Ask a Manager

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. Here are five updates from past letter-writers.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

1. My boss says I need to socialize more with my team

I was able to comment the day that the article was posted and gave some additional details: I am a woman, I am also the youngest person on my team by about 20 years (I am mid-30’s), and my manager just went through a contentious divorce. I didn’t think much of it until other people in the comments were telling me to err on the side of caution when it came to my manager’s feedback given that it seems like he just wanted to spend more time with me, and not necessarily that my team doesn’t know me, especially given that he wants me to be sociable late at night.

I went through two more meetings with my manager where he kept saying that he feels as though the team doesn’t know me, but would not give direct feedback even when I asked. So I decided to take matters into my own hands. I had two conventions I attended with my teammates (that my manager did not attend due to other conflicts) and I was able to hold some space to tell them that I had received feedback that it feels like people don’t know me and that I’m always available if people have any questions or if they’d like to talk. The response was a resounding: “What are you even talking about? We know you very well and we enjoy working with you!” from every single person on my team.

When I brought this back to my manager, he hemmed and hawed and wouldn’t talk to me more about it even when I asked where the feedback was coming from given that I received the exact opposite feedback from my teammates.

About two weeks ago, there was a major restructuring in my department and — surprise — my manager is no longer with the company. My suspicion is that there was much more going on than just this issue.

On the bright side, I got to meet my new interim manager. He and I have actually worked together previously at a different company and we worked very well together, and he seems eager to actually manage instead of trying to police people’s time outside of working hours. He has even put me in charge of an upcoming work dinner, and I have scheduled it from 5-7 PM with absolutely zero obligation for people to hang out after 7 PM unless they’d like to.

2. My boss is mad that I communicate better than she does (#4 at the link)

Thanks so much for answering my letter, I really appreciated the reality check and your advice along with that of the commenters, and I do have an update to share.

I tried to clarify some of this in the comments, but here’s some background that people were asking for. My manager (Jane) and I are both middle-age women, we’ve worked together for years, and she knows I don’t want her position. The last time it was open, I was encouraged to apply and declined. I don’t want to “manage” exclusively, I like keeping my hands in the work more than just doing projections, reporting, etc.

On to the update. After reading your advice, I began using your wording with people asking about decisions and answers. Most caught on pretty quickly that things had changed, but my reputation didn’t seem to take any hit, thankfully. I also set up a meeting with my grandboss (Laura). Not wanting to completely blow up my relationships, I didn’t give Laura the full context of the comments, but I did tell her I had been told to talk less in meetings and was conflicted because it seemed that she was asking questions and wanting me to contribute, while Jane had explicitly told me that I needed to talk less. I pointed out that I was also trying to involve Jane in meetings more (deferring to her when asked questions) and had even been IM’ing Jane in meetings with questions and thoughts so she could share instead of me. Laura was baffled and said she’d noticed I had been much quieter recently and she had been wanting to reach out and check on me. She offered to talk to Jane for me if I wasn’t comfortable, but in the end we decided I would try to get clarification again on the direction.

And I did…only to be told it was all a “miscommunication” and “misunderstanding” and I should just keep doing what I was doing and everything was fine (???). I tried to go back to normal and was then overruled by Jane on a couple of issues that seemed simple but greatly impacted my team’s workflow and morale. Eventually she reversed course but it was always presented as her idea to make improvements that were really just changing things back to the procedures I had set up originally. It was frustrating to say the least.

Throughout all of this, I was considering a lot of the questions asked by the commenters, and thought about what I really wanted to get out of my job and if I had hit the limits of what I could do within my org. While I had grown and expanded my job beyond what the intial description was, there really was no room for growth without moving into a more “hands-off” role than what I wanted, and even if I went that route it would be a long time coming. While I loved many things about my company and my team, I decided I needed to look around and see if there was something that might be better for me. And there was! I’m happy to say that I’m starting this week at a new job focused on training beginning teapot lid makers, with less responsibility, more money, better benefits, and what seems so far to be a very supportive manager!

3. My coworker refuses to talk to us and management won’t do anything (#2 at the link)

I originally wrote in mid-June, looking for advice and/or a reality check about Ann blanking out the majority of the team. After your reply and the advice/comments from the comment section, I did manage to mostly live with it. About a month later our district manager was around and Ann and her friend asked to speak with her, privately. The DM, thankfully, decided that she needed to actually hear all sides of the situation, and launched a full investigation into what was going on.

Beginning in late July and running into early August, everyone in the store was pulled in for one-on-one meetings with the DM and the regional manager. In my own meeting I mentioned Sam citing Ann and Friend as a reason for his leaving, and a couple of incidents that had happened with me. After the round of meetings and another couple weeks of behind-the-scenes coordination, we had a few Big Staff Meetings with our store manager, district manager, and regional manager, giving a literally-scripted talk on behaving professionally and being nice to each other. Ann and Friend did improve for a while after this, beginning directly after the DM launched her investigation and lasting for about two weeks after those Staff Meetings. When they returned to their previous habits, the rest of the staff rolled our eyes and moved on.

In the past few weeks, though, Ann and Friend have become more and more attached at the seams. This has included things like Ann and Friend being assigned to work different sections of the store and Friend proceeds to ignore the assignment and go help Ann for the day. Sometimes, that means they’ve been scheduled for separate lunch times, and they’ll ignore the schedule and proceed to take their lunch together. And just under a week ago, when Ann was assigned a different lunch than Friend, Ann seems to have decided that she wasn’t interested in taking her lunch if she didn’t have Friend nearby. She proceeded to clock out for her lunch break and return to work during that time. One of our shift leads discovered this and pulled Ann into a disciplinary conversation about not breaking labor laws. During the course of that conversation the shift lead ended up pulling in the District Manager via speakerphone, and based on what Ann was saying and what had already been happening, District Manager made the decision to let Ann go from the company.

We’re hoping that without Ann there, Friend will be a reasonable coworker, but it is early days to tell for that. We’ve also heard that we won’t be hiring to replace Ann, so it’s not an ideal situation, but it’s still nice to go into work without wondering if I’ll be ignored today.

4. I lied to get out of a non-compete, and now it’s coming back to haunt me

A day or so after I wrote to you, the organization I had lied to canceled my interview. HR said they had chosen another candidate, and that was that. I didn’t ask any questions because it seemed unwise to poke that bear. I suppose I got exactly the consequences I deserved: no second chance with that specific employer. And that’s OK with me. I can accept that I did something dishonest and crappy, I can accept the (possible, but unproven) consequences of the dishonest, crappy thing I did, and I can also accept that not being interviewed for a position is not a career-ending event.

As penance, I came clean to both my parents about The Lie. Fortunately, they didn’t care: they were incredulous that my former employer had made me sign a non-compete at all, especially as the underling I was at the time. My mom made a mom joke along the lines of “It’s a good thing I didn’t drop dead. If I had you would have felt really guilty,” which was absolutely warranted.

Since my letter, I’ve entered clinical research, a much bigger field with many more employers and jobs. This would be all sunshine and roses except three people from my old organization, all of whom were aware of The Lie, work at my new organization, so I’m still waiting for the past to catch up with me. If and when I face those consequences I suppose I’ll have to accept them too.

5. Joint retirement party (#5 at the link)

The staff arranging the retirement party decided to ask the retirees what they wanted as you suggested and they decided a joint party was a good idea. The wife had nothing to do with it. It turned out to be a fun evening for all.

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.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

Remember the letter-writer whose employee made up words and was impossible to understand? Here’s the update.

I’ve written in and taken your advice on other topics before — and it has been helpful — but I really struggled with putting things into practice on this one. I think it’s because being directly faced with what feels like genuine absurdity is somehow paralyzing to me. With other issues I’ve dealt with in the past, it’s like we both at least knew we were starting from a point of shared understanding or difficulty but in this one, that’s not the case.

You gave some good tips about how to try and ground the discussions in creating a shared understanding, but overall I took what might be the “easy” way out and steered toward the first part of your advice: if his work wasn’t great, focus on those issues instead. And that hasn’t gone much better!

First though, before I go on, I remember in the comments a lot of people wanted to know examples of the words he would make up. If you’ve ever seen the Knives Out: Glass Onion movie and you’re familiar with the vague nonsense words made up by Edward Norton’s character, it’s just like that! Just this morning we had a chat where he talked about needing to “capacitize” something, which I think meant enabling a feature of some software. There’s also a lot of pronunciation nonsense — recently plethora came out as pleTHORa, which I guess is a mistake some people make but it still feels like a twilight zone moment to me. Other misuses include “repointering” which I’ve gathered usually means to fix; there’s also a lot of “getting up” in relation to things that don’t make sense (so, real words, fake meanings) like “I need to work on getting up my SQLs” which, like, perhaps that means troubleshoot a SQL query, but it’s so very hard to know.

I tried to focus on the work quality issues and I’ve never felt more weirdly gaslit in my managerial life! That term — gaslighting — gets thrown around a lot these days, and I don’t take its use lightly, but he often just starts talking and doesn’t stop and the words coming out are so disconnected from reality! I’ve taken a lot more to just directly telling him I have no idea what he’s trying to say. I also interrupt him way more to tell him to stop talking so I can take what he’s trying to outline step by step, and I’ll often be really specific — like saying, “Stop, let me repeat what I think step 1 of XYZ is, then just tell me, yes or no. Am I correct in my understanding?” It’s much more direct and gruff than I have ever been with an employee and feels unnatural to me, but it has been a bit helpful. Sometimes he still just goes off into word salad but I just interrupt him again.

Now, all of that said, here’s the fun (sarcasm!) part. Someone else in our industry somehow put together that he was working for us, and passed along a note highlighting that he’s also listed as currently working at another organization in an identical role on their website. We went to HR to see what we should do and to ask if the background check had verified start and termination dates for his prior employment, and hilariously our HR person said she “didn’t know if we actually looked at or kept background check information” and then also told us that as long as I couldn’t point to a specific degradation in performance, it was perfectly fine for an employee to have two full-time jobs. She encouraged us to ask him directly, which we did, and he denied it. And that denial was good enough for HR.

More broadly and for other reasons, I’ve soured a bit on my current employer and I think 2025 might be a year to make a change. For that reason, I’ve given up trying to do anything substantive with this employee. He can be their problem after I (hopefully!) find a new gig. That’s perhaps a bad karma choice, but I have been open with my boss and HR about my struggles with managing him and haven’t gotten much support and my current strategies of verbally badgering him into spoon-feeding me updates and progress have resulted in us successfully keeping things running, so there aren’t unrecoverable bad outcomes from his relative incompetence, just a ton of effort on me to keep it all together. My energy to dedicate to that effort is waning, so it’s time to whip out the trusty Ask a Manager guides on job searching and freshen things up!

Hopefully the next time you hear from me it will be a new and interesting problem at a new job! :)

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.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

Remember the letter-writer whose employee was passing off ChatGPT lists as his own ideas? Here’s the update.

Last year, I wrote in about a junior engineer who was presenting ChatGPT list results as his own without understanding the results. Not surprisingly, the engineer tried doing this again. And again.

I took your advice to heart and the next time it happened, I scheduled a meeting with Dan and explained how he could use his ChatGPT results to start his investigation into the answer but I expected recommendations to be his work. He was not too responsive because this would be more work, which reinforces your point about being a personnel problem and not a technology problem. Then, my (older) boss came to me saying how great this employee was and how he had some many great ideas for this other project. I asked him if this was just a ChatGPT list and I was asked to investigate. Not surprisingly, after Dan reviewed his ChatGPT list, these ideas were completely out of scope for the project, and he wasted a good 2 weeks exploring them. I no longer had the time or energy to fight Dan’s laziness (he is not my direct report) and his manager didn’t see an issue.

This was just the tip of the iceberg of problems at this company and I had been looking for a new and more challenging engineering research environment. After nine months of interviewing (thank you for your advice), I landed a job at Big Tech Research Company that blocks all forms of AI due to security concerns. After 6 months, I find most of the people here are overly motivated with big brains. I spend my time telling them to take breaks or think of the big picture, which is a nice change. It’s a better cultural fit.

Thanks for taking my letter and all the comments. It was very helpful to put the problem into perspective. I see that you’ve had some related letters about ChatGPT, so it’s going to be a tough technology to manage as it becomes integrated into most software programs. For the record, in my personal life, I often have to write reference letters and promotional text and ChatGPT is fantastic! Super fan. I did not use it for this letter! :)

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. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.

1. My boss threatened to kill himself over a minor work issue (#2 at the link)

You and most of the comments told me to report my boss to HR or up the chain to our department lead, and consider reporting him to authorities for his safety. My boss lived in a different state (we were remote) and leadership already actively disliked him, so I was afraid that if I reported him to HR he would be fired and then actually harm himself.

I reached out to my coworker to see how things had been for her, and she told me that she had been having issues with our boss as well. He had been taking credit for her work, asking her to do his work and provide it to him through text so it wasn’t on company property, making her work during PTO, and calling her and crying about losing his job. She told me he was highly manipulative and I realized that he had been using my sympathies against me to take the heat off of him.

After that things started going downhill even faster, my department leader was let go, and thus the only buffer between my team and the leadership that had been causing issues was gone. The leader that was put in charge of social media was now overseeing our team. A week later I’m told that I no longer report to my boss, but instead to this leader.

This broke my (now former) boss, and he would call me frequently to say how scared he was about losing his job and that they were out to get him, and would ask me to affirm that he was a good boss to me. Things were awkward, with my former boss asking me to do work without input from the new leader. Then my former boss rolled out a new product too early, causing some issues and a mess to clean up. The next week, my boss was let go.

Leadership told us that they were committed to fixing the department and a consultant was then hired to revamp it, but a week later he was let go because he “didn’t do anything.” About a month later they hired an assistant for the president, and suddenly I had to work with her on some of my major tasks. The assistant also asked me to show her how different programs worked and how I did some of my work. I was suspicious that I was next on the chopping block and offered to show her more in depth at a later time, but she brushed me off.

My suspicions were correct because just a few days later I was laid off and my coworker was offered a demotion or the option to take severance. I knew it was coming, but I wasn’t really prepared to be let go that quickly. But I was also happy to be free of the stress and drama, and no longer having to worry about everything.

This was not the update I expected to share, but in the end my mental health is much better and I’m taking this time to recharge and viewing it as a long vacation.

Thank you to everyone for your advice, it really did help me get through a difficult time and I frequently read over the comments. Hopefully my next job is a much healthier environment!

2. Manager plays inappropriate music in a family-friendly store (#2 at the link)

The music continued to play for well over a month before she switched to other music on her own. The disgusting song didn’t come back for the rest of my time there, and she plays more mainstream songs. I’m not sure if that was because a complaint went through or she just decided to change the music.

Several commenters tried to guess the song in question but none of them were it. When I googled the lyrics, nothing came up. I can only assume the music didn’t have an actual record label behind it and was some sort of garage band home job CD. The sound quality was good, so someone had a decent setup, but it wasn’t an officially released song.

On the plus side, I moved out of state a few months ago and am continuing my life away from the store and the toxic manager. According to friends among the staff, she still works there, and bullies the staff for not working fast enough. She manages to keep it just below the threshold of crossing legal lines, such as trying to push unpaid work. But it’s apparently a job that doesn’t exactly get the cream of the crop employee-wise due to the hours and minimum wage pay. So people who work there now are sort of desperate to get a job and not likely to produce high turnover rates.

Nevertheless, I am free and clear, and going to a local college for a degree in a better field.

3. How am I supposed to contact a friend of my dad’s? (#4 at the link)

I wrote to you about how I had moved to a new city, and my dad was pushing me to get in touch with an old colleague of his. At the time I was a bit annoyed (my parents have always been a little too in my business), but you encouraged me to meet the contact. We had a nice coffee, he was very friendly, spoke warmly of my dad, and welcomed me to the city with some tips for fun things to do. About a year later my dad was in town and we all went to a nice lunch.

Alison, my dad passed away this year. After he died, I reached out to his colleague to share the sad news, and he replied with a lovely and thoughtful note. In addition, my dad was an expert in a niche topic, and ran a popular website about it for a number of years, in addition to writing some books. It was through this topic that he met his old colleague. I am a writer as well, and after giving it much thought, decided to take over the website and continue his work. His colleague was delighted to hear about it and said he would be happy to help.

Although my dad’s nagging annoyed me at the time, I’m so glad now that I honored his wishes and met his friend.

4. Is a past run for office keeping me from getting job interviews? (#5 at the link)

I got a new job with the candidate info still on my resume! It was actually pretty quick (I had submitted the application before I wrote to you/had the letter answered). I started in mid-November. It’s a much bigger org than I’m used to, but I’m excited for this next step in my career.

I hope to be here for a long time, but when the time comes, I’m still going to remove the candidacy from my resume moving forward and just leave it on my LinkedIn.

Thanks again so much for all your amazing advice! Commenters, too — y’all are great.

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. Here are five updates from past letter-writers.

1. My boss says people can’t be good at their jobs if they have kids or sick relatives

I’m still at the job. I think part of the issue was that Aria was really overworked and stressed out and I was coming off as too blase. She’s since come to trust that I actually know what I am doing and get stuff done so I had a good annual review and we get along. We also hired more staff for our team, so she has more support. I’ve been pretty firm with my boundaries and allowing my reports to prioritize their health and family when needed. I’ve also taken time off for family emergencies, unapologetically, even missing important meetings to do so. It was a rocky start but things are manageable now and I’ve learned I need to present as more serious moving forward. I am looking for a new job that will allow me to prioritize my family more, the job market is tight in my field so that might take another year or two.

Thanks for publishing my letter and to the commenters who correctly noted that it wasn’t a great environment and that I also might be giving off flaky vibes.

2. How do I ask for things and get people to actually help me (as a manager and as a volunteer)?

I have to report mixed results. First, thank you to you and your readers for your comments. I had read the post, and spent a long time reading all of the comments. Thank you to all of you who took the time to respond. I wasn’t able to respond in the comments in the way that I wanted, but I did read them all. Something that I had mentioned to Alison afterwords, but didn’t put in my initial question, is that I am a Black woman, and I wondered how much of my inability to get help from people was due to my communication style, and how much wasn’t. I know that it’s both.

Some things have changed, and some have stayed the same. I have taken from Alison and the commentariat to be specific in my requests for help. In my work, I continue to find that while the people who report to me lend a hand, the same does not extend to my direct manager nor the people who are at the same level as me. However, a new person joined our team this year, and he has been great about helping me. For example, I asked my same level colleagues to please help me with a specific, time-sensitive task (for example: “these teapots need to be glazed, and there’s no one available to do it. I need you to join me on Tuesday at noon to get them glazed, as they are being fired on Wednesday morning. It should take about 10 minutes to get the teapots painted”). No one responded to my messages, but he showed up to help paint the pots. I’m hoping that this help will continue. Unfortunately, I have learned that I will simply not get the help from the rest of my colleagues, but have learned who in other locations I can reach out to for help or advice.

As for my board, the lack of willingness to help is part of a larger issue that we see with a lack of engagement by the board members. That is something that we have been trying to work on with the members. I did find out that one of the reasons that people didn’t respond to my message asking for help with fundraising is because they couldn’t access the link (not because it was sent on a Friday — it’s a volunteer board, and I can’t send messages during the work day). Again, I have been working on being specific about what help I need. This year, I was clear that I couldn’t help with fundraising, and could only do one specific task, and let everyone else be responsible for the other things. I also exit-counselled one of our board members off the board (after she stopped taking minutes, tone policed me after I called her on it, then stopped attending meetings) and found new board members. I decided that last year was going to be my final year as chair and recently stepped down. This is my final year on the board, and I will move on to new opportunities.

I will continue to work on clear, specific requests for help, and hope that things get better.

3. My coworker announced she’s quitting and now is upset that she wasn’t invited to a conference (#3 at the link)

So, our coworker did not move out of state to be with her boyfriend immediately and actually moved only a week ago (10 months later) because her job search was so difficult. In the meantime, she actually did go to the conference!

From information I didn’t have at the time (but now know) is that other staff who were chosen for the conference were also planning on quitting sooner than her but for graduate school. My boss at the time equated their departures for graduate school as more worthy of professional development than her departure … which frankly was completely unfair. She brought this up and he agreed and rectified it by giving her his place at the conference. All was done right by Helga.

Since then there were some major changes on our team. Our boss moved into a new position in a different group as part of a promotion and I was placed into an interim supervisor role for my group. To hopefully ease some of the frustrations people had with this situation I’ve been more transparent in getting people more equal access to conferences and making sure they know which ones are on our radar so they can be better informed ahead of time and decide based on personal lives what will work best for them. I recently sent out a big list to employees which conferences we can go to and all the details — then I had them send back a ranked list of ones they could attend and were most interested in. I think overall everyone appreciates being able to choose and figure out what works for their life better even if they know they won’t be able to go to more than one or so in a year. And to Allison’s advice also not give off a perceived preference towards people on who ends up going or not.

4. Coworker’s office is gun-themed (#2 at the link)

I loved reading the comments and discussion on this topic. Home office decor is highly personal, and with that thought, I decided to not say anything (and, the co-worker in question was assigned to a different project and we didn’t have many meetings together). However, in the last month our work got closer again – and now this co-worker uses an aggressive background blur. So although I didn’t say anything to him in the end, I imagine someone else did.

5. Is this too many interviews? (#3 at the link)

Thank you for answering my question. Commenters clearly have very strong feelings about the interview process! Lots of speculation but I assure all that this was very much an entry level role and we’re not trying to sneakily underpay a mid-level. We hired someone fresh out of university with a few internships under their belt.

For context, my hiring process was happening in the midst of a wider organizational rejig of the hiring process so there was not a lot of up to date guidance. My team is small and retention on it is high, but this is the first entry level we’ve hired for in several years and was trying to avoid some pitfalls I saw on other teams and ended up trying to over engineer slightly.

After I flagged candidates from review of CV/cover letters, I did round one interviews with six people with a colleague and moved 3 candidates to a written skills assessment (short, discussed in interview, explicitly designed to take 30 minutes, really important for the role). That actually cut down our field to one person, so was a really useful tool! I still had the candidate meet with the ED as the hire would partially support him (20% of role) and thought it was important for the candidate to have the chance to connect before the role started given that they would be working together. The new hire has been in the role for five months and is doing very well and looking forward to supporting his further growth in the role and wider team.