Ask a Manager

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

1. When can I announce my new position on social media?

I recently graduated from a master’s program in the humanities field, and after some false starts, (the degree might be considered one of them), I decided to follow my fiance 6,700 miles away from home, and hitch my horse to a new industry. Thanks to the advice on your site and a few informational interviews, I received a great job offer.

I accepted in November, nailed down the fine points in December, and will not start until January. My question is: when can I announce my new position on social media? I will meet my colleagues as soon as 3 weeks before my start date, and would like to connect with them on LinkedIn. I’m also itching from restless to announce my glee to the world. Should I sit on my hands until the end of my probationary period or reveal my excitement head-on?

I’d wait until you start to list it as your new title — because you aren’t currently inhabiting the role, and shouldn’t list it until you are. But you can certainly announce it meanwhile, and you can certainly connect to your soon-to-be coworkers, by including a note explaining who you are (although you could also just wait until you start for that — which probably makes a little more sense unless you have a particular reason to talk to them before then).

2. Managing two nephews on a family farm when one is goofing off

Could you please advise me on how to handle two nephews who have equally inherited my business and their deceased father’s portion? I am 63 and run the large farm, and the two boys are in their late 20s. One will eventually manage but is not ready, and the other is a total goof-off. If I fire him, the other will walk too and I can’t afford that to happen. There is absolutely no respect for what their father and I have built. They leave expensive lights on, use free diesel for their trucks, goof off and waste time. I am loss as to how to handle them. If the one boy was not around, things would run smoothly, but with him around there is such waste of time and money. Firing him, I feel, is not an option.

Can you talk to the responsible nephew and point out the impact of their behavior? Be specific — explain what the impact of each of their actions is on the running of the farm. And appeal to his sense of duty to his father and his family. Frankly, you could also try having this conversation with the other nephew, too. If that doesn’t work though, you might need to consider letting them both walk, at least until they grow up a bit more. Ultimately you might have to decide whether having them both around goofing off is better than not having them around — but try a heart-to-heart first.

What other advice do people have on this one?

3. Should I have handled this negotiation differently?

I recently received a great job offer in a new field, and truth be told, I was fine with the salary and very happy with the benefits. Despite that, I decided to follow the advice of family members, friends, and online resources, and negotiate the salary. Because I am a recent master’s graduate, new to the field, and would be assuming my first salaried position, I wasn’t sure where to begin. My only resource included the interval for the position in my city and the average in other major metropolises. So to prepare, I picked a figure closer to the median (about 15% above what I was offered), and memorized my script, which details my value through skills and new business potential.

When I told the HR manager that I wanted to discuss salary, she hesitated, but let me go on, and I sensed that she was holding her tongue throughout my spiel. When I was finished, she told me that there was no room to negotiate. In fact, I had received a position and a salary far above my worth, and that applicants of my skill set are usually brought in at a much lower level. It was only my future boss’ belief in my potential that brought me on to where I was, she said. I was floored. I wasn’t expecting that, and I was equally thrown by the shock and vitriol in her voice. I didn’t know what to say. Isn’t everyone supposed to negotiate? Unsure of how to hold on to my dignity, I politely told her that I understood what she was saying, and asked about appraisals and discretionary bonuses throughout the year.

Was there anything I could have done to press her on negotiation? Should new grads and those new to an industry even bother negotiating?

There’s nothing wrong with trying to negotiate, but I wouldn’t have pressed her further in that context. As a new grad, you don’t really have a lot of negotiating power (unless you’re unusually accomplished and sought after).

The thing here that I would have advised doing differently is your salary research. You probably would have been better off checking around with people working in your field (ideally in your region) and asking what they’d expect a position like this one to pay, for a new grad without much experience. Online salary surveys are usually too broad to be accurate and can result in figures that are wildly off-base for a specific position. It’s possible that you overshot because of that and that getting more targeted opinions from people working in your field would have set your expectations differently.

I also might not have asked about appraisals and bonuses throughout the year after this particular conversation, but I wouldn’t worry about any of this too much — it’s your new manager’s opinion of you that matters, not HR’s.

4. I used my own property in work for my employer and I want to control how it’s used

I am a graphic designer and I have purchased many expensive fonts on my own over the years. I have used some of these fonts in designs I have created for the company I currently work for. I have paid a lot of money for these fonts, and I believe if you buy something, it is yours.

Many of my designs have been given to production artists so they can roll out the designs for many different schools and resorts. I have been ordered by my art director that I have to give these fonts that I have purchased to the production artist so they can do the roll-outs. I have a moral problem with giving away things that I have purchased to artists who can now use them personally for free. They now own the font even though they did not pay for them like I did. My solution would be to just let me do the roll-outs so I don’t have to give things I own away.

I’d love to hear from designers on this, but my take is that once you brought the fonts into work you were doing for your company, you gave up the rights to restrict their use. After all, your company needs to be able to take the work you’ve produced for them and use it as they see fit, even after you’re gone. If you were no longer with the company tomorrow, “just let me do the roll-outs” wouldn’t be a viable solution.

It probably makes more sense in the future to have the company purchase any fonts that you use in your work for them, so that this isn’t an issue.

5. Is this Christmas Eve work policy fair?

My workplace is scheduled to close early on Christmas Eve (3 pm rather than 5 pm). Employees working Christmas Eve still receive 8 hours of pay. However, if you elect to use vacation on Christmas Eve, you have to use an entire day (8 hours). Is this correct? I think that if the company is scheduled to close early, you shouldn’t have to use a full day of vacation. (For example, I usually work 8-5, and think that I should only have to use 6 hours vacation in this instance). Do you have an insight?

Yeah, it’s not especially fair, but it’s (a) legal and (b) a pretty common way to do things. And it’s basically a thank-you to employees working Christmas Eve day. I wouldn’t quibble over two hours.

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

1. Client keeps calling me “baby girl”

I know from reading your blog that you are outspoken against referring to adult women as “girls” in the workplace. I was wondering if you had advice on how to handle it when the offender is a client. I manage the account of a male client who regularly calls me ‘baby girl’ instead of my name. I have asked him once before to call me by my name and he did so, but the next time we spoke it was right back to “Hi baby girl…. Thanks baby girl,” etc.

This is seriously grating on me. I am neither a baby nor a girl and I absolutely want this to stop. However, he is a big client and so I am not sure how direct I can be for obvious reasons. I’ve struggled to come up with a way to say something in a direct but non-confrontational way, particularly since a polite correction did not work the first time. Can you please advise as to how I can shut this down? All that said, given the power differential, I know the easiest option would be to just let it go. Am I being unreasonable in letting this bug me to this extent?

No, it’s not unreasonable to be bothered by that! Baby girl? That’s ridiculous.

And yeah, you’re right that you risk souring a relationship with a big client if you take as hard of a line on it as you might take with, say, a coworker who was doing this. As for how to address it, much of it depends on your dynamic with the client. But if he’s calling you “baby girl,” the relationship is probably at least somewhat informal, so personally I’d just say cheerfully, “You know I’m not going to respond when you call me that, right?” and move on with the conversation. Repeat as needed / adapt to fit your style.

I’d also try to balance the understandable frustration of this against how he treats you aside from this — is he otherwise respectful and does he treat you as a competent professional aside from this? If so, I’d be more inclined to write it off as an annoying eccentricity.

2. How can I prevent wasting my time on interviews for jobs that aren’t what I’m looking for?

I was contacted by a search firm for a “senior leader” opportunity. I am a director and interested in jobs in the next level (exec director or VP). The recruiter set up an interview with the next level, who turned out to be a director too. Since all titles are not equal at companies, I agreed to interview. After the interview, I could tell it would be a step down, as it was really a senior manager job with a sign-on bonus that would match my salary but year two would not.

I went to the next interview with the SVP hoping to make an impression for future director-level positions. She said they didn’t have any plans anytime soon for more directors. The external recruiter sent me about 20 text messages trying to convince me it’s a growing company and director jobs would open down the road. I just can’t take that risk 30 years into my career. They made an offer that I declined. The reason I gave was I felt it wasn’t a step up and the timing was wrong since I will be getting a bonus soon.

The recruiter was very annoyed with me after all this and said I should have been more transparent about my bonus. But I was very transparent in at least 5 conversations that a senior manager job is not strategic for me and a step down. I feel it was none of his business about my bonus, and if he would have been more honest about the job level from the start, I would have never interviewed. How can I prevent this waste of time and resources in the future?

You can’t always perfectly screen job opportunities to eliminate the ones that you won’t be interested in. Sometimes you do need to go to the interview and learn more before you can realize it. And actually, that did happen here — you realized at the first interview that it wasn’t the job you were looking for. After that, it sounds like you went to the next interviewing only hoping to build a relationship for the future — but if you look at what you wrote, you’d already realized at that point that this wasn’t the right job for you. So I wouldn’t really blame the employer for wasting your time. The recruiter, maybe — and that bombardment of 20 text messages is a good indication that this recruiter isn’t exactly top-notch, as is his blaming you at the end of the process — but I think the lesson here is really to listen to what you learn at the first interview.

3. Addressing a cover letter when it’s to my current boss

I’m applying for an advanced position at the place I’ve worked at for the last 10 years. What is the most approriate greeting to use on the cover letter without sounding like an overly formal stranger? By this time, my boss knows me well, and I don’t want to sound too casual or too formal. Any ideas?

I’m trying to avoid stuffy and formal and come across as personable and outgoing.

What do you normally call her? Assuming you normally call her by her first name, that’s what you open with here too. You don’t need to pretend like you call someone Ms. Whoever when you’re on a first-name basis with each other … and in fact, it would be weird to do so. (After all, if your’e normally on a first-name basis, wouldn’t you be weirded out if she came by to talk to you about the job and called you Ms. LastName?)

Cover letters aren’t some special extra-formal thing; they’re just like any other business correspondence.

4. My coworker and I aren’t on the same page about our joint responsibilities

I work in content management, and I share identical and equal responsibilities with one other person, “A.” Because of the way we divide up our work (each of us spend equal hours on the necessary tasks every week), I have noticed that A works at a slower pace than I do. This is fine in theory — I would just get whatever I needed to get done in my time frame and A should be able to take over where I leave off.

My problem is that the work A is completing is actually creating additional work for the both of us. Our work relies on an outside vendor who is fairly unreliable, and the product we receive is partly determined by how details our instructions are to them. In an ideal world, they would need minimal instructions at this point, but as it stands they need careful scrutiny and feedback. My partner doesn’t have time for this (we do have other work to handle, separately, other than what we share) and so when we get some bad product back, I have to spend more time fixing it.

A and I have a good relationship, and we know that our vendor is bad, but A insists that they need to improve, rather than the fact that we’re still on the hook for the quality of the output, which is the stance I take and why I spend more time in the upstream part of the process to try to mitigate the errors that come after. So what can I do? It’s frustrating to do repeat work, and I feel like A and I do need to be on the same page on this, because we’re both responsible for the same thing, and there is a time-sensitive component to getting our product delivered (so it reflects equally badly on me when things don’t get done). Do I need to get my manager involved at this point?

Yes, I think so. Part of your manager’s job is to help resolve things like this, and you don’t really have the authority to solve it on your own. I’d approach your manager and lay out what you laid out there. Approach it collaboratively, as if you’re searching for a solution to any other business problem you might bring to her.

5. Having to work when everyone else is being paid to be on vacation

I’m a salaried, non-exempt employee, and my employer is closed down for two weeks over the holidays. If I’m expected to work a day or two during that time, am I entitled to either receive comp time or additional pay for the hours I work? These two weeks are paid staff holidays for all full-time employees.

Legally, there’s no requirement for that. However, you could certainly approach your manager and say, “I’m missing out on two days of holiday pay that everyone else is getting since I’ll be working those days. Is it possible for me to take those two days in January (or later) instead?”