So I am having a bit of an issue at work and has been bothering me for a while. First, you may need to know a bit about the organizational structure that I am dealing with
There is our COO (Chief OP Officer). Guy really likes my group and worked really closed with us in the past, when we used to report directly to him. Our project manager was also part of that team reporting directly to him as well. I now have a manager who also worked in that team and was very close to the COO as well. My manager now has a CTO on top of him (Chief Tech officer). CTO does not really like my manager and what is worst, hates that he even has to handle our group. He doesn't like the new tech we handle (ethernet based). He is old and already retired and his mindset got stuck in the glory days of analog telephony.
The project manager was fired a couple of years ago when he was reporting directly to the CTO. Our COO re hired him after some major projects, which he had experience with, came along. Problem is one of my techs who reports to me has become real good buddies with the project manager. To the point that he has, intentionally or not, began to leak information regarding what we do and the state of the group. Some of it is understandable but I am starting to get hints that no only he is leaking more than I feel comfortable with, but also Project manager seems to be taking advantage of this and has began digging for more info with this tech of mine. Project manager is looking for an actual group to manage because he is a manager of himself. I am not the only one in the company that gets the hint that he is looking to hijack something or somebody to put under him
All is good and fine to this point because I could easily go to HR or the tech directly and remind him that we have some policies against confidential information. Two problems with this approach...
1) The policy is rather vague and the grammar puts more importance on sharing with clients and outsiders. We used to be a much smaller corporation where internal sharing was rather encouraged.
2) The project manager, while not my boss, has gathered some power around him since he is supposed to keep us all of us in tune and also hangs out with the chiefs quite a bit, including the HR manager.
My fear is that if I go to HR, the HR manager is going to try and salvage the situation rather than taking action and in doing so he will probably spill the beans. I have no problem with getting under the PM's skin but I think is going to be seen as an attack by the chiefs that so far appreciate our collaboration and really believe in sharing info. If I go to my manager, he has no choice but to go to the CTO, who would take this chance to push his agenda further because we know he never wanted my group to exist. If I go directly to the COO, things may be a bit smoother but I hardly think that he will talk to the PM without putting me up for animosity. To make matters worst, I caught this techs of mine playing games at work before and his performance is less than desirable. We had a conversation about terminating his employment but no one wants to get HR to commit. Guess why? The PM is his playing partner and it was said that while it certainly is wrong and can not be tolerated, we could not fire this guy without firing the other because it would expose the company to a lawsuit. Nothing was done about it.
Any thoughts or other experiences like this?