update: is it my job to manage a coworker’s feelings?

by Alison Green on December 30, 2024

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

Remember the letter-writer asking if it was her job to manage a coworker’s feelings (#2 at the link)? Here’s the update.

I took your advice to disengage from trying to manage Claudine’s feelings and for a while it seemed to work (at least it took a lot off me mentally). I did notice that other people were starting to notice Claudine’s behavior and that it was impacting other teams she worked with.

I mentioned this to my mentor, Erika, who happened to be Claudine’s grandboss (we had a mentoring relationship before Claudine started her job, for the record), about how I was seeing that resentment was starting to build towards Kyle’s group due to Claudine’s work, and it was impacting my job as the lead of a group consulting with them but also that it seemed to be none of my business to deal with that.

Erika agreed and said it was Kyle’s job, and that if I were amenable, she suggested I take my concerns directly to Kyle and that it would be his job to manage his team. I swallowed back my skepticism, thinking Erika had a better view of the situation than I did from the Kyle/management side, and did as she suggested.

I brought it up to Kyle in a one-on-one that I was seeing that his team was alienating people with unreasonable asks, a lack of understanding of other people’s work statements, and an onerous number of meetings, and that it was starting to impact their working relationships.

Kyle seemed to take it well, and then asked me to a second follow-up meeting…

At which he ambushed me by bringing into the meeting Claudine and the rest of her team (but not my management) and proceeded to tell me in front of his team they had his full support and that the issues I was bringing up were not real and that I was essentially making it all up.

I mentioned this to Erika, who was aghast at the inappropriateness of such a response and reassured me that I followed the correct chain of command to resolve an issue. A few months later, Claudine claimed that her position did not protect her from workplace misogyny (for the record, while a large number of the technical folks I work with are men, I am a woman) and voluntarily moved on to a new position, and Kyle is under some more stringent management supervision.

I have happily moved on to a new project.

I wonder occasionally if I had inadvertently been caught in a web of office politics and that Erika knew exactly what Kyle’s response would be and simply needed a spark to light the fire so that she could intervene. But having moved on to bigger and better things, I am happy to report that your advice gave me some great peace of mind, and I can look back at this whole debacle with a sense of “well, that sure happened.”

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{ 39 comments }

{ 39 comments… read them below }

  1. Berin*

    I’m curious why OP didn’t tell Erika that she’d already followed up with Kyle about Claudine’s behavior, and had been rebuffed, as I feel like that would have potentially affected her suggestion to deal with Kyle directly.

    That said, hindsight is 20/20, I wasn’t in OP’s shoes, etc, and it sounds like all’s well that ends well!

    1. Myrin*

      Yeah, I didn’t understand that, either. It would make sense if these were entirely new problems which only came up later on but if I’m reading correctly, these were the exact same things OP had already approached Kyle about, only bigger/more widespread in that by now entire teams had taken notice of Claudine. I’m wondering if there’s part of the story – or even just the office politics OP mentions – that we’re missing here.

    2. Cloud Wrangler*

      True. OP had worked the chain of command and it didn’t solve the problem. This was important information for Erika to know.

    3. Lab Rabbit*

      We don’t know that she didn’t. We aren’t privy to that conversation. LW could have omitted from their letter, or it could have been edited out.

      But that is definitely information that Erika needed to know.

      But it also sounds like LW really trusted Erika. Erika could have asked this question as well. “Have you said anything to Kyle?” would have been one of my first follow-up questions.

    4. Toxic Workplace Survivor*

      I think it’s worth considering that both OP and Erika had all that information and that OP was advised to approach Kyle a second time, with a different strategy (it reads to me like OP’s second meeting with Kyle was a lot more “this is the impact it is having on your team’s outcomes” than the first). Unreasonable people like Kyle do unreasonable things; there’s no way anyone could have foreseen that reaction from him.

    1. Zelda*

      Kyle isn’t a manager. He’s just drawing a manager’s pay and running around with a manager’s title.

      2. Heffalump*

        I’m reminded of this, which has been ascribed to Abraham Lincoln:

        “If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does the dog have?”

        “5.”

        “No, 4. Calling the tail a leg doesn’t make it one.”

      3. andy*

        He is a manager. Many managers are imperfect or straight up bad. They are still managers.

        Just like bad cooks are cooks, bad receptionists are receptionists etc.

      1. MassMatt*

        Yeah, unless this reaction was extremely out of character for Kyle (and it doesn’t sound as though it was, given how he responded to LW’s 1st interaction with him) it seem that she really had no idea how bad Kyle was as a manager. A new manager should get support and oversight, and Erika really dropped the ball on that.

  3. Pizza Rat*

    I can’t help but wonder where LW’s manager is in all this. My thought would have been to go to my own manager before going to Kyle. Or before bringing it up with Erika.

    I’m glad things worked out for the better.

    1. Cloud Wrangler*

      This is a good point. At my job problems such as this would be me reporting it to my manager and the manager addressing it. I had to do that a couple of times.

      A bigger boss wanted me to take some thing on. I of course said yes. The proper response I learned was, ‘I’ll discuss with my manager and see if it’s possible.’ In another situation I had a problem with another manager. My manager handled it.

      1. Pizza Rat*

        On my first day at one job, my boss said, “If Pat comes to you and tells you to do something that’s not in your scope, come and tell me.”

        It was necessary more than once. The answer was always, “Ah, no. That’s not happening.”

        1. Elizabeth West*

          I learned to do this at OldExJob. Every time someone didn’t want to do something, they would try to shove it off on me. Both my boss and her assistant (later my supervisor) dealt with it usually, but when they both left and they hired someone new, that person was not an effective buffer. :\

          1. Rainy*

            My last job made a really bad external hire right before I left, and when she started being expected to do her job, she’d run around assigning other people her projects. She’s not a manager, and her position exists to do those projects, not to “manage” other people doing them. People say that they don’t have the bandwidth to take that on, or that they don’t know anything about that thing, and she’s been retaliating against people who won’t do her job by filing complaints against them with the larger institution.

        2. MassMatt*

          You are reminding me of the very cringeworthy letter from someone asking how to borrow the CEO’s assistant for projects. Dear lord, no!

          2. Space Needlepoint*

            I’ve asked co-workers if I can borrow interns, but only if they aren’t busy. I wouldn’t dream of asking someone’s assistant, never mind the CEO’s.

        3. RedinSC*

          I had to tell my new staff that as well. If Big Boss asks you to do something, ask them back, have you talked with Red about this?

      2. Inkognyto*

        I do also. I don’t take things to other manager’s unless mine wants me too.

        Currently I report to a Manager who states that they are there to remove blockers and take up issues. I bring up some issues I have with teams sometimes and getting results etc.

        The usual response is “I will deal with that, keep working with them on X”

        I’m an individual contributor but my work is with a few groups under manager’s or supervisors that report to the the same Manager I do.

        I rarely have to bring an issue directly. In short that’s not something I’ve had to do very much in my career unless my manager asked me too.

    2. Uranus Wars*

      I wonder if the mentor/mentee nature of Erika and LW made this navigation a little different/wonky. I get Erika is a grandboss, but problems like this are what I talk to my mentor about when trying to best navigate a work situation and I know mentee’s do the same with me. The difference, though, is my mentor doesn’t have any kind of management or leadership over any difficulty I have had navigating an issue and probably would have given me the same advice – talk to the person, and if you have already THEN talk to your boss if you think a second conversation won’t go anywhere. BUT here there is this extra layer here that kinda muddies things.

      1. cue*

        Experiencing something similar currently, i.e. my mentor is personal friends with my boss. My boss arranged things.

        Also, my boss is mentor to one of my direct reports, and mentor to a direct report of one of my peer managers.

        So, no way am I going to talk with my mentor honestly and openly; and boss also has a convenient front seat to two units she chairs. It is such a lazy approach to management.

        1. Edwina*

          My company has (used to have?) a formal mentoring program, and they make sure your mentor is nowhere near your reporting structure – totally different departments. I signed up the first time it was offered after I was hired, and it was terrific. We signed agreements about what to expect (# of meetings/month, confidentiality, etc.). My mentor was so helpful! It was the first time I’d done that sort of if thing where I felt it was run really well.

    3. Great Frogs of Literature*

      For me it really depends on the nature of the issue. There are corrections I’ll do in the moment with approximate-peers in other departments, mostly, “FYI you need to run the report and THEN run the command, or else this other thing breaks,” usually relatively junior people who are consulting with me for an area in which I have expertise.

      Something that felt really entrenched, or I didn’t know the other manager very well, or where I suspected that there would be Departmental Politics, I’d probably take to my manager, who I do absolutely use as a buffer for that sort of thing.

      But there’s stuff in the middle, where either a other-department peer is refusing to follow established procedures, or I’m in a position to see a problem with their work/approach — stuff that I’m confident that my manager would agree with me — where I’d absolutely just go directly to their manager, in much the way LW did. “Hey, Janet isn’t following clean room procedures, and it’s going to cause problems with the equipment,” or “Cecil doesn’t seem to understand all the mathematics necessary for [thing I’m supposed to teach him], and I can’t keep spending so much time on this.” Stuff where it seems like a relatively clear-cut problem, that is squarely in that manager’s purview. Especially if the manager is someone I have a decent rapport with.

      That said, if going to the other manager got Weird the way it did in this situation, I would definitely be routing everything through my manager. I see her as kind of The Big Guns when it comes to this sort of stuff, and I don’t need to take up her time with relatively trivial things, but if the direct approach isn’t working, it can be her problem.

    4. OP*

      My management chain during this period was… nonexistent, to put it kindly. I had raised the issue to my direct manager, who made little noises but left shortly after and left me reporting to my grandboss (equivalent to Erika) who basically told me to do whatever Kyle’s group wanted so they stopped complaining to him.

      Which honestly was the reason I brought it up to Erika in a mentoring capacity in terms of “ok if I can’t get the support I need directly is there a way of getting support from a different angle”.

  4. CubeFarmer*

    That was a terrible move on Kyle’s part. Wondering why LW didn’t tell Erika that she already approached Kyle about this and got nowhere.

  5. FormerLibrarian*

    I wonder occasionally if I had inadvertently been caught in a web of office politics and that Erika knew exactly what Kyle’s response would be and simply needed a spark to light the fire so that she could intervene.

    Employees are not bait.

    1. What what*

      Seriously! This was a huge red flag for me. If Erika already knew there were problems she should have intervened without setting up this farce.

    2. fhqwhgads*

      Given Erika’s role, she could’ve already intervened the second OP told her about it – instead of directing OP to go to Kyle. So, she really shouldn’t have needed a “spark”.

      1. rebelwithmouseyhair*

        yeah. This part doesn’t make sense. OP should have said she already brought the issue up with Kyle, there’s no point going back to him, unless Erika could suggest a better way of presenting the problem, which doesn’t appear to be the case (like when Alison suggests going back one last time and reframing the problem with a focus on how it affects OP’s work rather than focussing on how annoying the other person is)

        OP is commenting, but not where people are asking about this…

  7. Happy*

    I love the idea of being able to look back at something with a sense of “well, that sure happened.”

  8. andy*

    > Erika knew exactly what Kyle’s response would be and simply needed a spark to light the fire so that she could intervene

    She knew exactly what will happen … and her choice makes her manipulative toxic kind of manager. Very likely, situation became what it was also because Erica as a grandboss deals with issues in this way.

  9. H.Regalis*

    I missed the original post somehow. UGH, Claudine. Glad you don’t have to work with her anymore, OP!

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