family, friends & significant others

When your family, spouse, or partner intersects with your job or work, things can go badly. Here’s advice to navigate it well.

dealing with domestic abuse in the workplace

This is a reprint of a post from 2012. Someone recently suggested reprinting it annually and I think it’s a good idea. In a post about what to do if an employee is being abused at home, commenter Marie left the following comment, which I thought was so powerful that I wanted to post it here […]

Read the full article →

should I let my parents help me network?

It’s the Thursday “ask the readers” question. A reader writes: My question is about networking and family. My parents and I are in the same field, and I definitely was helped from the very beginning of my career by their experience and connections. Now that I’m finishing graduate school however, I feel that I want […]

Read the full article →

my wife’s complaints about work are overwhelming me

It’s the Thursday “ask the readers” question. A reader writes: My wife and I have a generally happy household, except for after work times: I think of this as the Airing of Grievances hour. And let me be clear in saying that it is my wife who does the complaining. She is pleasant with her […]

Read the full article →

my coworker/friend keeps coming to work drunk

A reader writes: I have a friend (let’s call her Becky) I have known since we were in middle school, who is now my coworker. In college, it became pretty apparent that she was developing a drinking problem, which has only got worse as she’s gotten older. Because I’ve been around her so many times […]

Read the full article →

I manage my daughter and someone complained about her

I’m on vacation today. This was originally published in 2016. A reader writes: I am the director of operations for our practice. I have a daughter who is one of our employees, and I am her manager. She has a seven-month old baby and works part-time from home for our publicly traded company, doing administrative […]

Read the full article →

my friend is angry that I can’t help more in her job search

A reader writes: How do I align a friend’s expectations of how I can help with her job search with how much time and support I can ACTUALLY provide? I’m a career bureaucrat. Most of my connections are in government and nonprofit industries. My friend is miserable in her job, and has been for a […]

Read the full article →