Ask a Manager

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

1. My coworker keeps pushing unwanted help on me

It is my first year working at a boarding school, and one of my coworkers, who has been here for numerous years, has slowly been poking his head in my responsibilities and using them for his own agenda. For instance, one of my responsibilities was to interview students for a position. He sat in on all my interviews and kept trying to boost students who he worked with and gave me reasons not to pick the students that I work closely with. His reasoning was, “Well, this is your first year and I thought you could use the help.” I have moved dates and projects around mainly because they did not fit his schedule. Any time I have come up with an original idea, his response is, “Well, THIS is how we have always done it” and he becomes super persistent until he gets his way.

I appreciate his input and guidance, and I do not mind trying to accommodate, but I need him to let me do my job. Not to mention, the responsibilities he has been poking his head in are now mine because he originally did not want them. Unfortunately, I work AND live at the school and so does he. Additionally, he is very sensitive and insecure. Where I am looking for a colleague, he is looking for a best friend. ( I did not add him on Facebook and it became a “thing.” ) I am looking for advice on how to tactfully let him know I need to do my job while not making it awkward at work/home.

“Thanks, I appreciate the offer to help, but I’m going to handle this on my own.”
“I think I want to figure this out myself, but thank you.”
“I’m going to do this on my own.”
“I’ve got this, but thank you.”
Etc. And you say this pleasantly, but firmly. And then you continue to repeat it firmly until he backs off.

If at some point you want to address it more broadly, you could say, “I appreciate your offers to help, but I think I need to handle most of this stuff on my own. Thanks for understanding.” But since he’s sensitive and insecure, you might be better off just addressing it in the moment as it happens and assuming that he’ll back off once you’ve clearly established that you don’t welcome the “help.”

2. Giving feedback about shoddy work to someone I don’t manage

I work for a franchise of a national company. We own the business, so we generally make our own decisions, with the promise of support from the company in exchange for our royalties.

A nearby business that competes with ours recently re-opened, so I called our “home office” to speak with their marketing specialist about ideas. She and I had a long talk about a lot of things, then she said it would take about a month for her to analyze and get back to me. We set up a meeting for today, which I was really looking forward to, until I received the analysis she’d written up. It looks like it was written by a toddler – run-on sentences, poor spelling, misuse of words, etc. Worse, while the first couple pages apply directly to us and seem to be well-researched, the other ten or so are what appear to be canned responses.

I am so disappointed by this and see no point in having this meeting, as it appears it’ll be a complete waste of everyone’s time. I emailed her back to cancel and included a couple lines about how I didn’t see that most of what she’d included applied to us (for example, she suggested we register with major online review sites, all of which we are already registered with, which she would have known if she’d visited our website).

Was this the right thing to do? I don’t want to shame her, but I can’t help but feel like she turned in skate-by work. If I were her teacher or her supervisor, I’d know how to handle this, but I have no idea if what I did was correct here.

Absolutely. Canceling the meeting was perfectly reasonable given what she’d sent you, and being straightforward in explaining to her why you no longer thought it would be helpful is more useful to her than if you hadn’t told her the reason. I’d actually go a step further than that and say that it would be worth telling someone at your home office what your experience with this support was. Part of the franchise fees you pay buy you support from this home office, and you should speak up if they’re not providing what they promise. (And quality issues fall under that category; wouldn’t you want to know about this if you were them?)

3. My company said I could try working remotely, but then replaced me

I have been at my job for almost five years. About five months ago, I moved about 4 hours away from my job to live closer to my boyfriend. Before I made this move, I asked my company if I would be able to work from home and come into the office once a week. They agreed to try this arrangement out for four months and see how it was. During those four months, I did not hear any complaints or negative feedback. I also spoke with my boss and she assured me that everything was going great.

Well, last week, my boss called me in and told me that it wasn’t working out and that they wanted the person in this position to be in the office five days a week. She told me that my performance has been excellent and the only reason for this decision was that I am not in the office five days a week. She also told me that they had already hired my replacement and that they would be starting in a week.

My boss said that I can keep working there until July or until I find a new job but I would be expected to train my replacement in the meantime. I was pretty shocked and hurt that this was all done without any discussions or feedback. I asked for severance, but my boss was very adamant that I wasn’t fired and that it was my choice to move away. I don’t know what I can do from this point forward. I obviously feel like I was fired and I don’t want to work there anymore and I especially don’t want to train my replacement. I also need to focus on finding a new job. However if I don’t stay then I won’t get any severance or be able to collect unemployment. Was I fired? What can I do in this situation?

It doesn’t sound like you were fired. It sounds like your company assumed that you were going to move whether or not they okayed you working remotely and so they agreed to try it for four months, thinking that they might or might not keep you on longer than that … but that if it didn’t work out, it would just be the same resignation that you would have otherwise given when you moved. They absolutely erred in giving you no heads-up about their thinking, especially when you asked directly how the arrangement was working out, and they suck for blindsiding you like this. But it’s also true that it was set up from the beginning as a four-month experiment, and it’s not crazy that they decided at the end of that time that it wasn’t working for them. (And presumably you knew from the beginning that this could be the outcome.) They’re giving you another 2+ months, which is more than they agreed to at the outset, so in that respect, they’re being pretty accommodating. Really, the only thing they did wrong here was in waiting to fill you in on their thinking once they started having concerns.

As for what to do now, I’d stay while you look for a job, train your replacement, and do good work so you don’t burn the bridge and so you preserve a good reference. When you find a new job, give two weeks notice and move on.

4. Why do interviewers give you their card at the end of the interview?

I have had several interviews over the past few weeks, and I was offered cards at the end of the interview. I assume this is for thank-you notes, but I also use them to ask about timelines if the timeline they mentioned in the interview has passed. One woman gave me a very blanket vague response like she was annoyed that I asked, one woman didn’t even bother to reply to my emails, and the other just fell off the face of the earth. And I had really good interviews! They seemingly like me at first, but afterwards I hear nothing and they get irritated if I reach out. I’m confused!

They give you their cards because it’s a business convention to give people your card at the end of a meeting. (You’re not expected to give them one in return since you’re not there representing your employer.) It’s really nothing more than that. As for why they’re not helpful or don’t respond when you contact them later, that’s part of a larger pattern of employers not getting back to candidates after interviews. Sometimes it’s because they have no news yet, sometimes it’s because they’ve taken you out of the running but are too inconsiderate to tell you, and sometimes it’s because they intend to but forget to in the rush of higher priorities.

5. Did I mess up by addressing my application to HR instead of the hiring manager?

Recently I submitted an application to a generic email address (e.g. careers@awesomeorg.com), and I thought I was being smart by addressing my cover letter and email to their human resources director. After reading your definitions for HR and a hiring manager, I’m not so sure. Did I screw up my chances of getting considered by addressing the email and cover letter to the HR director instead of the person the open position reports to? If so, is there anything I can do to correct this mistake?

No. No one cares how you address the cover letter as long as you don’t make up fake names or spell people’s names wrong. You’re over-thinking it. You don’t even need to address it to a specific name, unless they include a name in their application directions. “Dear hiring manager” is fine, and so are most other variations of that. They do not care. Put it out of your mind.

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

1. When an employee names his dog after his manager

One of your employees gets a dog and he names it after his supervisor and makes sure he tells all of his coworkers. I think this is disrespectful. What do you think? (And no, it’s not a common name.)

It’s either disrespectful or … a sign of honor! Especially if the manager has a sense of humor. It’s hard to evaluate it without more context, like what this employee is like more broadly. Are there problems with his performance or attitude? Does he seem to dislike the manager? If that kind of thing is true, then the manager should be focusing there — but I wouldn’t get too worked up about the dog name alone.

2. My retail experience is harming me with employers

I recently graduated with my B.S. in Business Management … only to discover that employers no longer seem to care if you have your degree. I graduated Magna Cum Laude with a 3.84 GPA. All employers see when they look at my resume is that I worked retail while I was in school. They feel I have no real skills in anything — even though I had held two different supervisory positions and maintained that job for 10 years. I do NOT want to work in retail anymore. I have a family and a different life now. This was a job I obtained out of high school and kept to get me through college.

I recently applied for a job at the corporate level with a different company. The recruiter loved me and said my skills matched the requirements perfectly. I got a second phone interview with my potential manager. I thought I answered his questions well on my part, but he seemed less enthused. I thought I would at least get a chance to complete the next step — a role playing assessment. The next day, the recruiter emailed me to tell me the manager felt my qualifications were inadequate.

Is there anyway to salvage this? Can I reach out to him and try to demonstrate that I am fully capable of doing more than merchandising (which by the way was listed as a requirement for the position)? Or would this just annoy him and burn bridges (which I really do not want to do)? If not, how do I get past this with other employers? I am really devastated about not even being given an opportunity to do the assessment. Most other companies just email me rejection letters a few months after applying. Am I doomed to be stuck in retail forever?

Sure, reach out and tell him why you’d be awesome at the work. Don’t couch it as “your decision was wrong,” but rather as “I’d love one more opportunity to tell you why I think I’d excel at this role, and what I can point to in my past to demonstrate it — but I also respect your decision if you’re not convinced” (followed by compelling evidence). If you approach it that way, you’re not going to burn a bridge, and so you have nothing to lose.

As for the broader situation, it’s true that employers often discount retail work and want to see evidence that someone else has already taught you how to function successfully in an office … which is legitimately a different thing than retail. It doesn’t mean that your retail work is hurting you, but the lack of office-type work probably is.

If you have any non-retail work you can highlight on your resume — internships, even volunteer work — putting a stronger emphasis on it will help. (And this is why it’s so, so important to do internships in school, even if they’re only half a day a week and you’re doing them on top of paid work. It really helps once you’re out of school and looking for a professional job.) If you don’t, can you get some now, by interning, temping, or volunteering? It’ll help, in a job market where you’re up against tons of candidates who do have that experience.

(Also, it’s not that employers don’t care that you have a degree. It’s that it’s become such a prerequisite that it doesn’t qualify for you anything on its own.)

3. In my thank-you note, can I clarify an answer I gave in the interview?

I just interviewed with a great organization, and I’m really excited about the job. Upon thinking through their questions and my answers, it’s occurred to me that I didn’t quite make something clear, and it feels like it could be a deal-breaker. I was answering a particular question, and it led to other questions, which were fine, but I didn’t quite wrap up my train of thought before we continued. Can I include a short explanation/clarification in my thank-you note? Mostly in a “further explanation” sense, not in a “said the wrong thing” sense.

Absolutely. Phrase it as something like, “I also wanted to build on our conversation about X and mention that blah blah blah.” (And you’re right to make it further explanation rather than sounding like you’re second-guessing yourself.)

4. My employer ties pay to off-duty conduct

My current employer has decided that for the benefit of their employees, they will now tie the employees’ compensation to how safe they are off the clock at their homes. While documenting safety items you can and should improve upon, is it legal to hold you accountable on your yearly review for things you do at home on your own time? It just seems to me this is crossing a line and is an infringement of your right to privacy and freedom of choice.

As an example of what I am talking about, if I say I will use safety glasses while doing yard work, but then when cutting my grass I have an eye injury and was not actually wearing safety glasses, they can count that against me for the annual review rating for my raise.

What the … what? How would they even know if you wear wearing safety glasses when cutting your grass? How would they know that the eye injury was caused by that and not by, say, a rowdy gang of squirrels?

In any case, it’s possible that this would violate the law in California, where the state constitution provides broader privacy protections than most other states do. But aside from that or a similar state law, yep, it’s legal. It is, however, a ridiculous overreach and terrible use of company energy.

5. Asking an interviewer for a 12-month vision of the job

Sometimes when I apply for positions, they mention on the ad “position ends April 2015” or “prefer candidate to commit for two years.” However, I had a job interview recently and the interviewer seemed offended when I asked about his 12-month vision of the job, like I asked what he saw this position looking like in a year or two because I was trying to gauge what kind of a commitment they were looking for and whether or not they mentored employees into other positions. Anyway, the bottom line is that he told me he had no idea what was going to happen in 12 months and couldn’t really comment. Do you think this is a fair question or should I avoid this in the future?

You should avoid that interviewer in the future because he sucks. If he truly has no idea what was going to happen in 12 months, he’s got some serious planning problems.

The question itself is fine. Or at least it’s fine as long as you’re not implying that you’d hope to be promoted or doing significantly different work in a year or two, but it usually takes longer than that to get promoted — and employers want to think that you’re excited about the job as it currently exists, not what it might turn into it.

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

1. We’re having lighting wars … and half my coworkers want to work in darkness

Our cubicle farm office of about 90 people is undergoing “lighting wars.” One person asked to have the lights above his cube removed because the glare gave him headaches. That prompted another person to ask if the lights above her cube could be taken out, and then another, and another. When they found out that our facilities guy didn’t object to going up and down a stepladder 10 times a day, many people went along with it. Whole swathes of the open plan floor were suddenly plunged into total or semi-darkness, with no light source but glowing monitors. It seems to break along age lines, with people under 35 preferring the darkness. However, many of our jobs require people to look at faxed handwritten papers that are sometimes hard to decipher. I question how well that can be done by the light of a computer screen.

All of this might have stayed just an acceptable office fad if contiguous groups of employees hadn’t gotten together and declared their sections “light free.” New employees were given the option to have the lights above their cubes turned on, but not many did, knowing they were going against the will of the larger group. No manager wanted to step into this because they didn’t think it was worth the ill will. The capper came when a senior manager walked into a room on a dark, rainy morning and flipped on the overhead lights. She walked out a few minutes later, but had to return a second time and was surprised to see the entire room dark again, so she flipped on the lights again. This led one of the analysts to come completely unhinged and start raging at the senior manager at the top of her lungs, hollering and shouting. She had to be led out of the room and was sent home for the day – but she’s a whole ‘nother story. In any case, the lines have hardened: 1) lights off and the senior manager had no business flipping them on, to 2) who runs the show around here anyway? Has anyone had an issue like this? We have no policy about this because who would ever think that office lights would become such an issue?

The biggest issue here is your unhinged analyst who exploded in rage at the senior manager. Either this person is a problem in myriad other ways, or this lighting situation has been allowed to take up way too much emotional space in people’s minds. Or both. I think I’m guessing both.

Anyway, if people like it to be darker, let them have it be darker — as long as it’s not impacting the ability of other people to get the light they need to do their work. The concern is whether people, especially newer employees, are being pressured into accepting no lights because they don’t want to make waves with people who apparently feel quite strongly about this. Ultimately people’s right to work in space that’s sufficiently lit for their eyes and their work trumps other people’s preference to have it dimmer, so you’ve got to make sure that people who want light do truly get it. One way to do that would be to just turn the lights on everywhere (and you might point out to the people going overboard here that they’re going to ruin it entirely if they push your company into solving it that way), or to turn on just half the lights, or even to just buy lamps for anyone who wants them.

Read an update to this letter here.

2. How can I address my employee’s bad attitude?

Reading yesterday’s post about the person sending the email to their boss and giving her the silent treatment made me wonder if you could share some tips about managing folks with attitude/professionalism problems like this.

I have to meet with a staff member this week who is generally good at her job but has become increasingly disrespectful and resistant to any direction. It came to head over an inappropriate email as well, though differently inappropriate, more disrespectful/borderline insubordinate. Her attitude makes it difficult for me to work with her, but every time I talk to her about anything she is so unpleasant about it and afterwards it is almost the silent treatment. Do you have suggestions for the manager to address the attitude without making the whole situation even more unpleasant? She wants quite desperately to be transferred to work anywhere but here, but doesn’t realize that her attitude is going to make that impossible. So I plan to make that clear in the meeting–but she is still griping about the time I told her they’d come up with a new procedure they wanted us to follow that was different from what she did.

I know I can’t make her respect me, but is there a way that discussing disrespectful attitude will result in better attitude and not just make the problem worse?

Managers sometimes worry that they can’t address attitude issues as straightforwardly as they would performance issues, but you can and you should. In fact, you should frame it exactly the the same way you would a performance issue — “what you’re doing is ___, and what I need is ___.” Just make sure that you’re specific about what she’s doing that needs to change (as opposed to just lumping it all under “bad attitude”). For instance: “Part of what we need in this role is someone with a cheerful, can-do attitude and a willingness to hear feedback. That means I need you to be pleasant to coworkers, participate in meetings, not roll your eyes or otherwise be dismissive when people talk, and be open to discussing areas where I ask you to do something differently.”

And if the problem is severe enough that it could conceivably lead you to replace the person without significant improvement, you should be transparent about that: “I want to be clear that this is important enough that without significant improvement in the next few weeks, we would need to move you out of this role.”

Also, read this.

3. Shouldn’t this CEO have asked me about salary?

During a second and final interview with a CEO, he didn’t ask me how much I would ask for a salary, although during the first interview with executive managers I did indicate a salary range after they had asked me to. I found it strange that a CEO wouldn’t ask me for a salary indication. What’s your advice?

He didn’t ask because he’s focusing on other things in his interview with you — and besides, someone else already asked you, anyway. The assumption is that you’re not going to give different answers about salary to different people, so there’s no need for him to raise it with you a second time. (But even if someone else hadn’t already covered it, I wouldn’t assume he would have — his role is to evaluate you in a more high-level way.)

4. How can I ask how likely I am to be laid off?

I work at a unionized nonprofit. Recently we were told that layoffs were possible if we didn’t receive renewal of a certain grant. It is possible that the grant will be fully funded, partially funded, or not funded at all. We won’t have a decision on this for a couple of months.

We were given a list of worst-case scenario positions that would be eliminated, and mine was on it. They were listed in no particular order. I think a partially-funded grant is more realistic than no funding, which likely still means some layoffs. My question is: How can I approach my boss and ask him how high my position is on the layoff list?

You could say something like, “Do you have any sense of where my position would fall on the list if we were to be partially funded but not fully funded?” However, it might not even be worth asking, since either way, your next move here should be the same, which is to start job searching. Your employer has given you this heads-up so that you can steps to be prepared if it does happen, and even if your boss told you that your job is last on the layoff list, you should still be actively searching. You’re not obligated to take a job if it’s offered to you, but if you’re laid off, you’ll be glad you had a head start.

5. Being forced to pay a penalty for leaving without three months notice.

When my friend started her new job, she signed a contract. That contract included a clause that stated that if she left within six months of employment there, she would be required to give one month notice; if she left between seven and 12 months of employment there, she would be required to give two months notice; and if she left after 13 or more months of employment there, she would be required to give three months notice. Failure to do so would mean she would have to pay her employer the difference in the notice she gives and the required notice, based on her current base salary.

Is that lawful? Does she have any recourse?

She’d need to consult with a lawyer to be sure, but since this would bring her pay for that period below minimum wage, I’d think it would run afoul of minimum wage laws if nothing else. If I were her, I’d give whatever damn notice I pleased, decline to pay this ridiculous penalty, and go instantly to the state labor board if they were late in paying my final paycheck — for all time worked — in full.