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 three updates from past letter-writers.

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

1. Teen daughter wants to quit her new job because of bad history with a coworker

As I mentioned in the comments, I let her know that I’d support whatever she felt was best, up to and including backing out of the job. Ultimately, she decided she didn’t want to let that relationship ruin this opportunity for her, so she went ahead with it. She has been LOVING it, and by all accounts doing a great job. She’s already in the running for one of three empty crew lead spots, and should hear about it soon. Best (well, worst, but also best) of all, she’s had a couple really horrid interactions with rude and entitled customers, which her managers stepped in and handled perfectly. So while the incidents themselves were pretty awful, it gave her the chance to see that her managers have her back pretty solidly.

As for “Apollo,” the two of them have worked a few shifts together, and she reports that it hasn’t been nearly as bad as she feared. She says they have “an unspoken agreement to coexist in peace,” and she’s prepared to give him the “Grey Rock” response if he seems to be trying to instigate or escalate. Her coworkers and managers know there’s some distance between them, but none of the specifics, and she doesn’t think it’ll be an issue.

She’s making friends; she’s making money; she’s gaining experience, skills, and confidence. A dad couldn’t ask for a better outcome. Thanks for your initial advice and all of the readers’ comments – they really helped me focus in on the best way to help her get where she was going.

2. Pushy coworker won’t stop bringing me food I didn’t ask for

I’m afraid not too much has changed; Kevin still tries to push food/beverages on everyone, including me, and I’m still saying no.

His most recent thing is sending me an IM at 8am every workday asking if I want a coffee. This has happened the last 8 workdays. I bring my own coffee to work, which he knows, but without fail, that IM is there when I start work each morning.

I have not approached my manager formally about it. I did tell her about the coffee thing last week before the holiday, and pointed out that if I were to say “yes” each time, he’d have already spent between $40-$50 buying me coffee. (He specifies “his treat” each time.) I’m not the only one he offers it to either…I acknowledged his finances are not my concern but it’s very odd. Her reply was essentially “I agree that it’s a strange situation but there’s not much to be done.”

He hasn’t gotten aggressive again since the iced tea tantrum, at least not with me. Even without that, though, I’d be lying if I said the constant offers didn’t bother me. But by this point I’ve said so many versions of “no” that it seems unlikely that he’ll suddenly get the message; he doesn’t WANT to get the message. His behavior may not meet the legal definition of harassment but it definitely feels like it. It’s a boundary he’s forcing me to constantly defend and it’s tiring to say the least. I feel like it’s less about the food/coffee and more about wearing me down until he gets a yes.

It’s looking more and more likely that I’ll just have to work around it, unless he escalates again, then I’d definitely have a more serious sit-down with my boss about it. For now though, I’m more or less stuck with it. I was lucky to find a job willing to accommodate my disabilities to the extent this one does, and I really don’t want to jeopardize that.

3. My coworkers are asking if my pregnancy was planned

I don’t have the most exciting update. I got a lot of great responses on the original post that I could give people who ask if my pregnancy was planned, and also ways I could try to stop the question before it happened, like saying, “I’m so excited to say that I’m pregnant!”

I talked with a trusted coworker or two, and they both agreed with me that it was a weird thing for my manager to ask. I’m glad we were on the same page about that! Overall, I only had one other person ask me if the pregnancy is planned. My response was something like, “Wow…I mean we knew what we were doing!” I do think most of my coworkers assume that it was unplanned, but they didn’t say anything.

Since I wrote in, I quit the food service job—it was just getting too hard for me, and my husband and I didn’t need the extra income anyways—and the people at my teaching job have been much more accepting of the pregnancy. No one has asked if it was planned.

I am now 8 months pregnant and everything is going great! Thank you to everyone for the help!

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 who sent their boss a long, angry email … but turned out to be wrong? Here’s the update.

Here is how the situation resolved itself.

I took the day off to decompress and think some more about what happened (and of course, to reach out to Alison!). The night before returning to work, I sent my boss a follow-up email in a different thread from the 1000-word tirade which had kickstarted the whole thing. I followed Alison’s (and other commenters’) advice not to use any “I’m sorry, but” statements, or say anything else that could sound like trying to justify the original email.

The opening sentence of this new message was to, “Renounce the statements made previously, because they were based on a mistaken and out-of-context interpretation of the conversation that we had on MM/DD/YYYY. I sincerely apologize for jumping the gun and making statements that were completely inaccurate and unjustified.”

The next sentence of this email gave a brief recap of how I had interpreted the original conversation. But I wanted to be careful & avoid any semblance of trying to defend my initial behavior. So I followed up with, “However it was my responsibility to ask for clarification, instead of getting angry and using inflammatory rhetoric towards what I THOUGHT was an unfair judgment being passed on me. By failing to do so, I escalated a simple misunderstanding into a situation that damaged the team’s morale and productivity.” The reconciliatory email ended with some genuine words of appreciation and sincerity, and finally a promise to behave differently in the future.

We had a face-to-face meeting first thing in the morning, on the day I returned to the office. He was in a surprisingly good mood, and acknowledged that he saw the follow-up email. I apologized again for the original Angry Email, and acknowledged that it was “completely deranged and made zero sense” for me to react that way, over something that could’ve been so easily cleared up. He said a few things about the importance of communication and staying calm, and the next 15-20 minutes were spent talking about work.

At the time of this writing, a little over 3 months have passed since the original letter. The project has gone well and we haven’t had any more issues in our professional relationship. Although I can definitely sense that our 1:1 meetings have started to have a little more-than-before talk about soft skills. Things are definitely on the right track, but I am aware that I will have to show long-term improvement (e.g. many years without another incident) in order to fully change the way that I am perceived.

Thank you everyone for your time and feedback!

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and for the rest of the year I’ll be running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.

1. My coworker refused to share their screen for training

I did bring it up with my manager, who talked to the trainee’s manager. I’m not sure anything specific happened as a result of that conversation, but some other events happened and he was let go. It turns out this was another episode in a pattern of bizarre behavior. I did appreciate the confirmation of my authority as the trainer to stop the session if the trainee wouldn’t participate. I’ll keep that in mind, though of course I hope to never encounter this again!

2. Community member cuts me off and asks to hear from male employees instead

At the next meeting after the letter, the community member again tried to manage my responses in the room and in front of everyone. Instead of letting him do that I just answered the question, ignoring his “cue” without making eye contact with him. I talked to my manager before the meeting and asked him to back me up when I responded if the scenario happened again, which he did by verbally confirming in the meeting I did in fact answer the question correctly. I think the community member was a little embarrassed and the behavior has ceased. Thank you for your advice and the helpful feedback from the readers. I’ve recently become a manager in my organization and am working to help my younger female reports find their voice in our field.

3. Should I take a great job working for someone I can’t stand?

I’m the letter writer who wrote about whether or not to take a great job, knowing that my direct boss had a lot of bad qualities as both a manager and colleague.

I applied for the job, and took it. I don’t regret it at all. Your advice, and I think the most helpful commenters’ advice, was to reframe how I see him. This was what led me to taking the job despite my reservations.

I won’t speculate, but the bad boss is no longer with the company, and I’m still in the job and enjoying myself. I’ve had far more harsh/unpleasant bosses in the past, but my assessment of him prior to taking the job was spot on. It’s not that it wasn’t difficult, but it was difficult in predictable ways, which made it fairly easy to not react nor take anything personally.

One of the biggest things that made a difference was that I had people in my corner, who were also noticing the same things as me so I never felt like I was going crazy. It was also useful to reframe everything. For instance, his attempts to steal the limelight seemed a bit sad, his tendency to go on about himself made him seem out of touch. Many other things I could laugh off, and get on with it. It helped that I was enjoying the job otherwise.

The biggest unexpected downside was the lack of direction — the job itself is complex, and having someone with a lot of experience who was willing/able to talk it through with me would have helped, and there were times (in hindsight) where I was misled by him. But there are many people in my industry who share knowledge, so I wasn’t adrift.

Thank you, Alison, for your advice and for the commenters who took the time to weigh in, I read every comment and considered every viewpoint. I’d lean towards advising someone in my shoes to not take the job – things may have worked out for me but I was lucky to have support from others at my workplace.

4. Someone left a nasty Glassdoor review using my title(#4 at the link)

I took your advice and texted my old boss. At the same time, I flagged the review on Glassdoor. I’m not sure which of those two actions did the trick, but the review was taken down from Glassdoor … phew.

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and for the rest of the year I’ll be running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.

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

1. What’s the point of making me work from the office to “collaborate” if no one else is here?

I originally wrote to you in December 2021. During the omicron wave, as you suggested, I was able to speak to my supervisor about an exception to the policy and get my office time down to 1 day a week under the premise of not feeling comfortable with so much face time with covid circulating so highly. Initially this decision was meant to be reviewed by March or so, but for various reasons the review kept getting pushed off and I continued to come in only once a week. This arrangement was amazing – since I was only coming in once, I was able to make sure it was always at the very least a day when my boss was in, and since it was the only day I was available in person, others made an effort to schedule meetings that day too. Going to the office went from feeling like a horrible, pointless, depressing waste of time to a productive day. I actually do like seeing my coworkers in person sometimes, and with this arrangement I actually was seeing them when I went in! And I also wasn’t wasting so much time commuting and was able to have a quiet environment 4/5 days to do the work that takes more concentration. My morale was greatly impacted.

Finally, in July my supervisor let me know that due to several recent and upcoming new hires to the team, we are running out of desk space and need some people to be in the office more part time in order to share desks. I have now been approved to come in only once a week indefinitely for that reason. That said, upper management officially still has the 3 day policy in place despite the fact that many people are unhappy with it – and not everyone across the organization has been able to successfully negotiate down.

2. When I give my employee feedback, she tells me her previous boss loved her (#2 at the link)

I’m the person who managed someone who was underperforming and when I gave them feedback, they told me their previous boss loved them and found no faults.

A few commenters pointed out my original email didn’t include explicit examples of how Jane’s work didn’t meet the mark, so I’ll include them here (heavily anonymized):

• She prepared a document that had notable flaws. I and others on the team provided notes that those flaws are not acceptable in multiple reviews. They were unactioned until another person at her level grabbed the document right before it went out to fix it.
• Her documents often have things like spelling errors, continuity errors, and other somewhat obvious errors. When I ask her to fix them she argues with me that I am wrong.
• When I’ve witnessed peers telling her something doesn’t make sense or has an error, she has a lengthy list of reasons that say something clearly wrong is actually right. For instance, chapter 4 comes after chapter 5, but she thinks that makes more sense so she reversed them, and another book she read has that order, so it’s fine.
• Let’s assume we use MLA, she repeatedly uses APA, or Chicago, or some mix of both depending on the project. She will argue that APA makes more sense when told we use MLA, even if it’s inconsistent and doesn’t match what our company uses elsewhere.

She and I met with HR to go over what was wrong, and why she was not meeting expectations. She felt she had too much work on her plate. I reduced her workload to one project and took the rest on myself. Unfortunately, her work didn’t improve. We met weekly to go over the documents she prepared and I consistently found and raised errors, misalignments with our business, etc. Shortly after this, I conducted her performance review, where she had given herself a “greatly exceeds expectations” and I gave her a “below expectations.” We talked about the misalignment and ultimately it came down to the fact her role looks really different than it has in the past, and her work style and output haven’t changed to match. I used a lot of the advice you gave in your column, “the expectations have changed,” “But I’m not talking about the past, I’m talking about this project.” etc. In these conversations, I was met with a lot of deflection and defensiveness, including that she believes I am looking for problems in her work. I did ultimately have to part ways with Jane. She took this news very poorly, and immediately listed all of the reasons her being fired is wrong, and raised a number of reasons why I am actually ill-suited to my role, am not qualified to give her feedback, and a conspiracy had been launched against her. Honestly, I’ve had to part ways with employees before and this was by far the worst reaction I’ve seen.

I appreciate all the commenters who brought their perspective and stories to the thread. It was important for me to see how others had felt when they disagreed with their boss’s assessment of their performance, and how frustrating it can be to think you’re looking at the same situation so differently. I went back and checked (and anxiously re-checked and re-checked) that I was basing the feedback on clear outcomes. I also reached out to some external mentors (same industry), and internal leaders I could trust to gut-check before we ultimately made the call. I do hope I handled this with care and respect, while still upholding the needs of the business and ensuring our department creates results.

3. My constantly available coworkers keep commenting on my healthier work-life balance

I changed my responses as you suggested and stopped brushing off the “wow your work life balance is great!” remarks so quickly. Reading your response (as well as all the comments) helped me approach those remarks with more curiosity and less insecurity. In particular, I talked with my colleague Anna many times about her overload of work and need for more personal time. Instead of referring to my need for evenings, weekends, and PTO as a personal quirk, I started being more frank about why I think everyone should hold reasonable boundaries and asked more probing questions about how she could try to claw back some private time. She ended up taking a real vacation without being available just in case, and is she also taking the entire month of December off because she has so much rolled over PTO. Our second level manager has also been very actively encouraging people to take PTO – I think this is the biggest reason Anna started feeling more comfortable using up her PTO. I don’t claim credit for these developments, but I really appreciate seeing them around me and I’m especially happy that a person in leadership is vocally supportive of time off.

4. Did my candidate invent his alma mater?

I wish I had a more exciting update! It actually made me wonder if the candidate read AAM. Less than a day after the post went up, he withdrew without explanation. I’m grateful to you and the AAM community for the great advice; it was such a weird situation!

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and for the rest of the year I’ll be running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.

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

1. Pregnant coworker keeps saying awful things to my terminally ill sister

I have an update that, while dissatisfying from an HR perspective, will probably be pretty fun to read.

My sister vents often to me and our best male friend. Preggo left a comment on Lil Sis’s Facebook – some sort of “did you know I’m pregnant bc I’m pregnant” comment on a cancer update. While Lil Sis and I were brainstorming firm but tasteful responses, Male Friend just left a reply that tore her a new asshole. She immediately deleted her reply and went radio silent.

Lil Sis met with her boss the next morning to get ahead of any potential drama. Her boss actually shrugged and said, “This is what happens when you talk crazy out of church” (did I mention they’re in a tiny mountain town?). The gist was she gave my sister carte blanche to put Preggo in her place as needed. A warning and write up would have been better and I’m disappointed that my sister’s manager is kind of a coward. We’re glad manager is on her side in at least some way.

Preggo came into my sister’s office with her tail between her legs and apologized profusely and has since only been annoying in an overly accomodating way. No pregnant talk, no minimizing the TERMINAL CANCER.

Apparently we just needed the audacity of a straight white man with nothing to lose.

2. My employees must have short, unpainted fingernails (#2 at the link)

I took your advice during our annual hiring cycle this past summer and provided those applicants I selected for interviews with a supplemental document describing the work environment in more detail. If they agreed that these were conditions they’d be willing to work under, I went ahead and scheduled the interview. This proved a good opportunity to highlight some other unusual requirements that our student employees need to be aware of, such as not having any food in the lab and the necessity of following security protocols such as leaving coats and backpacks in a designated space away from their work stations. Using the supplemental document makes it clear that these are the rules for everybody and they’re not getting singled out.

I also agree with your assessment that I was way overthinking it! The precipitating incident that prompted me to write in was a recent interview I’d conducted with an exceptionally qualified student of color who uses he/him pronouns and has very long, natural painted nails. I had to ask him if he would be willing to cut them and he said no, which is totally understandable! Coupled with the fact that I am white and the previous student I had to fire for getting acrylics was also a person of color, I couldn’t help but worry I was misstepping somehow.

Thanks also to the commentariat! Hearing about all the other jobs, especially in food service, that require short, unpainted nails, made me feel less like this was an extreme imposition. (Just a heads-up for this time that I use they/them pronouns.) Folks were right that we work with rare books, archives, and museum specimens and because people in my field get this question a lot I did want to address the comments about wearing gloves. American conservators recommend against those iconic white cotton gloves you see in movies for working with paper materials; recently washed, dry, unlotioned hands are the way to go (this can be a real pain – literally – in the winter!). “The acidity of human skin” as one person put it does not damage paper. Fabric gloves can greatly decrease the user’s manual dexterity and sensitivity, especially when improperly fitted, making it easier to inadvertently cause damage to the materials they’re working with. The textile fibers can also snag on paper fibers, leading to tears. From a purely practical perspective, fabric gloves are often reused again and again and unless somebody is vigilant about taking them home to wash properly between uses they can end up introducing more contamination than they prevent (especially if you’ve been handling a book with red rot!). Plastic gloves are a necessity for handling photos, some metals, and some textiles, however.

3. Booking a luxury hotel for business travel (#3 at the link)

I ended up going with the cheaper hotel that was a short drive away, since the price of the hotel + Ubers was significantly less expensive than nightly rate of the luxury hotel. It was definitely the right decision, and I feel silly now for having even considered paying $800/night for a hotel, but I’ve come to realize that my norms around business travel were a bit skewed before this. At the last job I had where I traveled for work, I would regularly stay at very nice hotels where my boss (who handled the bookings) had rewards points. That company was, in general, not a great example of a healthy work environment, and I probably should have realized that extended to this situation also…

Anyways, the cheaper hotel worked out fine for this trip, and the business part of the trip went well also. The people at the office I visited did recommend checking the luxury hotel next time though, as sometimes the hotel will run promotions that significantly defray the cost and make the nightly rate more reasonable.

A few commenters also pointed out that, as is the case with so many letters Alison receives, better communication from my boss would have prevented this whole situation. I have since learned that clear and concise comms and maintaining process documents are generally not my boss’ strength, but now that it’s something I’m aware of, I’m working to manage it better in all aspects of my work.

4. My professor wants us to walk into local businesses and ask if we can do a free project for them

While several students from both classes the teacher pulls the “find your own project” stunt in have filed complaints, none of the students I’ve talked to have had any progress in getting their complaints heard. Whether the IT dean has even seen the complaints is unknown. Meanwhile, I’ve heard the teacher’s doing it again this quarter.

In the comments of that post, I mentioned the dean of the IT school was having an argument with the teachers over the dean wanting all classes back to 100% butt in seat, while the teachers wanted hybrid and asynchronized classes. The teachers won, and with surprisingly minor compromises on their part.

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and for the rest of the year I’ll be 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 coworker kept bringing her “problems” that weren’t problems … and they definitely weren’t her problems? Here’s the update.

This feels like a lifetime ago! As you and many commenters picked up, my manager was… not great. The reason the Emily problem grew so insufferable was because our manager didn’t want to manage her. Despite telling me that she agreed with me and that she would speak to Emily, she did the bare minimum; I found out that some of the meetings she promised never actually happened. I think this was partly because Emily’s schedule rarely overlapped with our manager’s, making her an easy problem to ignore. Our manager had a habit of “managing” like that, so it’s not surprising that, within the two years I was there, every single position in my department turned over at least once.

After reading your advice, I did my best to have Emily make a list for me rather than constantly interrupting me. This worked briefly, but she soon started coming up to me and saying “This is urgent!” for “problems” that were really, really not urgent. When I did get a list, it was mostly things that were, shockingly, not actual problems. I was careful to act quickly on items that made sense, even if it was something very minor, hoping that Emily would feel she had contributed. But, she soon realized that I wasn’t acting on all of her list items, and she began arguing for every single item to be resolved. I directed her to our manager every single time, but Emily despised our manager, so nothing ever came of it.

Fast forward to June: Emily is still there, but no worries, because I got a new job! My last interactions with Emily, though, were a complete circus. The day before my last, she found out that I had interviewed for the same job as her (a different job than the one I accepted) and she was LIVID that I hadn’t disclosed it to her. The truth is, she had told me about her interview, and I didn’t say anything about mine because 1) I was certain her reaction would be volcanic, and 2) I was lukewarm on that company, and was pretty sure I was going to take the other offer I had on the table. On my last day, she STOMPED into our shared workspace, refusing to make eye contact with me, threw her things on her desk, and STOMPED out to the public area. A few minutes later, she saw me working on a piece of equipment, stomped back into the space, and, with a raised voice, told me to get off of it because she needed it IMMEDIATELY. I calmly replied, “Okay, Emily, that’s fine.” She glared at me and said, “I am SO disappointed in you. You knew you had another job lined up and you still interviewed for a position YOU KNEW I WANTED. I NEED IT MORE THAN YOU.” I said, “Emily, everyone can interview for whatever jobs they want.” She then raised her voice again and started blatantly insulting me, to which I immediately said, “I’m sorry you feel like that, but I am not going to be spoken to that way.” I walked away and continued wrapping up my things.

A few minutes later, a coworker asked me why Emily was nearly in tears, in the public area. I pointed her to our manager, and said to bring any behavioral issues directly to her. The last thing Emily said to me was that she was “disgusted” by me for interviewing for a job I knew she wanted.

I started my new position the following Monday, and I have never been happier or more satisfied with my career. It’s a better title, with much better pay, doing work that I love. The organization’s culture is absolutely fantastic. I work with so many talented people, and I have a wonderful manager. I’ve gotten glowing reviews already, which I think is a direct result of working in a positive, professional, friendly, flexible workplace that truly values its staff.