now and it’ll help you forever.

If you vibe with what I’m saying, let me know and I can give you more suggestions. At the same time, it’s totally understandable if you don’t think my path is viable.

Big time red flag, bad boss, needs manager training, or basic human decency training.