Ask a Manager

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Manager is always scratching his chest inside his shirt

I am a recent transfer to my current office, 10 years with my company, and I have an issue with a manager. “Mark” wears his shirt with the top three buttons undone and he is rarely seen without his hand inside the shirt, scratching his chest. Am I wrong to be grossed out by this?

Mark is my direct manager, over my immediate supervisor. I have talked to my supervisor about my feelings and I was told that if I felt like this was a serious concern, I should take it up with HR.
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What can I do? Short of reporting this to HR or trying to ignore him, which is hard to do since he will stand right in front of you and scratch his chest while he talks to you.

You’re not wrong to be grossed out; someone regularly having their hand inside their clothes is odd, and three unbuttoned buttons is more skin than you see in most offices.

That said, your supervisor is correct that unless you think it’s a big enough deal to take to HR (and I agree that it’s not), there’s nothing you can do about it. Mark’s scratching his chest; he’s not fondling his man parts or otherwise crossing glaring lines. The behavior is uncouth, but it’s not obscene.

At most, the next time he does it you could say, “Are you okay? You keep scratching yourself” — which could make him realize he’s doing something noticeable enough to be remarked on — but if that doesn’t work, then realistically you probably just need to accept the dude is a bit boorish (or very itchy).

2. Is it OK to drink non-alcoholic beer at work?

In your opinion, would it be okay for an employee to drink non-alcoholic beer in the office? Since it contains no alcohol, they wouldn’t be getting drunk and negatively impacting performance. But maybe it falls under the category of “not work appropriate.”

In most offices it would seem pretty weird. It’s an optics issue, not something strictly logical. Partly it’s that people won’t necessarily know it’s non-alcoholic at first glance; a lot of non-alcoholic beers look exactly like regular beer, and it’s not a great move to look like you’re swigging a beer at your desk, whether or not you actually are. Many people won’t stop to check and will just assume they’ve witnessed you drinking at work. But mainly it’s just going to come across as a weird choice in an office — like you’re trying too hard to be provocative, or not sensible enough to know that it will come across strangely, or just too invested in the choice in some way.

If you want to debate whether it should be okay to drink non-alcoholic beer at work, that’s a different question. But realistically, in most offices the optics are going to be bad.

3. My employee won’t take any time off for an injury

I work for a mid-sized city and was recently promoted to the division manager (leading eight staff overall). Our work group is tight and hardworking, and we are all super passionate about our work. As is often the case in the public sector, there is always more work that can be done.

One of my coworkers, Faye, has always worked long hours. She works late and nearly every weekend, and almost never takes time off. Even when she goes on vacation, she usually works part days throughout. She is extremely smart, dedicated, conscientious, and hardworking. Faye is now my direct report, but we worked for years as colleagues running parallel programs. I consider her a work friend, but she is older than me and we are figuring out what our new work relationship is.

When we were peers, how she took time off was none of my business. Now that I am her supervisor, I’m running into an issue because Faye is dealing with a really bad back injury. We are going into the third week of her working through extreme pain. She has been continuing to work through it from home, since she says it doesn’t make a difference if she’s working or not. She’s been working slightly fewer hours, but mostly just pushing through, working through pain and pain-induced insomnia.

I know it’s not appropriate to manage her time off, but I am starting to be concerned because I strongly believe in taking time away from work, unplugged, to heal and recuperate. I also don’t like the expectation it sets for the rest of the team. We get generous time off, with interchangeable vacation and sick time that rolls over into the next year. Faye has about 10 weeks of time saved up, in addition to access to paid medical leave through our state. Our workplace also has a donated leave program.

What is my role here? Is there anything I could/should do, beyond letting her know we can cover if she needs to take time off? I did encourage her to turn on her out-of-office message so she feels she can step away from email, which she did. And I’m covering any in-person duties (which are pretty minimal).

I agree with your philosophy about real time away, unplugged … but I also believe in letting adults make their own choices in that regard until and unless it’s affecting your team.

Reasons to tell Faye she needs to disconnect would be:
* if you’re seeing signs that other team members feel pressured to mirror her behavior
* if “working through pain and pain-induced insomnia” is affecting her work quality or output (hard to think it wouldn’t, but who knows)
* if you have reason to think she’s burning out
* if you need her at her well-rested best for something more important in the near future
* if her never being away means you have no chance to spot weak points or cross-training needs on your team (or fraud, for that matter — there’s a reason many financial jobs require people to fully disconnect for two weeks each year)
* if your sense is that she’s doing this because she truly feels there are no options to cover important work (in which case you’d need to work to find some)

I suspect at least a few of these are in play. But if they’re not, you can urge her to take real time off and emphasize that things will be covered in her absence, but otherwise should leave it to her to decide.

4. My manager won’t take any responsibility for us dropping a ball

Last week, my boss messaged me, “So, how’s project A going?” and I had no answer because I had done … nothing! This is a project that usually requires over a month of preparation and coordination between multiple teams at the company. However, I never knew it was my responsibility! I replied that I didn’t know it was my responsibility and I thought another team had it handled. He mentioned a meeting we had with the other team a few months ago where we had apparently agreed to handle the entire thing. But it didn’t come up in any documentation, meeting notes, my monthly goals, our yearly goals, and he hadn’t checked in until today, a week before the project was supposed to be completed!

In my work life (eight years) and under this manager (1.5 years), this has never happened to me before, and certainly not on an assignment that requires so much preparation. I have always gotten really good feedback on my ability to juggle multiple projects, prioritize, and communicate effectively, so this really rocked me. I feel like my manager dropped the ball on this, but he refuses to take any responsibility for it.

I did work like crazy to get everything figured out in less than one week so we are still on schedule, but it was one of the worst weeks I have ever had at work. We had a follow-up conversation where I mentioned the lack of communication or documentation, but he seemed completely nonplussed at the situation (and definitely not apologetic). I apologized for any miscommunication and really tried to give him the benefit of the doubt … but I can’t help feeling that I shouldered the entire situation and he has walked away oblivious to how big of a problem it was. How do I get across to him how much this affected me? And how do I prevent this kind of thing in the future?

If he’s normally a good manager who communicates well, one option is to leave it where it is now, since you’ve already had a follow-up conversation where you mentioned your concerns. I see why you’re thrown by his response to that (or lack of response, really) but if it’s not part of a pattern, you could just figure it’s been addressed, you see it differently for whatever reason, and it’s now settled enough — as long as it doesn’t keep happening.

But the other option is to go back and say something like, “I know we talked about it a bit, but I’m pretty rattled that I was unaware of such a major project for so long, and I hoped we could figure out where we miscommunicated so I can make sure it doesn’t happen again. If your sense is that I dropped the ball somewhere, can we dig into what happened so I’m better prepared next time? Or if your sense is that something else caused it, can we figure that out too?” There is a danger here that if your boss feels it’s already been discussed and handled, it could be annoying to reopen it, so you should factor in your sense of that, and also how open he’s historically been to acknowledging when he has messed up. If he’s not one to admit fault, there may be no point in revisiting it — not because he doesn’t necessarily need to hear it, but because in that case his previous non-response is probably as good as it’s going to get.

Also: he mentioned a meeting you were a few months ago where your team agreed to handle the project. Unless you have reason to doubt that’s correct, one takeaway might be that you need to be more proactive about following up with your boss on those types of commitments yourself, rather than assuming he’ll check in with you about them.

5. Submitting a reference from a job not listed on your resume (because you were fired from it)

My partner, Linda, was recently fired without cause after a month at a new job. She was still within her probationary period, the job was not a good fit, and the training was extremely lacking, which is why her performance suffered.

At this job, Linda worked closely with Tracy. Tracy was in a tenured position but not in Linda’s chain of command. Tracy was very pleased with Linda’s performance and was definitely one of her cheerleaders during her time there. Now that Linda is back in job-search mode, Tracy reached out and offered to be a reference.

However, Linda was only at this job for a month and, due to the nature of her departure, she is not including this position on her resume. Is it appropriate for her to list Tracy as a reference? If so, how would she note that Tracy is a reference from a job not listed, and with such a short length of employment? I’m concerned that a hiring manager will see yellow flags at best if Linda includes Tracy as a reference. Linda has other options for references, but they are from a position that ended in June.

I wouldn’t use Tracy as a reference, unfortunately. It’s more likely to cause concerns than it is to strengthen her candidacy (because of the firing, but also because one month of working with someone generally isn’t enough to produce sufficiently strong and nuanced feedback to outweigh the firing, or even to count for all that much on its own).

The exception would be if Tracy is personally connected to someone Linda is applying with; in that case, it could change that calculus (in part because Tracy would be able to talk more candidly about what happened and her assessment of Linda would carry additional weight).