Ask a Manager

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

1. My job made me a shocking counteroffer

I just had a bizarre experience. I’m an IT analyst at a global org, and we’ve been going through a painful and poorly executed agile implementation for the past 14 months. I could write a book about all my complaints, but long story short: I got another job because agile is driving me nuts, the dysfunction here is bad for my health, and I’m paid below the market rate.

I’m in my notice period, and was just pulled into our director’s office today and asked if I’d be interested in a senior management position, reporting directly to a VP, managing a team of 15-20 people (my current colleagues!). I’ve never managed even one person. I’ve got “senior” in my job title, but I’m not very senior in the structure here. I’m just not junior.

I know I am above average as an employee, I’m trusted and have good relationships, I’m a smart worker and good at articulating issues, and I’ve been here for over five years so my leaving is a blow. I tend to be modest and underestimate my impact, but come on. Senior management? Me? Why? Figuring out how to reestablish relationships with the team, many of whom are currently senior to me (!!!) as their manager feels insane. It feels like a trap.

The guy who was in the same role for the past year was just fired for being ineffective. There is so much political maneuvering going on, it’s hard to trust anyone — and the master manipulator is the director who floated this option to me. It feels like I’m being used as a pawn. But it’s also made me start second guessing myself — am I undervaluing myself so much? — and it’s coming right at the time where leaving feels very real and change is scary, so I feel vulnerable to this nonsense. How am I even supposed to react to this?

Trust your gut. You’re in the process of leaving, you made a decision you felt good about, and now someone who you describe as a master manipulator is offering you something that doesn’t make sense to you to try to change your mind.

I don’t want to discount the possibility that you’re some kind of wunderkind — the rare person who could leapfrog over several layers of advancement to walk into a senior management role and thrive — but that person is very rare. You’ve never managed anyone, and you’d be managing a large team; that in itself would give me pause. The first year or two of managing is very difficult, managing managers is a whole other level of learning and difficulty, and this is a place that just fired the last person in that job for being ineffective; I’d be awfully concerned about walking into that job without experience. I’m also concerned that the “master manipulator” who offered this sees it as a short-term solution to two problems (you leaving, and the vacancy created by firing the other guy), not as something in your best interests.

Plus, you were leaving for reasons that wouldn’t go away just because you moved up; if anything, the dysfunction you’ve already identified as bad for your health is likely to be worse in a more senior role.

Stick to your original plan and don’t be this person’s pawn.

2. How can I talk to people at my new office?

I’m three weeks in to a new job that requires office presence (hybrid), after four years of working from home. I work from a satellite office and nobody on my team is located here. About three times a week, I drive to the office, badge in, sit at the desk I’ve reserved, and do my onboarding work. I stop by the pantry for tea and snacks occasionally. I eat lunch at my desk. I haven’t spoken to another human. It didn’t bother me at first, but now I’ve realized that I’m in a bad mood on office days and I think I’m starved for human interaction. It doesn’t help that I don’t have much work yet and rarely talk to my coworkers on calls either.

For the office people, it’s a different mix every day. I see some of them talking to each other about work sometimes. But I also see a lot of people who never talk to anyone. I suspect they’re also just here to get their badge swipes. Any advice for talking to strangers in the break room so I can feel like a live human? Or not and just being okay with it?

Introduce yourself to people! The break room is the perfect place to do it. It is completely socially acceptable to walk up to someone in the break room and say, “Hi, I’m Jane! I just started recently and no one from my team is based here, so I’m trying to meet people!” Most will be happy to introduce themselves in return and you can ask questions about what they do, how long they’ve worked there, etc. If you sense a particular rapport with someone, ask if they’d be up for getting coffee sometime and telling you more about the company. This is how work friendships are made! (They’re easier to make if you’re thrown into contact via doing actual work together, but this will work too.)

Also, try eating lunch in the break room sometimes rather than at your desk; it will put you into contact with more people.

3. Can discussing salaries be an anti-trust problem?

This no longer affects me as I’ve moved on, but I am wondering if something a company I worked for previously is doing is on the right side of the law (and, if it is technically legal, if it’s as shady as I think it is).

The company I worked for was purchased by a much larger company. Literally everything I learned about the larger company after that was somehow been worse than their already questionable reputation in the industry led me to believe. I left not long after we were purchased, as their business practices were concerning and they seemed to treat employees more like liabilities than assets.

Before I left, we all had to do some training with the larger company. Some of the training was solid, but the thing that stuck out to me was the section on anti-trust concerns. The training material said that discussing salaries can violate anti-trust regulations, but it did not say how or under what circumstances this would be the case; it was just included on a list of things that could pose a liability.

I understand that sharing salaries with competing companies could possibly be an issue, but they did not expound upon the situations in which sharing salary information might be in violation of anti-trust regulations, which I imagine would lead a lot of employees to assume that discussing their salaries amongst themselves is potentially illegal. Does this seem as deliberately misleading to you as it does to me? Could this be interpreted as them illegally prohibiting employees from discussing salaries? Or is it just legal enough for them to squeak by? Am I thinking about this the right way?

It’s hard to say without seeing the specific wording on the materials. If they were implying that discussing salaries with fellow coworkers could be an anti-trust issue, then (a) that’s an extraordinarily audacious bit of bullshit and (b) it would indeed put them at odds with the National Labor Relations Act, which prohibits actions that cast a chilling effect on workers’ ability to exercise their rights under that law.

But sharing salaries with other companies in your industry (not coworkers within your own company) can be an anti-trust concern if it’s used to keep salaries down, and I suspect/hope that’s what they were referring to.

4. HR wants me to sign up for their disability and life insurance

It’s benefit elections time where I work. I signed up for pretty much the boilerplate options last year, which was health insurance and a few other items, including a life insurance policy and a disability insurance policy.

This year I decided to waive the life insurance and the disability, because I’d rather have the money and the plans don’t seem very good. After submitting my selections, I got an email from our HR person asking me if I was aware that I waived them. It felt a little passive-aggressive and weird. Why does she care? Also, I think she knows damn well I didn’t waive them by accident. What do you think?

I wouldn’t be convinced she knows you didn’t waive them by accident; you’d be surprised by how many people do things like that and then are surprised/upset when the insurance isn’t available to them later. By confirming you intended it, she wards off those complaints later. It’s also possible that your company needs a certain percentage of employees signed up in order to offer the rates they offer. And/or she may just think it’s a good deal that you should take advantage of. (For what it’s worth, while not everyone needs life insurance, especially if you don’t have dependents, disability insurance is usually a good idea if the plan is right, although this one may not be.)

If you don’t want them, just confirm that you intended to waive them and don’t worry about it beyond that.

5. Making sure job postings are legitimate

I work for a large company in a medium-large city. Due to our size and industry, we are always hiring. My responsibilities include managing our LinkedIn presence; in that capacity, I have noticed a concerning trend.

In the past couple of months, I have received several LinkedIn direct messages from job seekers questioning the legitimacy of jobs for which someone posing as us contacted them. The messages usually included a job description and an invitation to download an app to participate in an interview. Very often, the name of the “interviewer” is the name of one of our HR executives or recruiters.

I heard from at least 10 people who, thankfully, contacted us before downloading any software. I shudder to think of how many job seekers believed the offer to be real and downloaded malicious software, thinking they corresponded with my company when they were instead being scammed.

Readers, please go directly to a company’s website to confirm that a job posting is legitimate. Apply for the job directly from that website. Do not download software of any kind that is sent to you by someone you don’t know. The scammers are getting more sophisticated when it comes to taking advantage of job seekers. Please be careful out there.

Thank you.

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

1. Should I avoid rolling my eyes while giving feedback to a coworker?

My workplace rarely fires people for performance issues, and it’s led to us retaining a few people who everyone agrees have performance issues but where no action is taken. I have a few colleagues who I’ve given regular, repeated feedback to about basic things like not completing the scope of a project they outlined they would complete or not understanding a topic that they work on regularly. The first time I give someone feedback, I always give them the benefit of the doubt that it may be a one-off. But there are now a couple (of the dozens of colleagues I work with) where I don’t have hope that their performance gaps are coachable. They are both below me in rank, but don’t report to me.

I always keep my words factual, but I’ve now started to receive feedback that I should avoid negative body language, such as eye rolling. Is it reasonable to expect someone to control unconscious body language even if everyone agrees that the negative body language is in reaction to unacceptable performance, not anything personal?

It feels like these employees’ performance issues have now become my problem. Would a man be expected to always be extra “nice”?

Rolling your eyes at someone while giving them feedback is incredibly rude. This isn’t about being “extra nice”; it’s about not showing open contempt while speaking to a colleague, and that’s a reasonable (and very normal) expectation of both men and women.

If you truly can’t control outward signs of contempt, you’ll need to find another method of providing the feedback (like in writing where your eye-rolling can’t be seen) or ask your manager or someone else to deliver it in your place.

For what it’s worth, your company’s refusal to deal with performance issues is a much bigger problem than any individual low performer could be. Direct your contempt there.

Related:
my boss says I’m too much of an “open book” emotionally

2. My company is forcing me to see their doctor to get prescription coverage

I have been taking weight loss medications (think Wegovy, Mounjaro, etc.) for over a year and I am ecstatic to finally be losing weight after a lifetime of struggling with obesity. But I recently received a letter from my employer stating that starting in 2025, our health insurance plans would no longer cover weight loss medications unless they were prescribed by the online clinic they have partnered with which specializes in weight loss. They’ve marketed this partnership as an amazing new benefit to employees. You get to meet with a dietician, download their app, track all your food, connect your activity tracker, all for free! And then maybe, if you qualify, you get to meet with a prescriber. I get what they’re trying to do. The medication is expensive and they need to reduce the number of employees taking them. Note that while we’ve received company-wide emails touting this new amazing benefit, the part about weight loss medications has only been sent quietly via snail mail to the people currently taking them.

I am pretty terrified that I will become a victim of the prescription reduction targets they’re trying to achieve and am frustrated that they believe the opinion of a doctor I’ve never met is more valuable than that of my physician who specializes in medical weight loss and whom I’ve been working with for more than a year. While I don’t believe it will be good for my mental health to reinvigorate a numbers obsession back into my life (calories eaten and burned, pounds, grams of macronutrients, etc.), I am willing to do many of the things my company has outlined to prove I am worthy. But the RX can only come from their doctor.

I’ve already expressed my concerns to our third-party benefits support provider and plan to appeal the rejection I will receive when my physician prescribes me this medication in January. In the meantime, I have begun jumping through their hoops, some of which seem invasive, make me uncomfortable, and are all pretty time consuming. (Each day you open their app, you have a new long list of “things to do” and information to share.) Is there anything else I can do in the meantime to convince my company that their doctor is not better than my doctor and that abruptly cutting off care will not be good for my health? For context, I work for a large global publicly traded company that manages several “operating companies” and I personally am located in Massachusetts.

Probably not, I’m sorry. Less than 20% of large companies in the U.S. cover weight loss drugs in their insurance plans at all; they’re increasingly being excluded from coverage because of the cost. About half of those that do cover them are adding requirements like your company’s. If you want to continue to get them through your insurance, this is likely the only way you can do it.

3. Do I have to continue my old boss’s gift-giving tradition?

Early in the year, my boss moved across the county to a new job, and I was given his role. I am now the manager of our small office and my coworkers. Several of us have been here since this branch opened; we’ve been peers all along and have held various levels of supervisory status. We are a client-facing operation so that title is not so much for internal supervision as it is procedural for client issues.

My boss used to give everyone gift cards for Christmas, either for specific stores or a general Visa-type card. Last year I was given $100 and two others $50, and the rest of the staff $25. No one else exchanged gifts that I know of. I was pleased, I admit. I mean, who doesn’t like free money?

But I think I’m a bit of a hypocrite because I am not a gift-giver or holiday-minded person by nature, and I somehow feel weird about taking over the gifting role. I’ve never exchanged gifts with these folks, and it kind of seems odd to start now. I appreciate them hugely, and I tell them so often (they really do make my work life easy), but giving gifts seems … too personal? But maybe that’s just my anti-holiday streak talking. Would it be really egregious to skip the individual gift and do some sort of a group recognition?

You’re fine skipping the gifts. You’re not obligated to give gifts, even as the boss. That said, before you decide, are you sure your old boss was buying those gifts personally rather than them being “from” the company? If they’re paid for by the company, it would be Scrooge-ish to stop the tradition.

However, giving different amounts to different people is weird! If it turns out the company will pay for gift cards and so you continue giving them, everyone should get the same amount.

4. I can’t convince myself to start job searching

My boss sucks, and isn’t going to change. I work for a micromanager who plays favorites, and while I’ve been able to find ways to work around this for years — work from home was great! — I’ve finally reached my breaking point. This isn’t healthy, I don’t deserve to be miserable at work, and there has to be something better out there.

The problem I’m facing is actually taking the plunge and starting a job search. I know I need to get out! I feel strongly about this! There are positions on my industry job board that I’d be qualified for! And yet: I can’t bring myself to update my resume and put myself out there.

I think there’s a lot of things playing into this hesitation. This is my first professional job, which I came to without the traditional educational background. It’s been made clear that it’s Very Unusual for someone without the traditional background to hold a position in our industry. And while I am at a crisis point with my boss, I love the work itself; under different management (which likely won’t happen at my organization for many years), I’d be happy to stay here indefinitely. What if I can’t get hired into another job in my industry? Am I insane for considering moving out of my low-cost-of-living region? Is it foolish to throw away my current position, where I’ve got middling seniority, when my industry (and the world!) may become increasingly turbulent in months and years to come? What if, what if, what if…

At the end of the day, I know the answer: I’m miserable, and it doesn’t hurt anything to see what’s out there. Job searching and leaving a job are two different decisions, and I should view them separately. What I could use is advice about how to make that leap, emotionally, from “I know I need to look” to actually looking. Any guidance about how to get over the hump would be greatly appreciated.

Look at this way: you’re just gathering information. If you’re worried that you won’t be able to get hired into another job in your industry, the only way to confirm or disprove that is to apply for jobs and find out. If you’re right about that, you’ll find out by … not being offered other jobs. It doesn’t make sense to decide that preemptively, rather than testing the market.

And you’re not obligated to take a job just because it’s offered to you; you can job search simply to see what’s out there and to compare those jobs against your current situation. If you decide you’re not ready to make the move once you’re offered a specific, concrete job, you’re allowed to decide that. But by not even looking, you’re taking away all options from yourself and just ensuring you’ll stay where you are, with a boss who’s making you miserable. If you end up choosing that in the end, after comparing it to other real options, so be it — but do yourself the favor of letting it be a real choice.

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

1. Can you be fired for making a pass at your boss’s spouse?

I am a longtime watcher of the CBS soap The Bold and the Beautiful and recently a plot line came up that I thought would be fun to run by you!

On the soap, Steffy runs Forrester Creations (an international fashion house that seems to only have three rooms in its office space). She has long-standing enmity with her stepsister Hope, who is the main designer of one of their fashion lines. Steffy and Hope have fought over men in the past (and have been married to and had children with the same guy), and Hope is now single and was crushing on Steffy’s husband, Finn (who’s a doctor but seems to spend a lot of time at his wife’s work). She made a pass at him at a non-work event and he turned her down, but everyone found out. Steffy told Hope that if she made another pass at Finn, she would be fired.

Hope moved on to a new guy (Carter, who’s the COO — this place has terrible work boundaries) and while attempting to have sexy times with Carter at work, she accidentally ended up in a compromising position with Finn in her lingerie due to mistaken identity. Steffy walked in on them and fired her on the spot, despite Hope saying it was a miscommunication and she wasn’t attempting to seduce her husband.

Many of the characters are saying it’s wrong for Steffy to fire Hope for a personal non-work reason and I’m wondering how you would advise Steffy or Hope if they wrote into you!

Of course it’s reasonable to fire your sister for continually hitting on your husband. There is no obligation to continue to employ a relative who tries to personally betray you in that way. Steffy would also be on solid ground in firing Hope for stripping down to lingerie at work and attempting to have sex in the office, regardless of who she hoped to have the sex with.

It would also be reasonable, and legal, for Steffy to fire Hope if Hope tried to kidnap her child, was secretly sheltering an evil twin, or was blackmailing their long-lost uncle after he came out of a coma. (I watched Days of Our Lives as a child; I know how this works.)

2. Volunteer dropped the ball and wouldn’t respond to any messages

I belong to a professional organization that has a national branch as well as state chapters (sometimes more than one per state). For my state, we have three chapters and we hold one large statewide conference every year. I am a chair of a subcommittee of the main chapter. These aren’t paid positions (it’s more something that looks good on resumes).

The same woman has always handled our submission to the statewide conference every year. This year, she was going to record a podcast with former chairs of our subcommittee and then post them to the chapter’s social media so everyone attending the conference (not just our session) could listen. (She also hosts a professional podcast related to our profession in her spare time.)

About a month before the conference, we still had no work product from her, despite this starting three months prior. She emailed a week or so later, saying she had never imagined her work would be this busy this year, but she would make the deadline.

So we went on to assign co-hosts to eight tables, telling the co-hosts where the podcasts would be posted and to listen so they would be able to help direct any conversations.

Not only did this woman not post anything to the social media accounts until the morning of the conference, she would not answer any phone calls or emails asking where these podcasts were, or what she needed help with, despite several of us inquiring.

I’m wondering how we could have best handled this situation. Looking back, I think more check-ins might have helped, especially with hindsight, knowing we should have taken stuff off her plate. I just don’t know how to handle it when people are not answering any communication — for all we know, she could have had a family emergency and not been able to handle any of this, so we were also worried.

Yes, more check-ins! If you’re counting on having something by a particular date, you don’t want to just leave it for months and not check in until the end; you want to check in at least a few times throughout so that you can ensure things are on track and course-correct if they’re not.

If someone in this context (an unpaid volunteer) isn’t responding at all to inquiries, then at some point you assume they’re not doing the work and make other plans — and you let them know that with a message like, “Since we haven’t hear back from you about X, I’m guessing you don’t have time to do it this quarter. Because we’d need know for sure by the 15th, if we haven’t heard from you by next week, we will assume X isn’t happening this year and will make different plans.” And then the next week, if you haven’t heard from them, you send another message confirming that you’re moving forward without their work on X.

3. My coworker road-raged at me and now she’s trying to be BFFs

Last year I was involved in a road rage incident. I cut someone off (not my proudest moment, mea culpa) and she followed me closely, occasionally pulling up next to me at intersections to scream threats and obscenities at me, until I pulled into the parking lot of a police station. I made a report but there was never any follow-up. It was really scary, but I was unharmed.

Recently, I changed jobs. On day one, I was being introduced to my new team, and wouldn’t you know it, the woman who road raged at me is on my team! She didn’t recognize me at first, but a few days after I started, she told me she’d recognized my car in the employee parking lot. She apologized and let me know that the incident had been part of a very low point in her life that she’s been working hard to recover from. I thanked her for apologizing and have since been polite to her at work.

However, she seems to have gotten it into her head that this has brought us closer together, and is now making overtures of friendship towards me (asking for my socials/contact info, asking me to hang out after work, etc.). I appreciate that she apologized but I’m really not interested in being her friend. I’m worried that not going along with this will set her off somehow. What do you think is the best way forward here?

Treat her like you would any other colleague who was making social overtures you weren’t interested in — meaning set clear boundaries and politely decline: “You’re kind to ask but I keep work and social media separate.” / “I’m not able to socialize after work.” / “No, thank you, but I hope you have fun if you go!” / etc. Alternately, you can say more directly, “I appreciate your apologizing for what happened last year, but I prefer to leave it there and simply work together as colleagues.”

It sounds like you’re worried about a volatile reaction because you’ve already seen her have a volatile reaction once before. Hopefully we can take her at her word that she’s working hard to not repeat that behavior, and she has more incentive not to blow up at a colleague than at a stranger … but if she does blow up again, you’ll have more recourse this time and can escalate it to your employer to manage.

Related:
I don’t want to be friends with my coworker

4. How to ask people who want free advice to pay me for it

I am a technical expert in a niche field and have accumulated some contacts from a previous position who I assisted with some brief, but free, advice in the months after I left, knowing that it was very hard to fill my spot. My previous employer hasn’t replaced me in a year (and counting).

Things were quiet for some time but they came back with a very big issue and copied a number of high level staff, attached documents, and asked me for help beyond a few quick questions. I’ve also had other people I’ve previously worked with ask me questions regarding my expertise to use for their own jobs for paying work for other clients. This is work I would need to be paid for, not free advice.

How do I either politely deflect freeloaders who are profiting off my niche experience, or potentially broach a discussion of having them pay a consulting fee? I was a public employee previously, but I am not willing to work for free now that I have moved on to another position, but am interested in a consulting side job.

“The scope of this is more than I could answer quickly, but we could set up a short-term consulting agreement if you’re interested in that.” Include an estimate of what you think they’d need and what you’d charge.

Alternately, if you’re not interested in doing a particular piece of work even if you’re paid for it: “The scope of this is more than I could answer quickly. I sometimes do this kind of thing on a consultant basis but realistically wouldn’t have the time to take it on right now — my apologies!” If you can easily refer them to someone else who might do it for pay, refer them for the good will it will generate on both sides.

5. “Gotcha” instructions in an applicant’s cover letter

I’m a hiring manager for the first time and wading through applications and cover letters. Today one of the letters had a postscript: “I’m not sure if recruiters read these until the end. If you did, write ‘Booyah’ at the beginning of my follow-up email. Because you did what most don’t!”

I understand that job seekers are frustrated with the rise of AI and job application systems that seem like black holes. But yes, a person reads the applications at least some of the time — especially at smaller places, or for jobs where writing is important. And I’m not sure if there is a job or company where a statement like that would help your case for getting the job. At the very least it seems like a big risk to turn people off.

I put this applicant in the no pile for not only this reason, but wonder if I should respond, not with “booyah” but with some version of feedback that their P.S. was unprofessional. Or is it not worth it and I should just move on and let them get the form rejection email?

It’s not worth it. They’ll figure it out from the lack of employer response, or they’ll find the one employer who thinks it’s amazing, or they won’t figure it out and will just stay bitter … but it’s not your job to coach them. (I understand the impulse! I used to have it myself. To the point that I started a blog to try to help. But it’s really not your job.)

Interestingly, occasionally employers have used this tactic too — including instructions in ads like “please put ‘kumquat’ in the subject line of your email in order to be considered.” It’s as infantilizing (and a bit insulting) when they do it too.