Ask a Manager

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

1. My employer wants us to “volunteer” for groundskeeping and cleaning

I work in a faculty position at a private university that is struggling with all the challenges that higher education is facing right now, including declining enrollment. We have not had raises in years, and positions are only replaced if they are determined to be absolutely necessary. Even though housekeeping and groundskeeping are deemed necessary, they are having trouble filling those positions because they either can’t or won’t pay a competitive wage for the area.

Recently the administration sent out an email asking all employees to participate in a voluntary workday to make the campus beautiful before students arrive. Staff who would be working that day can count it toward time worked, but faculty, who would typically not be working that day, are expected to do it with no additional compensation. Tasks include power washing buildings, planting flowers and laying mulch, and cleaning. I had planned to use that day to prepare for my fall semester classes. Part of the reason they are asking for help is because they don’t have an adequate number of groundskeeping and housekeeping staff, although the email didn’t say that. I do not think it is my responsibility to do tasks outside of what I was hired to do because the university failed to hire people to do them.

I’m planning to not sign up for a time slot, but do you think this is something that we should push back on? Also, do you think that those who don’t participate could face backlash for failing to be a team player?

Yes, it’s something you should push back on. It’s bad enough that you’re being asked to pick up extra work from unfilled jobs similar to your own (for no additional compensation), but now you’re supposed to “volunteer” for manual labor that has nothing to do with your job at all? No. If they want to cut positions, they need to deal with the consequences of cutting those positions — not add power washing and cleaning onto your already full plates so that you’re the ones shouldering those consequences.

Will you face backlash for “not being a team player”? Maybe! But the more of you who decline to sign up, the less feasible that will be — so encourage your colleagues to sit this out.

2. People ask if my hair color is natural

I’m a woman in my late thirties and I work for a company of approximately 600 people. My role has me connecting with people across many departments. I have found my hair to be a frequent topic of conversation at work and I’m looking for a script to politely shut people down.

My hair was dark blond most of my life, but I started going gray early. I think gray hair looks lovely on many people, but it made me look washed out and ill so I had fun trying out lots of different hair colors. For the last five-ish years, I’ve dyed my hair red (Cowboy Copper, to be precise). It’s bright, but not outside the realm of natural hair colors.

My problem is that I get asked approximately once a week if my hair color is natural. I think it’s rude and would never ask someone whether they dye their hair. I’ve tried different answers — a joke, the truth, lying and saying it’s natural, and they always respond with compliments, but every exchange leaves me uncomfortable. I don’t think the people asking mean to be rude (they all legitimately seem to like the color) but I never know how to respond. How do I politely shut these people down?

Yes, it’s rude. Welcome to life as a redhead! People constantly ask redheads if our hair is real. A friend’s mom once poked around in my hair looking for roots because she didn’t believe it was real. I’m pretty sure adults asked me if it was real when I was a child.

That said, most people who ask are just interested because it’s unusual. You certainly don’t need to tell them it’s dyed if you don’t want to, but it’s also not a shameful secret and you could simply respond, “No, I just like it.” But if you don’t want to answer on principle, some options for you:

* “Why do you ask?”
* “I don’t think you’re supposed to ask people that.”
* “That’s between me and my hairdresser.”

Still, “No, I just like it” is likely to make it less of a big deal.

3. I was snubbed by a mentee I’ve given countless hours of my time to

I am a seasoned professional in a niche spot in my field. Early on in my career, I spent some time talking to my alma mater classes about my niche area of work, and took to mentoring a student who was interested in my field.

I have spent hours over nearly a decade giving advice to this person, editing his resume, and providing extraordinary amounts of input for which positions would be a good fit.

Recently I had a question for this mentee. He had accepted a job at an agency I cross paths with very infrequently, and I thought he could provide me very general information on a topic. Instead, he immediately discussed billing my agency for work over 30 minutes, and even mentioned an unwarranted inspection of my facility. I was floored. I told him to forget about it, reached out to a consultant, and worked out the question on my own.

I do not plan to give my time to this person ever again. Should I tell him how disrespectful he was, and why I plan to separate myself from his future advice needs? He contacts me only when he needs career advice. He has stolen countless hours from me and gave nothing as a show of thanks.

Nah, there’s no point. You’re right to be unavailable to him in the future now that he’s shown his interest in the relationship is so one-sided, but there’s little to be gained by spelling it out for him. (And really, you’ve already invested a ton of time in coaching him! You don’t need to do this final bit of it on your way out the door.)

For what it’s worth, though, I don’t think it’s useful to look at this as him stealing your time. You presumably mentored him voluntarily. And sure, you assumed the relationship would be a two-way one, but he didn’t engage with you under false pretenses. He’s just selfish and apparently sucks at networking. Now you know!

4. How do I reject a qualified former coworker?

I am the senior director for a small firm. We are in the process of hiring a new lead engineer in a very niche field where the applicant pool is tiny in our region. We recently received an outstanding resume from somebody with 30+ years of experience, a master’s in our field, and a ton of awesome project work that lines up with exactly what we need. Great news; our months’ long search is over! Only one catch: this person used to be my boss, left on overall good terms with our organization, but also left a bad taste in the mouths of a number of current team members. He resigned 10 years ago to take a high level director position at a neighboring company.

The word is that he left his director role in an acrimonious fashion last year (forced resignation). He is currently at another company as a chief engineer, which is two steps below director but two steps above our position. Our location would save him almost an hour commuting each day and I am guessing that is at least part of why he wants to come back. But beyond the personnel issues if he were to return (people are already freaking out about the possibility), the position he applied for requires a lot of desk time and actual crunching numbers type of engineering work, with no supervisory requirements. My experience with him as my boss was that he was a super delegator — to the point of asking senior engineers to draft emails on his behalf to send to vendors, prepare his presentations for conferences, do the annual cap ex budget for him (!), etc.

We have a handful of junior engineers and my gut is telling me he will pass his work on to them even though they don’t report to the senior engineer. He also has 15 years more experience than the manager he would report to — they have very different management styles and I believe he would question/go around him constantly. HR is trying to do everything by the book and although I have relayed all of this to them, they are insisting, based on his qualifications, that we have to offer him an interview. He will ace the interview and I am sure he will outshine the other candidates we have (he’s a very good politician and is very sharp). Is there anything else I can do to convince HR to not bring him in for the interview? Or if we must interview him, how can we justifiably turn him down? I also want to maintain a professional relationship with him, as we still occasionally cross paths at industry events.

First of all, what exactly does “the senior director” mean here? If you’re in charge of the firm, HR should be working to support you, not laying down edicts that they can’t defend. Yes, they’re charged with ensuring the company complies with the law and minimizes risk, but there’s no legal requirement that you interview everyone who’s qualified on paper. If you’ve worked with the candidate in the past and know they’re wrong for the role based on that experience, you do not need to interview out of a sense of fairness. So first, push back on HR and ask them to explain exactly why they think you should ignore firsthand experience working closely with a candidate.

Second, are you in charge of hiring for this position? If so, and you’re pushed into interviewing him, you can name your concern pretty explicitly in the interview: “This is an individual contributor position that doesn’t manage anyone, and about 80% of your time will be spent doing XYZ personally, not supervising others in doing it. I know that’s different than the role you had when we worked together, so I hoped you would speak to your interest in making that kind of move and what appeals to you about it.” Who knows, maybe you’ll hear something that changes your mind. But assuming you don’t, you can simply decline to hire him based on your experience working together in the past and your knowledge of the needs of the role. And if you’re not the decision-maker, you should share your experience and concerns very candidly with whoever is.

5. Can you take back your resignation?

This is a hypothetical, but it’s made me curious: Is there any way to pull back a resignation within the notice period? I had a wild dream where I quit a job I liked a lot for a reason I regretted, and found myself having to try to un-quit. I didn’t actually do this, but now I can’t stop thinking about it! Is there a script for changing your mind gracefully?

Sure, you can always try. If they valued you and haven’t already hired someone else, they might leap at the chance to keep you — although on the manager side of that, I’d want to make sure I understood what led you to quit in the first place and why you’d changed your mind, and I’d want to feel confident that whatever led to your quitting wasn’t going to put us in the same spot a few months down the road. And of course, if they weren’t terribly sad about you leaving, you might hear, “We appreciate the offer, but we’ve already planned for the transition and are pretty far into hiring for your replacement.”

As for how to say it, you need to explain why you’ve changed your mind. For example: “I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and I’d be interested in staying if it’s not too late to change course. I’d been concerned that my job was moving to more of an X focus, but you were so responsive when we talked about it and I can see that with Jane joining our team, those projects won’t fall as heavily to my role for much longer. If you’re open to me staying, I’m looking at a lot of this differently now.” (But that’s a reason that makes sense! If it’s just “oops, I acted too hastily / in the heat of the moment,” you still might be able to reverse it, but you should expect a fair amount of concern about what happened and whether you can really be happy there or not.)

Related:
employee resigned but now wants to stay

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

1. My team has an all-male soccer betting pool

My team includes two women (including me) and five men, three of whom are huge soccer fans. A few months ago, the three of them decided to form a betting pool on a large soccer event. They invited the other two men on the team (who are not huge soccer fans) to join the pool, but did not invite the two women.

The first pool was a success, so the five of them did another betting pool for a subsequent soccer event, and then another one for the Olympics. It has become quite a public office event that is widely discussed throughout the day, and it often culminates in outings where the five of them go to watch the games they’ve bet on together after work.

It seems likely to me and the other woman on the team that the men did not intentionally mean to exclude the women from this pool, as they are all quite nice guys with whom we get along well with. However, we could not help but notice the optics of the decision not to ask us. It seems blatantly sexist and we feel like, principally, it is bad for the office to have so much of work chat centered around an activity that only the men were invited to join.

We have been going back and forth, however, about whether we should do something to address this. I imagine that if we spoke up and outright asked to join the betting pool, they would allow us in. The thing is that neither of us are particularly interested in soccer, so we don’t actually have a strong desire to participate in this betting pool. Is it worth bringing to the rest of our team’s attention that there’s a very visible gendered dynamic to this group they’ve formed, or should we let it go since, in this case, the organizers happen to have correctly guessed that the two women wouldn’t be interested?

I’d leave it alone. Could it have been handled better, by originally inviting everyone to participate even if you declined? Sure. Is it outrageous that they didn’t think to do that initially? Not really if they correctly knew you wouldn’t be interested, and especially because it sounds like originally it was just going to be for a single event. Now that it’s turned into something more long-running, you’re not wrong that it’s not great to have so much work socialization be single-gender … but from a practical perspective, I don’t think there’s a lot to gain by addressing it when you don’t actually want to participate (and when the Olympics just ended anyway, and perhaps this activity with it).

That said, I’m curious about the gender dynamics in your office. If you’re already dealing with sexist dynamics on your team, I can see why this would especially grate. If it’s not something that normally rears its head as a problem, I’d be extra inclined to leave this alone.

To be clear, the circumstances matter here. This is different from, for example, this company that sponsored annual golf trips that women never participated in (in that it’s not company-sponsored and is smaller, less formal, and likely shorter-running). It would also be different if any of the woman asked to participate and were rebuffed.

2. Employer asks new hires to list all their prescription medications

This is a question about an organization that I left, but still bothers me. After some turnover at my last job in a mid-sized nonprofit, new employees were being asked to list the prescriptions they used on their new hire paperwork. Some of the new employees refused to list this information, and our director of facilities — who did not process our new hire paperwork but did perform required background checks on new staff — would inform the new employee’s manager and the two would pressure the new hire to list what prescriptions they used.

I found this to be deeply upsetting since some prescriptions can identify key aspects of one’s identity, including some protected classes of individuals. Some prescriptions have stigmas attached to them, and some might be banned in the future (for example, birth control). Can employers require staff to declare any and all prescriptions they use? Can staff simply lie about these prescriptions if they do not want to out themselves?

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits employers from asking employees medical questions (including about medications) unless it’s job-related and consistent with business necessity. For an employer to legally ask about prescriptions, the employee must be in a safety-sensitive position (like if you were a bus driver using a medication that could cause drowsiness). For the vast majority of jobs, this inquiry would be illegal — but whether it was illegal in your organization depends on the nature of the jobs.

Related:
my office is requiring us to disclose all medications we take

3. Is my employer gaslighting me?

I’ve been working in the nonprofit sector for the last ten years. It’s a small organization, less than 20, and I’m on an even smaller team and we are fully distributed. My question is about feeling gaslighted (gaslit?) and what, if anything, can be done.

Over the years, many micro-instances of this have occurred; I’m only flagging the most consequential ones. I’ve watched new hires come (and go) at much higher pay or with less experience and immediately move up the ranks. Others have been given training opportunities to advance or been given a voice in their career trajectory. There is a long history of nepotism at this org too. Below are two instances that bother me the most and enforce the narrative in my head that I don’t deserve better.

My manager is retiring, and at one point, I was to inherit that role as the two of us have worked together closely the entire time. A few years ago, they decided I was not the one for that role, and a good friend of management was hired to inherit that position. I was talked at when they made this decision and asked if I was okay with it (as if I had a choice or a say) and told it’s because I’m so good at bringing in the money, they don’t want me doing anything else. (It’s true that the millions in revenue I’ve brought into the org have directly contributed to making it through the pandemic.) It still felt crummy. I took it like a champ, but it stung.

More recently, we hired another person who will be on the same team as me and who, once again, is being elevated and given the opportunity, agency, and voice. At least they are not related to anyone on staff, but they look and sound a lot like my soon-to-be-retired manager, so perhaps nepo-by-osmosis is happening.

Just last week, our executive director said in a team meeting that this new person would get to do X, Y, and Z and that I would feel left out, and they asked me if that was okay. I was flabbergasted but said, “I don’t have any say in this, so yes.” But I am crushed, burned out, and tired of feeling worthless. I am the lowest-paid teammate (and have the heavy/heaviest workload) and am soon to be the longest tenured on this team.

When you add these instances up over the course of many years, I feel like I’ve lost my compass, so I’m reaching out to an outside voice. Am I being gaslit, or is this normal for an organization? I would like to have more agency and opportunity and to be seen and treated like a valuable colleague. And of course, I want to be paid what I’m worth. But each time that opportunity presents itself, the gaslighting happens.

I don’t know if you’re being gaslit or not (that would involve a deliberate intent to mess with your head, so it’s unlikely but who knows), but it doesn’t really matter. What we know for sure is that you’re not getting the advancement or recognition that you want in this job, and that’s been the pattern over a number of years. That on its own is reason to look outside the organization for a different job.

You don’t need to sort out whether this is gaslighting or normal or anything else. You’re unhappy and burned out and there is a pattern of not getting what you want in this org, even as others do. Their reasons for that could be entirely understandable each time it’s happened, but it doesn’t matter because this job isn’t meeting your needs, and hasn’t been for a long time. You get to leave for that reason alone!

4. Company wants a verbal acceptance before sending an offer letter

My husband just received a verbal job offer for a higher-seniority position from a small company in the private sector. He requested a written offer with details of the compensation, and HR sent an email with only a salary, annual bonus percentage, and “total compensation” value, with an attached booklet on medical and retirement plans available.

The thing that really got me about this was the following line: “If this fits within your scope, we’ll draft up an offer letter. We can discuss the start date after a verbal offer acceptance.”

Am I misunderstanding this, or does it seem like they want him to verbally (or by email) accept their offer before giving him an actual offer letter? That sounds bananapants to me! The process up until now makes it seem like a very inexperienced HR person. The legal mind in me says this is not a great procedure, but a verbal agreement is not necessarily binding. What say you?

This isn’t uncommon. They’ve sent him the details of the offer and they’ll formalize it once he decided if he wants to accept (and presumably after any negotiation has occurred so the details are finalized). The only part that’s weird is that they don’t want to discuss start date yet, but he could just introduce that into whatever negotiation or discussion of the offer he’s going to have — for example, if it’s important to him to have a start date that’s between X and Y weeks out, he can say that now. If there’s any other info he needs before making a decision, he can ask for that now too. Basically, this company is opening negotiations and sees the offer letter as simply memorializing whatever details are hammered out by the end of that process.

I think you’re balking because it feels weird that they’re not making it formal now. But he has an offer. If it changes when the formal letter shows up, he’s not obligated to stick to an earlier yes.

5. I announced a new job — how do I now share that I’m taking a different one instead?

In May, I accepted a job offer that I was reasonably excited about, so I announced the new job on both LinkedIn and my personal social media. I am taking the bar exam this summer, so I was not scheduled to start this new job until September.

However, a few weeks after I accepted the job, I was offered another position that was better for me in pretty much every way — better salary, much more in line with my career goals, easier commute, the works. I accepted that position and gracefully extricated myself from the first job and am on good terms with them (and I even referred someone to them that they ended up hiring in my place).

However, how do I handle publicizing that change to my personal and professional network? At the time, I quietly took down the posts announcing my acceptance of the first position and did not say anything about the second position, particularly since I won’t start there until September either. Do I acknowledge that I had previously announced that I would be working one place but have since accepted another position — and if so, how do I explain that change without denigrating the first job or making it seem like they let me go? Do I just quietly update my LinkedIn status with my new job when I start it in September and just explain what happened if anyone asks? To what extent do I need to explain the change?

Nah, just go ahead and announce the new job when you start it or just before, if that’s something you want to do. You don’t need to acknowledge that this is a change. Lots of people won’t even remember, so there’s no need to draw attention to it. If anyone asks, you can simply say, “I ended up being offered a different role that was an even better fit.” But you don’t need to get into the details; most people won’t care that much (unless they’re close to you, in which case they’re likely to already know anyway).

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

1. Application asked, “If offered this job, will you accept?”

I am applying for jobs. One application asked the question, “If offered this job, will you accept?” Yes and no were the only options. Obviously, I clicked yes. I assume this is not legally binding. But is it a red flag? Another possible red flag is that this job has been posted for 10 months.

Ha, that’s a ridiculous question — as ridiculous as an applicant asking, “If I apply for this job, will you hire me?” Who knows, on both sides; that’s what the interview process is designed for both parties to figure out. You could discover the work is different than you’d envisioned, or you hate the manager or the culture, or the salary or benefits are too low. The question is absurd.

That said, is it a red flag? I’d say it’s a yellow one. It could have been stuck in there by some deranged HR person who’s sick of having offers turned down, whereas the actual manager would be fine to work for. But that in combination with the fact that they haven’t been able to fill the job for 10 months (if that’s what the long posting means; it doesn’t always) isn’t super promising.

Related:
when an interviewer asks, “If I offered you the job, would you say yes?”

2. A colleague we don’t want to work with is trying to muscle in on our volunteer project

I work in tertiary education, and we have an informal community of practice that unites some of us who feel kindred (people with a shared experience that puts them at a disadvantage in society and education and a desire to help people who have similar experiences). For the third time in four years a small group of us are organizing a symposium. The first was in 2021, when I partnered with a colleague, Summer, and we hosted 12 presenters over a half day. Summer was really keen but wasn’t particularly good at organizing and “lost” room bookings. They were not particularly good at the tech, managed to video all the presenters speaking from the waist down, and wasn’t particularly good at social stuff. I am autistic and even I noticed that. While it was good to have someone to bounce ideas off when we planned, it was hard work to run the event.

After the first event, Summer said that they didn’t want to organize another one. I was keen and another colleague, Zoe, wanted to work with me to organize a second event. A third colleague, Lisa, offered to help. Zoe and I worked really well together, but Lisa drifted off and stopped attending meetings a few months into the planning. Our second event had 350 attendees, had two big sponsors, flew in an international keynote and two national keynotes, we had 64 presenters, and afterwards we received a staff award at our institutional celebrations. Organizing all this was voluntary, with our managers’ and institutions’ blessing, rooms, and tech support but over and above our allocated workload. In the meantime, Summer presented a research paper about our community of practice and made some of us feel othered, and which really upset Zoe.

Now Zoe and I are planning a third event, with the blessing of our wider volunteer community. Lisa has decided to join us again, which we said was okay as we both thought she would drift away once the work began. But Lisa insists Summer be part of the team, because Summer wants to be. We have said we are working with a smaller team for now, and when we need help we will reach out and ask more people to join to team. But Lisa adds Summer into our meeting invites, and both send us emails offering their help and insisting we share our planning with them. All this has really upset Zoe, who avoid the meetings.

Lisa has accused us of not being professional because we don’t want to work with Summer and has suggested we need to learn to get along. This is a volunteer event, one we have put a lot of energy into. Are we being unreasonable to want to work with a team of our choosing? Do we have to accept everyone who wants to be part of the planning, no matter how much trouble they have caused in the past? Is there a polite way to say, “Actually, we did this last time, it was wildly successful, and it’s ours to do again this time”?

You do not need to agree to work with Summer. You and Zoe have put a ton of work into organizing these events, and you’re right to want to ensure they go well, which means paying attention to how you’re staffing them. Just because a project is a volunteer one doesn’t mean you have to allow anyone who wants to work on it to help in whatever capacity they want. You decide who to involve based on the needs of the project and your assessment of potential volunteers’ strengths and weaknesses (just like with paid work).

It’s entirely reasonable to say to Summer, “Thank you so much for offering, but we already have all the work covered.”

The bigger issue is Lisa. You and Zoe need to have a direct conversation with her where you explain that Summer was difficult to work with last time and struggled in the areas they were responsible for, and based on that experience you’re not going to be including Summer in the planning again. It doesn’t sound like Lisa has any sort of authority here; she can’t just decide on her own to involve Summer. You and Zoe are the ones who have been organizing these events and you have standing to tell Lisa no, it’s not happening, and that if she wants to help, she’ll need to understand that the two of you aren’t working with Summer again.

3. I proved my coworker wrong — did I handle this right?

I work for a small organization and very occasionally process refunds. If the person receiving the refund is to get a paper check. I hand off those requests to a teammate who has access to our bill paying software. Recently I did just that, and the person receiving the refund contacted me to complain that she had to fill out a bunch of stuff, including her Social Security number, in order to receive her refund. A legitimate complaint in my book.

I sent an email to our team (only four of us, two of whom are on point for accounting responsibilities) to let them know of the complaint and to question why it was necessary for her to jump through that hoop. A more senior team member, Eric, told me that “everyone is set up in the system as a vendor and they need to supply a SSN or EIN in order to process all payments.” I pushed back because this was a simple paper-check-issuing request, and represented a refund, not a payment to a vendor. There was back and forth, with Eric insisting that there was no way around it and that our accounting department absolutely requires such information because every vendor needs to receive a W9.

I replied again stating that this person is not a vendor, does not need to report this as income, and therefore does not need a tax form, which negates the need to collect a SSN or EIN. Eric and I got on the phone to discuss it, and he was adamant that all of this was absolutely necessary.

I was confident that he was wrong, so I researched it further on my own. I contacted the help desk for the billing software system, as well as our internal accounting department. The billing help desk confirmed that to issue a simple paper check, the system only needs a name, email, and phone number. The accounting department assured me that they do not need a W9 for end-of-year reconciliations.

I hate to be an “I told you so” kind of person, but in this case I thought I owed it to our clients to get it right and not ask for unnecessary personal information. I took this information to our manager. I felt this was the better route than emailing the team or contacting Eric directly because the message hopefully wouldn’t glaringly look like I did an end-run around them, and my manager is obviously more authoritative in communicating these things. She stated that she would confirm it with our accounting department and then deliver the message.

Did I do this right? Should I have accepted Eric at his word? Should I have told him up-front that I was going to research this myself? And finally, should I have gone directly to my manager with the info, or addressed it with Eric first once I had the answer?

You handled it fine. Eric’s claim made no sense, and you were right to look into it further, particularly as a person who has to process refunds.

If Eric hadn’t been so adamant that he was right when you talked to him about it, you could have gone back to him and said, “I looked into this a little more and billing and accounting both confirmed that we don’t need SSNs or EINs for refunds.” You could have done that even after his bullheadedness, but it’s understandable that you didn’t want to at that point and instead handed it off to your manager to deal with. (After all, you could have done that and been met with continued insistence that you were wrong and he was right, regardless of what your research found.)

I’m guessing Eric will be well aware that you were involved anyway, but since he kept insisting on something wrong, it makes sense to have someone with more authority than you correct him.

(Also, it’s weird that Eric thought you’d need W9s to issue refunds. Unless he never deals with anything involving payments or taxes, it’s useful for your manager to be aware he may have some pretty surprising gaps in his knowledge.)

4. Is my new job just not for me?

I was internally recruited and promoted to a new role that began in June. My onboarding has been terrible and I have walked into a completely dysfunctional team dynamic. My new boss is universally hated and oblivious to her lack of skills. She actually brags about how much people like her and how effective she is, when the truth is almost everyone we work with internally and externally has gone out of their way to tell me privately how much they hate her. The team I took over is being obstinate and uncooperative and claim everything I ask them to do isn’t actually their job.

In theory I have the skills and track record to work through problems like this, but I am finding this level of dysfunction overwhelming and I feel surprisingly apathetic and struggle not to be short / negative with my team. Advice on recognizing the signs personally and systematically that this just isn’t for me?

In these seven short sentences, you’ve already got strong signs of that, particularly here: “I am finding this level of dysfunction overwhelming and I feel surprisingly apathetic and struggle not to be short / negative with my team.”

Feeling overwhelmed, becoming apathetic, and feeling short with people are all very bad signs — and it’s only your third month there. If you’d been there a few years and were feeling this, I’d have other suggestions, but when it’s that bad by month three? Listen to that.