Ask a Manager

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

1. Can I teach my employee critical thinking?

One of my direct reports, “Phoebe,” who is just out of school, has a great attitude about the work we do. However, she has zero ability to problem solve on her own. Every time something is not exactly right, she comes to me or another manager for help. I’ve tried asking “what do you think the next steps should be” and other forms of redirection. I’ve tried showing her how I’d handle a particular situation, but when a very similar issue comes up later, she isn’t connecting them. Her constant questioning when she searches for clarity and her nervous energy is noticeable — I’ve had two other managers and three clients mention it to me.

I want to help her progress, both for her own growth and also because I can’t keep doing 75% of her job in addition to mine. This past week I asked her to retrieve an item from the supply closet. She messaged me three times about where in the closet the item was — eventually I just went with her and it was exactly where I’d said. Another time, I asked her to order 200 markers. She called me because the supply store didn’t have boxes of 200 markers. They only had boxes of 50. It did not occur to her to buy four boxes of 50 markers.

All of her executive functioning skills need work and as a manager I’m clueless as how to help her get to where she needs to be. I do not want to coach her out of this role, because she has such a great attitude and honestly I’m worried that she’d be crushed out there in the big bad world.

You can’t keep someone just because you’re worried they’d be crushed in the big bad world. You can’t keep someone just because they have have a great attitude either, if they’re missing fundamental skills needed to do their job — particularly if that means you end up doing 75% of their job. Is your employer really okay with paying her to do 25% of her role (while your own work presumably suffers)? I’m guessing no. What about the impact on other employees who are likely to resent the situation more and more over time?

Her great attitude does mean that you might devote extra time to coaching and training her … but critical thinking is generally impossible to teach in the amount of time a manager reasonably has available to coach someone. Ultimately if she can’t do such basic chunks of the job, it’s not the right match for her, and you’re doing her no favors by keeping her in a job where she can’t thrive or advance.

All that said, the one thing I’d try if you haven’t already is naming the issue very explicitly. If you haven’t yet done this, it’s worth clearly telling her that you need her to problem-solve on her own (ground it in specific recent examples and describe how you would have liked her to handle those situation differently) and what she should try before coming to you for help. But given the details you’ve shared, it sounds likely that this just isn’t the right match.

2. Employee stole coworker’s food delivery

A DoorDash order arrived at our office today. The name listed on it did not belong to anyone we know, but the instructions were specific enough that we knew it had to be for someone in our department. We tried calling the number listed, with no response. After an all-call of “Hey! Did anyone order a cookie?” an employee came up to claim it.

About half an hour later, another employee’s husband called to ask if she received her cookie. All the pieces started falling into place, and we realized that the employee who claimed the cookie should not have. How do we address this? I do not want to outright say, “You stole that cookie,” but I do believe that the issue needs to be brought up, and the employee needs to reimburse the cost of the cookie and delivery. But can I “force” someone to do that?

Sure — but first make sure that’s really what happened. It’s possible that that she had ordered her own cookie delivery and thought this one was hers (and then presumably figured it out when hers arrived, but she could have assumed that was an error on the delivery service’s side, especially since no one else had claimed the first one). So talk to her and ask what happened! If she’s like “yeah, no one was claiming it and I really wanted a cookie,” then tell her it wasn’t hers and she should reimburse the colleague whose cookie she seized.

If it was an honest misunderstanding and she thought it was hers, that’s different and you can leave it up to her own judgment whether she reimburses the coworker. Most polite people in her shoes would, but it’s also true that the other person’s husband created this chaos by not including clearer instructions (like his wife’s name!) or alerting her to expect a delivery.

3. New hire is leaving because of a coworker

We have a new employee (been here right at 30 days) leaving to go back to school. But her main basis for her decision was “I can’t work with someone who is always negative and hateful. And not welcoming.” How do I handle this with the employee who is still here?

Is she referring to the other employee? If so, you’ve got to get more information — a lot more information! If she hasn’t left yet, please ask her about her experience and get details, then figure out if it lines up with what you know of the other employee. Talk to the other employee, too, and get her perspective on what happened. If you’re not sure how to sort through everything you hear, consider talking with others who work with this person and getting their input on what she’s like to work with (since as her manager you might see a different side than they do). This isn’t a court of law and you might not come away with rock-solid conclusions, but do what you can to get a sense of what that new hire’s experience was like and why. And then if you determine the problem lies with your other employee, even partly, you’ve got to address that. Sometimes that sort of thing can be resolved through coaching, and sometimes it can’t — but this should start a conversation about what’s going on.

If the new hire wasn’t talking about the new employee — if she was talking about you or someone else — that’ll change the details of how you proceed. But either way, you’ve got to take the feedback seriously (unless you have strong evidence the new hire’s judgment was way, way off), assume you’ve got a problem on your hands, and figure out how to resolve it … both for the next person and for others still there.

4. Drinking alcohol-free beer at work

I work in a safety-critical industry where drinking on duty is absolutely not allowed (and with regular drug tests). That being said, your thoughts on drinking alcohol-free beer during the working day?

My thoughts are: Why?! There are much better things to drink.

Plus you risk people thinking you’re drinking actual beer since they look similar. You can explain if asked, of course, but why deal with that?

5. My boss can see my personal Google calendar

I made a mistake in my enthusiasm for my current job back when I started and used my personal (but professional sounding) gmail calendar for work. My company has company domain email addresses for us, but we all use our personal google calendars for company appointments and tasks. Because my boss has edit permissions on my calendar, they can see everything, even if I mark it as private. (For clarity: I have a separate actual personal gmail and calendar with a more casual name that is where most of my life resides.)

I’m job hunting furiously and finally got an interview but realized in a panic that accepting the calendar invite put it right where my current boss can see it! I deleted it immediately, then realized it looked like I had declined the invite to the other party. I followed up in email, citing technical issues with google calendar, and assuring them I was looking forward to our call. But now I realize this is going to happen repeatedly. I can’t just change which email I’m job hunting with, nor can I switch the one connected to my company calendar without drawing attention. If they’re thinking about this at all, my boss would assume I’m job hunting, but I don’t want to poke the bear. Do I just confirm via email but not accept the actual invite? Any ideas or perspective on how this looks from the hiring side?

Your boss isn’t going to assume you’re job hunting just because you decide to stop using your personal gmail calendar for work. Set up a new calendar account, switch your work stuff over to it, revoke your boss’s permissions for the old one, and explain it was getting too messy to have personal and work stuff in one place so you’re streamlining. There are tons of reasons for that besides job hunting — private medical appointments, for example, or just a general feeling that your office shouldn’t have such visibility into your non-work life.

Alternately you could start using your other gmail account — the one where the rest of your life resides — for job hunting stuff, but it sounds like it might have a more casual name than you want for job hunting, and regardless you presumably have a bunch of applications out there with the other email on them … although you could change it going forward if you want to.

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

1. My coworker is high on pain pills

I work in a lab. We have a chemical engineer on our team who is the only one who knows how to make our chemical solutions and fix certain machines. Dude’s brilliant and I like him as a person, but he has some serious problems. The one that bothers me most is his addiction to pain pills. He’s been on and off the wagon every couple months since I started, and when he’s off the wagon his behavior is worrying. One incident ended in him trying to grab my chest and saying he’d beat up my boyfriend. He backed off after an HR report, and I’ve made sure to not try to be his friend at all since then.

Over the last few days, I’ve noticed his behavior is odd, in the way it usually is when he’s using. Normally he isn’t very affectionate at all, but right now he’s giving arm slaps and side-hugs, making jokes, being really friendly, that kind of thing. Called me “his angel” for helping with testing, as is my job. He’s forgetting things he’d been told a few hours before, and is really fuzzy on communicating in general. I’m worried about the guy, but I can’t reach out or be his friend after the incident between us. I don’t want him fired, he’s kind of indispensable and honestly if not for the thing I’d call him a friend. Our manager also has a habit of not listening to personnel issues, so I worry this would all fall on deaf ears. How do I approach this? Can I even try?

Someone under the influence of pain pills working in a lab is a genuine danger. You have to speak up, for the safety of your coworker, yourself, and the rest of your colleagues.

Even many managers who generally suck at handling personnel issues would act if aware of a situation like this so unless you’ve seen your boss wave away serious safety issues in the past, it’s still worth talking to her and sharing what you know. If for some reason that doesn’t work (which would mean your manager is remarkably negligent), escalate it. Go back to HR if you have to. This is dangerous enough that “I don’t want him to get fired” can’t be a concern.

2. My mentor unintentionally gets a lot of credit for my work

I am a woman in my 20s, and I have a male coworker/mentor in his 50s. He has been extremely helpful in lending his expertise and wants to see me grow and develop in the role, for all of which I am very grateful. We work closely on many projects and I have learned a great deal from him.

Perhaps I’ll just have to learn how to deal with this, but I find myself often growing frustrated that he will get credit for projects which I have taken the lead on and have done the lion’s share of the work for, when he is just in an advisory role (or has not contributed to said project). This is no fault of his own, as he’s not actively trying to take the credit, but people seem to think of us as a pair, and assume that as the older figure he’s automatically in charge and I’m more like his assistant. I feel that many times my contributions are completely overlooked. He also comes across more confident and knowledgeable, so will sometimes cut in to answer the question briskly rather than letting me deal with it, which probably doesn’t help.

I find myself desperate to explain to other people how much work I’ve really put into a certain project, which feels very petty. I don’t know what else to do as some days I can leave work feeling very disgruntled and that as a young woman in this field, I’m never going to be taken seriously. Sometimes I feel like quitting, which I know is the wrong thing to do, because I love this job, really. Is there anything I can do, or do I just have to toughen up and ignore it?

Can you talk to your mentor about it? He might be totally unaware it’s happening and he’s well-positioned to help you counter it. I’d frame it as, “I notice that because we work together closely, people often assume projects like X or Y are yours and don’t realize I’ve done things like Z. Do you have advice on making my contributions more visible?” Depending on his answer, you could also say, “If you’re able to highlight my work when that happens, I think that would carry a lot of weight too.”

You should also try speaking up yourself. For example, when those projects are being discussed with others, make sure you’re jumping in and talking about your role, how you came up with the idea, why you took a particular approach, etc. There’s advice on how to do that here.

3. How should I talk about my abusive boss in interviews?

A couple of years ago, I had a boss who was incredibly abusive — he’d yell, throw things, swear at people, tell people they were bad at their jobs, etc. He seemed to have it out for me in particular, and often targeted me personally. It completely destroyed my life for the time that I worked for him, and I left the job about a year in with quite a bit of trauma to work through.

Recently I was asked several questions about this role in a job interview — in particular, what made it hard, why I left, etc. — and I burst into tears. The interviewers handled it graciously, but I don’t think it was the best impression.

While I like to think that I’ve mostly processed and gotten over how it felt to work for this guy, it was still a traumatic experience that I’m not fully over. I’m continuing to go to therapy for this prior experience, but in the meantime, how should I handle it when I get asked about this experience in job interviews? What should I do if (and probably when) I get emotional?

Honestly, I’d pick another reason for leaving. This one brings up too much emotion for you and makes it too likely that you’ll look/sound more upset than people are generally comfortable seeing in job interviews and risks moving the focus way off where you want it in an interview.

If it’s at all plausible to say that a better opportunity fell in your lap or you realized you wanted to do more X than Y (or anything else that doesn’t raise lots of questions about what it was like there), you’ll be a lot better served by that.

Related: should I not tell interviewers I left my last job because of bad management?

4. I’m being recruited for jobs that are way out of my league

About six months ago, I received a double promotion (woo!) and have gotten a chance to start managing projects and teams of people (whereas before I was mainly executing on those projects). This has been great, but it seems like there’s some sort of vacuum at this level and above in my industry because I’ve started getting recruiters reaching out every week. Even more strange is that these roles often seem way out of my league — for example, director level positions that list 7-10 years of project management experience. I’ve been getting so many messages that I either turn them down or send back a very blunt list of questions to see if I should consider it.

Am I right to be scared that I’d crash and burn if I trust these recruiters and try to jump up the ladder so soon, or should I go for it and maximize my earning potential?

Well … six months of management experience is not a lot, and if these are really director-level management roles I’d be very wary. Recruiters often do cast a very broad net, especially at early stages.

That said, there’s no harm in talking to those recruiters to learn more about the jobs and — crucially — what it would take to do well in them. Personally, though, I wouldn’t look at this through a lens of “should I maximize my earning potential” unless you’re comfortable with that being a very short-term gain. If you end up in a job you aren’t positioned to do well in, you could end up losing the job — or worse, struggling for years and doing real harm to your reputation. Instead I’d look at it through a lens of how likely you are to excel at the work. (I also worry that if you take a job too far above your current skill set and crash and burn, it’ll take a lot of time to get back to the type of role you just started, and that would suck because the current job sounds like a good opportunity to build the skills that could prepare you for higher level roles in time.)

But talk to some of them and learn more. And if you have a mentor you trust, get their perspective too.

5. Should my time at a conference count as work days?

If I have to attend a conference, should my time at the conference be considered my days off from the company?

If your employer asked you to attend the conference, it’s unquestionably work time.

If you’re the one who asked to go and it’s related to your job, it should generally count as work time too, assuming the company is getting some kind of benefit your attendance (even if that benefit is just your professional development). If they’re paying your travel expenses, it’s a good bet that it falls in this category.

But this isn’t always black and white. Let’s say it’s a conference that your company doesn’t see a need to send you to but you decide to attend for your own professional development or networking advantages. In some cases — depending on the exact circumstances — it’s possible that your company wouldn’t consider that work time. I’d argue that in general managers should look for ways to count it as work time unless the conference is totally irrelevant to the work you do for them … or you’re attending barely-relevant conferences every month or something … but it can vary.