Ask a Manager

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.

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 boss was obsessed with her and wanted her to be his emotional support? The first update was here, and here’s the latest.

Your readers may remember me as the executive assistant who wanted advice about the increasingly obsessive behavior of their CEO. Shortly after reading your response, I began job hunting in the public sector. I was disillusioned by my recent experiences and the thought of landing a position that was even remotely similar made my skin crawl. Fortunately, I was able to land a position in my local government after a relatively brief search. I’ve been in this new position for a few months and it’s been the single most humbling experience of my life: the caliber of people that I work for and with is astonishing; I’ve never been part of a team that operates this way and it’s incredibly gratifying. However, I’ve been struggling to find my footing and rather than hit the ground running, I took two steps and face planted. I feel like I’ve gone from playing with Lego Duplo to Lego Creator Expert sets overnight — one of the many astute comments left by your readers suggested that my old job was doing nothing for my skill building and they couldn’t have been more right! However, I’m happy to say my new boss has been incredible at every turn: they understand it’s been a rough transition and they are willing to see me through. I’m learning and growing in fantastic and challenging ways for the first time in my adult career. It’s been really hard, but the kind of hard that makes a person better for having experienced it.

As you can expect, it’s been a really bitter pill to swallow, now that I have first hand knowledge of what an appropriate EA/executive relationship should look like. In an effort to insure that my ex-boss is no longer able to leverage his title and position to manipulate or out-right force women into these relationships with him, I’ve retained an attorney and am currently working through the list of options available to hold him and the organization accountable.

And I’m still married, happily for the most part (ha!)

I remain forever grateful that you responded – you and your readers showed me everything I was missing when I was too close to see.

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 younger employee doesn’t know professional norms

Thank you to Alison for your advice and to the commenters as well. I wasn’t able to be in the comments in real time, but appreciated the feedback (and drubbing haha). I’m happy to report that my employee continues to thrive in his role and that we sorted out the issues in the letter. The most important thing to address was being on time to our check ins, which I brought up and we haven’t had an issue since. I mostly decided to let the “boss” thing go, although I did let him know that it should stay in internal communications. Finally, I learned from my employee (and from my brother and in the comments) that there are actually a few different interpretations of the 😤 emoji! He intended it to communicate “Yes, I’m hard at work!”. Like, you are grunting from the exertion of doing your task. I let him know that since there’s a few different interpretations of its meaning, that we should probably keep it out of social posts. (We had a separate funny conversation about how millennials use 😂 but Gen Z prefers 🤣. Still learning a lot about which emojis are in these days!)

Overall, I’m very happy with my hire for this role. In addition to the coaching I provide him as his manager, we also secured funding to hire an outside consultant who has been helping him shape his work plan, which I think has been invaluable professional development for him. His role is one that we haven’t had a dedicated staff person for in years, so it’s a huge boost to our organization’s impact to have him there. Excited to see how he continues to grow into the role!

2. I’m taking six months off to hike — should I tell people what I’m doing? (#2 at the link)

I did end up telling folks why I was taking off for 6 months and it was pretty much a non-issue. People were generally excited for me, supportive and curious. I recently got back after completing the trail, and have gotten absolutely no negative feedback, even though I ended up extending the trip by two weeks. My one remaining team member had a fairly miserable May/June but she is more frustrated with my boss than me, b/c he also took off for more than a month in her busiest season. I also ended up getting the promotion I had anticipated (while I was on leave already, gotta love those sloooow government processes) and have had overwhelmingly positive responses to that – my team member/new direct report has been particularly effusive as have all our internal partners.

3. My boss sent me a message urging me to follow Jesus

Unfortunately I never texted back or reported but as the job was a a grocery store I still shop at I have run in to her. When it happens we both have acted like it didn’t happen. I don’t really want to risk her being fired as she retires this year. But I did tell a lot of the coworkers there about it.

4. My coworker/friend keeps coming to work drunk

Unfortunately, my story did not have a happy ending. Despite my and my coworkers’/supervisor’s best efforts, my friend ended up being caught drunk on the job a second time and was terminated back in the spring. She has recently started to look for work again but did no additional substance abuse counseling and I’m positive she’s still drinking. It’s really very sad.

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.

Remember the letter-writer whose boss wouldn’t stop texting her while she was in a hospital bed? Here’s the update.

First, I want to thank the commentariat for all the well wishes for my recovery and for those who shared their own stories of cancer/major illness. Reading your supportive comments got me through a difficult month. I’m six months out from surgery and just had a good scan and follow-up appointments. I’m seeing a therapist who specializes in patients who have/had cancer and have my first visit with the exercise oncology group next week. Things are looking good.

Before I get to the update itself, I also need to thank Alison who, on the day of and after my letter was posted, kindly and quickly dealt with my mental fog and opioid-induced paranoia. At my request, she made several edits to the piece (e.g. removing the word-for-word text messages I originally included) and removed my comments, which is why the comment section seems confusing. There were LOADS of identifying details in the post and in my comments, so I freaked out a little. She was great and reassured me as well as made every change I asked for.

Now, on to my update and to answer a few questions that commenters had. The flowers were purchased via a PO sent to an admin — not personally paid for by my team. More than a few descriptions of my boss were spot on: wants to be acknowledged for “kindness,” extrovert who is projecting her needs onto others, narcissist, has boundary issues, believes she is empathetic but shows it all wrong, and performative just to name a few. Several readers caught that I said these were just the texts my boss initiated, speculating that I’d been encouraging the communication. While, yes, I’d replied to her texts, I wasn’t the one to start any of the conversations. Grumpy Elder Millennial’s comment summarizes why I responded to them: “I’m guessing that OP is concerned about the interpersonal and career consequences of [ignoring them].” I also didn’t want my boss to have the phone numbers of any friends/family members (I’ll probably do this with a Google number next time), which is why she only had my number.

Now for what I did. I used Alison’s advice and some of the suggestions made in the comments to craft a reply that said I (1) was settling back in at home (I’m out of the hospital), (2)  was wiped out and focused on rest/recovery (I’m exhausted and healing), and (3) would get back in touch closer to my return date when I was feeling more up to it (I’m not at work so leave me alone). I also thanked the team again for the flowers and conveyed my appreciation for their concern. My coworker (we are a team of 3) reacted with a simple heart within minutes. Boss never reacted at all — no email, no text, no call, zero reaction. I hear nothing from her until I emailed several weeks later letting her know I would be able to come back half days a week before my return date, so all the advice worked. The relationship between the two of us is fine now. She’s back to her oversharing self but not hounding me like she was when I was on leave, which I can deal with now that 90% of my energy isn’t spent healing my body from a 10+ hour surgery with a surprise organ removal.

An unrelated, final thought for the readers who didn’t understand the difference between “Did they get all the cancer?” and “How did everything go?” Although people and cancers are all different, you should really never say that. Even if the surgeon or oncologist thinks they got it all, you really have no idea until you hit a 5-year (or more) mark — or when it comes back. There is literally no way to know if they “got it all” until years later. different pseudonym’s comment sums it up nicely: “There is a difference between cancer and ‘not feeling well,’ and when you speak as though they are the same you are being cruel.”

Thank you to everyone who engaged in the comments. I can’t tell you how much I appreciated it!