Protective colleague

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The job I have now is nice and I really enjoy it. I climbed a bit in function and I have a sort of senior position and have nice colleagues. One of my colleagues is going to be the team leader (boss) in a few months and it is a woman, with whom I can interact nicely. Another male colleague of mine has a sharp sense of humour and can be a bit blunt or even derogatory.

Most of the times I ignore his remarks or put some back. Not really my favourite colleague, but good enough. Now she is starting to feel responsible and often snaps at him for making remarks, sometimes even when I did not notice them. Am I missing too much of his remarks? Am I being to lenient towards him? Difficult. I do not want to be too strongly reacting, but I also do not want to be an easy target. Or is my future team leader just too protecting?

A bit of a difficult question for me, since I probably miss half of the social interaction going on.

Has anyone some good advice?

Sounds as if she is starting to mark her territory - which she should do.

Example: If you work as management and let people get away with everything, they are not going to respect you as a leader.

This is not exclusive to remarks, but also apply to things like showing up in time, making sure people are working with the things they are supposed to do, behaving well against other coworkers (etc). Without a hierarchy of management in a large corporation, the organisation will break down (things can be different in a small organisation with a flat organisational structure).

Try to listen to what they are saying and maby you can pick up why she reacted. If you want to know, maby you can ask her diplomatically "What happened?" and maby you can learn some useful things.

It may even be so that you too are doing things that someone do not like, but they are too afraid to mention to you (or dont bother because they think you cannot change or something) because you may have explained your condition to them.