Ask a Manager

I’m off for a few days. Here are some past letters that I’m making new again, rather than leaving them to wilt in the archives.

1. One of our bosses got invited to our rowdy beach weekend

I am good friends with three of my coworkers, let’s call them Billy, Goat, and Gruff. The four of us are distributed across three different teams, but we work together a lot on various projects and also hang out with some regularity outside of work. As such, we are planning a big beach weekend getaway in August. We’ve all invited various friends, booked a giant house for the weekend, and have been making plans for a super fun, rowdy weekend of drunken shenanigans (as beach excursions tend to be).

Billy is also friends with Goat and Gruff’s boss, Gabby. Like us, Gabby is in her 30s, friendly, fun, lively, and would logically be friends with all of us if she weren’t Goat and Gruff’s boss. She has been to dinner and drinks with us, and on one occasion the whole group went back to Billy’s house to drink more beer and eventually play a well-known boundary-pushing party card game. We all had fun, but Goat and Gruff both left early-ish, and didn’t drink much (as you’d expect).

This is where it starts to go sideways. Billy, in a fit of generosity, invited Gabby to the beach weekend. Since then, Gabby has asked me for additional details and if there’s room for her to join. My hostess/planner self is screaming that Gabby really, truly cannot come. That there’s a world of difference between the equivalent of a rowdy happy hour with coworkers and a whole weekend of road-tripping, mostly-naked (swimsuits!) heavy-drinking shenanigans, communal living, and collective reckoning with rampant hangovers and sunburn. Regardless, what was a smooth-sailing fun weekend is now embroiled in office hierarchy drama.

It seems to me like my options here are a) ask Billy to tell Gabby not to come, and run the risk that he’ll blame it on Goat and Gruff for being spoilsports, b) be the bad guy myself and tell Gabby that she can’t come, blaming it on my delicate/old-fashioned sensibilities about mixing work dynamics (possibly damaging our relationship in the process), c) pray that she won’t attend, either because her schedule will prohibit or because her sense of decorum kicks in and she decides to bow out, or d) be a terrible hostess, stew in my own stress, and let things play out as they may. I could use some help figuring out how to approach this.

Gabby can’t come. It’s crossing too many professional boundaries for a manager to attend a “rowdy weekend of drunken shenanigans” with two people who report to her. Presumably, Goat and Gruff are going to have to be on guard if she’s there, and it’s just not the weekend you planned. Ideally you’d do choice A — have Billy tell Gabby he didn’t think it through and since it’s going to be a rowdy weekend, he shouldn’t have invited two of the organizers’ boss. If you don’t trust him to do that without blaming Goat and Gruff (despite your explicit instructions), then you need to move to choice B — deliver that message yourself. Do not just hope she won’t attend or suffer in silence.

But really, Billy messed this up and he should fix it.

Read an update to this letter here.

– 2019

2. My coworker is visibly uncomfortable around my service dog

I recently started bringing my service dog to work with me. I went through all the required processes with my supervisor and HR, and found out that one of my neighboring coworkers (I’ll call her Carol) is very scared of dogs. I said I was willing to move desks, but they said it would not be necessary. However, Carol avoids me and my dog, and even refuses to walk within a few feet of my dog. If we’re walking in a hallway towards each other, I have to duck behind a wall or Carol gets visibly scared. I would like to help her be more comfortable around my dog, but don’t want her to feel pressured or coerced. Do you or your readers have any suggestions?

For context, my dog is about 65 pounds and tall. So she doesn’t exactly blend in. I keep her well groomed to make sure she doesn’t smell or shed excessively. She’s very quiet and doesn’t make any fuss.

I don’t know that it’s your place to try to help Carol be more comfortable around dogs unless she expresses an interest in that on her own (although I certainly understand the impulse to want to!). But you could tell her that you’ve noticed she’s uncomfortable around your dog and ask if there’s anything you could do differently to make her more comfortable, or if there are any questions you can answer about your dog that might help put her more at ease.

You could also mention that you’d offered to move to a different desk but HR didn’t think it was necessary — but that you’d be willing to bring it up again if she’d like you to.

– 2018

Read an update to this letter here.

3. My coworker has panic attacks, and it’s affecting my work

I share an office with my coworker. She has panic attacks. When she has one, I have to leave the office until the attack passes. If I’m there or she isn’t alone, the attack won’t stop. We work with financial information and can only do work with the computer inside our offices. When I have to leave, I can’t do work because my computer is in the office (we all work in offices with doors and there is no way for anyone to ever bring work outside of their offices), and when she is having an attack she can’t do any work. We are always behind on work because she has an attack every two or three days.

Our boss says if we don’t start delivering more work on time, he’ll put us both on a PIP. My coworker asked me not to tell anyone about her attacks. I don’t want to out her but I don’t want to end up on a PIP. There aren’t any empty offices for me to move to and there isn’t room anywhere else because everyone, including my boss, is already sharing. The last thing I want is to out my coworker. No one else here knows about her anxiety or panic attacks and she feels bad about disrupting our work. I don’t want to make it worse. But I also don’t want to keep getting in trouble or ending up on a PIP. I can’t think of any way to get my boss to understand without outing her.

Yeah, you’re going to have to out her. It’s not reasonable for her to insist that you leave your work space like this, and one of you needs to let your boss know what’s going on.

I’d say this to your coworker: “Because this is now affecting my performance and is at the point where I could lose my job over it, I need to talk to Bob about another solution for our office space. To do that, I’ll need to explain to him what’s going on. Would you prefer to talk with him yourself first? I’m planning to talk with him tomorrow, so I wanted to give you a chance to speak with him first about your panic attacks if you’d like to.”

But then you do need to disclose to your manager what’s happening, and quickly (because the longer you let this go on, the more it’s affecting your work and the harder this may be to come back from). This isn’t gossiping about someone’s private health information. This is letting your manager know about a major reason for your slipping work performance. It sounds like your choices are to do that or risk getting fired for low performance, and it’s not reasonable for your coworker to expect you to do the latter.

– 2018

Read an update to this letter here.

4. Interviewer insisted I was uninterested in the job

A friend got me an interview with his company. It was going well until I met the senior manager; towards the end of the interview, he dismissed one of my questions about the work by saying “I don’t think you’re actually interested in this, I think you just want a job.” I didn’t respond very well, as I sat there in stunned silence while he gave me “job-hunting tips.” Should I have argued back with him? I’m in a field where getting in someone’s face is an acceptable negotiating tactic, but it felt out of place at an interview.

There are three possibilities here: (1) You really were coming across as if you weren’t that interested, and this guy was candid in response; (2) he’s just a jerk, or (3) he wanted to test you to see how you’d react (which is jerky if there was no reason for it but potentially not so jerky if the field really does require the ability to stay cool under hostile questioning, and if you don’t yet have a professional track record proving you can do that). You might be able to get a sense from your friend of which category this guy might fall into.

I don’t think you should have “argued back,” but I do think you should have calmly asked, “What makes you say that?” and then responded calmly to whatever he said.

– 2011