Ask a Manager

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

1. A manager thanked my husband for letting me work with them

A department I work with organized a social dinner at a restaurant after work one evening. People brought their families and so I brought my husband. A manager I work with came by, so I introduced them to each other. It was a very usual interaction, until the very end when the manager said to my husband, “Thank you for letting her work with us” and returned to the far side of the table. It happened so quickly and then he walked away that neither of us had a chance to say anything to correct him. People sitting near us who heard it asked me, “Wait, did he say…?” It was so awkward.

What would you do in this situation? Ideally I would have said something in the moment, like “Oh, my husband has no say in my work activities” but the opportunity’s already gone. I don’t want to approach this manager now and bring this up and say “Hey, this was disrespectful, don’t say things like that again.” There’s a chance that conversation may go well but I think it’s more likely he would just say, “That’s not what I meant/said, you must have heard me wrong” and kind of invalidate me and make me feel silly for coming to him about it. But if I don’t, I’m just enabling things like that to continue happening. But also why is this now my burden to correct?

What do you know of this manager in general? Does that kind of comment fit in with things you already knew/suspected about him? If not, I think it’s reasonably likely he meant something more like “thanks for loaning her to us, she’s great”? Obviously your husband is not loaning you to your company either, but that’s the sort of thing people sometimes say to spouses of either gender when they’re trying to compliment the other partner. Still a little awkward, but very different from a sexist “thank you for permitting your wife to work outside the home.”

But if you do have reason to think he meant it exactly the way you heard it … well, then this one comment is probably the least of the problems. You said you don’t want to address it, and it’s fine to just roll your eyes and not raise it. But it would also be fine to say to him, “Roy, did you thank my husband the other night for letting me work?”

2. My boss threatened to kill himself over a minor work issue

I’ve worked for my company for a few years. I’ve seen many changes, and many layoffs, in my time here. My old boss was transferred to a different subsidiary earlier this year and I got a new boss. My new boss is fine, if high-strung, a bit neurotic, and way too all over the place.

Recently, we made a post on social media and a small error was made, nothing huge and one that was fixed that day, but it caught the attention of the president of the company after a complaint. Due to this, the president decided to put another leader in charge of social media temporarily. This led my boss to call me freaking out, blaming me for what happened, and telling me that if he lost this job, his wife would leave him and he would kill himself.

This was very unprofessional, in my opinion, and a complete overreaction, as we met with the president later that day and it was not as big of a deal as it seemed. I have not spoken to my boss since, as he pushed back our weekly meeting to another day, but I believe he knows he went too far. What do I do in this situation? I am very upset with his reaction and the fact that he keeps blaming me for a simple mistake that was not life or death. I also don’t like that he called me on my personal number and threatened suicide, it was very disturbing. I was already thinking about looking for a new job, but in the meantime how do I handle this?

The safest thing to do when someone makes a suicide threat is to take it seriously. If it turns out it was serious, you won’t regret doing that — and if it wasn’t serious, then responding as if it was can show the person how out of line they were and discourage them from making fake threats again.

Your boss threatening self-harm is way above your pay grade, so this is something to escalate. Ideally you’d talk to HR — or to your boss’s boss if your HR is incompetent or nonexistent — and explain what happened. Say you don’t feel equipped to handle a suicide threat from your boss, and ask that they take over from here. If you feel awkward doing this, consider: if your boss does need help, someone in a position to provide that help needs to be alerted. And if the threat wasn’t real, then it was an incredibly manipulative thing to say and it should be addressed as such by someone who isn’t you.

3. How much exaggeration is too much on LinkedIn?

I have a coworker who has been making some updates to their LinkedIn profile that got me thinking about how much exaggeration is too much when it comes to describing your work. I do think there is an ethical line here, but my coworker has found some interesting ways to make them sound more experienced in certain areas without lying outright. Here are a few examples:

• “With over 20 years of experience in education and editing” (I believe the education part is true, but they have been editing for less than two years and are struggling to reach a professional level of competency.)
• They are “looking for opportunities to further develop their expertise in project management, management, and training” (They are technically doing some project management now, but they are struggling, and to my knowledge they’ve had no experience with management or training. I don’t think this would strike me as questionable if a different word than “expertise” was used, like “interest.”)
• “Manager and leader at heart” (I think this one is the most interesting because they do not have management experience and are not a leader on our team, but the phrasing doesn’t necessarily imply that they are, just that they feel they could be).

This really has no direct effect on me, and I have no plans to bring it up with my coworker; I just thought it was an interesting thought exercise, and I’m curious to hear your opinion.

Nothing here is technically a lie, but they’re definitely puffing things up.

That said … a lot of people do this on resumes and LinkedIn (which is why good hiring managers look at actual experience and accomplishments more than anything else). I don’t like and wouldn’t write it that way myself, and in my experience the people who do this are never the strongest candidates anyway. Plus, it can backfire! If having tons of editing experience is important to an employer, they’re likely to be annoyed if they interview this person and discover the “20 years” is actually two. But “manager and leader at heart” is the worst part of it of to me — a little cheesy, but also if I saw that on a resume from someone with no management experience, I’d be digging into that pretty hard to find out what it meant. People who aren’t managers but feel managerial at heart are often problems or have an unrealistic idea of what management is.

But none is it is wildly outside the realm of how some people market themselves.

4. Applying at my old company with a new name

I worked at my first job out of college for five years, then moved on to a different job for the following 10. I’m now hoping to return to the first company; however, any record of me there is under a different name. The change is not me going by a nickname, my middle name, or new surname. I’ve legally changed my first name. Instead of “Dana Katherine Scully,” I’m now “Gillian Katherine Scully.”

There’s no trauma associated with my former name so I don’t mind it being referenced, I’d just like to know how best to include it on my application so that my first company can verify my past experience there under “Dana” without too much confusion.

I considered omitting that first position from my resume altogether, but this company has a strong culture of hiring from within, so I feel like my prior position is worth noting. I left on great terms after a contract ended with no openings available at the time.

Yeah, definitely don’t omit the job from your resume; that would be odd to do just because of the name issue! The fact that you worked there previously is highly relevant (and they’re also the only other employer you have aside from your current one). You could include a note in your cover letter, but cover letters often aren’t read after the initial screen so that’s not a reliable way to do it. The easiest thing would be to explain in your interview — but if you want them to know before you’re at the interview stage, I’d just include a small note on your resume next to that job like this:

Teapot Factory, 2010-2014 (employed as Dana Scully)

You wouldn’t do that for resumes you’re sending anywhere else, only for this one.

But also, do you know anyone who still works there? If so, you should be contacting them anyway about your application, and can just explain it to them.

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

1. I suspect my colleague was drinking before our morning meeting

I held a meeting late morning on Friday with my colleague, “Janet.” During our meeting, her behavior seemed fine, if even a little more level than her normal frenetic energy.

During the meeting, we pulled our chairs together to look at something on her screen and I very clearly smelled vodka on her breath. The smell was like she’d taken a shot right before coming into my office; this was not a case of being hungover and smelling like old booze.

Now I don’t know what to do. Recently, I witnessed her at a fancy work event drinking heavily (7-8 glasses of wine in a little under two hours) but since that didn’t cause any issues, I didn’t say anything to anyone (and still wouldn’t). But the fancy event drinking did put on my radar that she may have a problem with alcohol, and I was immediately reminded of it when I smelled the vodka.

What do I do now? She is well liked and respected in our office, and her work hasn’t suffered (to my knowledge). Am I obligated to tell our manager? Can I talk to my colleague? Say nothing and wait until this maybe happens again?

I know that my biggest priority is making sure she is safe and getting help, but a very, very close second is not getting myself in trouble for withholding information from my superiors.

I don’t think there’s anything actionable here. You didn’t see Janet acting intoxicated or see her swigging vodka. You just smelled something when you sat close to her.

If there were safety implications — if she operates heavily machinery or otherwise held people’s lives in her hands — that would change the calculus. But otherwise, there’s not enough here to act on.

Related:
I think my coworker is an alcoholic

2. We’re being forced to label all our office furniture

Our new chief operating officer is forcing our Engineering department to completely clear their offices of any items other than the desk, two chairs, and a filing cabinet and is mandating where our computers and phones sit on the desk. Though it sounds reasonable to have a clean office, we work in a manufacturing company and often we have items in our office that are being evaluated (we make valves). He has now told us that we MUST LABEL each piece of furniture in our office identifying what it is. For example, a label on the desk that says DESK. Yesterday we were told that we must take a picture of our office once it is set up to his specifications and put the picture on our wall to remind us of how our office should look.

This is a degrading exercise for a group of engineers and counterproductive given the industry we are in. Is this a practice that we are unaware of, or should we see this as a character situation with him? How should we handle this respectfully? You should know that he is not at all open to hearing our opinions directly.

This is extremely odd. It would be one thing if he just wanted less cluttered offices — a bit controlling but not outlandish — but labeling your furniture? So there’s no doubt that a desk is in fact a desk? Was there some safety incident with someone mistaking a trash can as a chair? This is so over-the-top controlling that there’s either a really weird incident that provoked this or your new COO has misplaced his gourd.

This is something where you want influential allies involved — someone with power and influence within the organization, like the CEO’s longtime and trusted assistant or your own boss who has the ear of someone powerful, or so forth — so you can tip them off and see whether someone can intervene. But I’ve got to think this is a sign of problems with this new hire and more trouble is brewing.

3. Can you fire someone because their spouse is a politician?

The recent news of Usha Vance resigning from her law firm — a law firm that reportedly has progressive values — leaves me wondering: If she hadn’t resigned, could they have fired her after her husband became Trump’s running mate?

Federal law doesn’t prevent private employers from discriminating on the basis of political beliefs. But some jurisdictions do — including Washington, D.C., where that firm has an office, although I don’t know if it was her office. (D.C’s law might seem strange since D.C. is a town full of employers like lobbyists and nonprofits where your politics play a role in whether you’ll get hired or not, but in a lot of those cases political beliefs are considered a bona fide occupational qualification, which gets around the law.)

Regardless of the law, in reality, given the nature of the situation, if she hadn’t resigned on her own it almost certainly would have been a conversation about optics/client relations/PR and a mutual agreement to part ways, not “you’re fired, clean out your desk today.”

4. Employer missed our scheduled phone interview

I am job hunting and recently applied for a job that I am really excited about. Less than an hour after I submitted my application, the HR manager emailed me to say I sounded like a great fit and they’d like to schedule a phone interview at specific time and date the following week. I responded an hour later thanking her for reaching out and confirming I was available.

My interview time came and went with no call and no email. I figured they might have had a meeting run over or a conflict pop up, so after about 15 minutes, I emailed them to confirm the call would still take place and offered to reschedule if there was a more convenient time for them.

It has now been over 24 hours since I sent the email and I still haven’t heard a peep. Is it overkill if I email them again to reiterate my interest and ask to reschedule the interview? I really want this job and genuinely think I’m a perfect fit for it, but I also recognize that it’s just a first stage interview and I don’t want to come across as obsessive and over-eager.

It’s fine to email one more time asking about rescheduling. After that, though, if you don’t hear back, assume that for whatever reason it’s not going to happen and move on and don’t keep following up.

Asking someone to set aside time and then ghosting them — and not even responding to an email about it afterwards — is incredibly rude, but it’s also not terribly uncommon in job-hunting. Hopefully they’ll get back to you, but some employers just have utterly chaotic hiring processes and the more you can let the rudeness roll off you, the better.

5. What shows up in a background check?

What info shows up in a typical employment background check? A friend has recently gone through a hard time and was staying in shelters and accessing various public aid programs. They’re doing better now, but they’re worried about that info showing up in a background check and an employer being biased about their previous circumstances. Would any of that actually be on a background check an employer would do? What’s usually in those and what are employers looking for with them?

They shouldn’t need to worry about that at all! Employment background checks are about verifying your employment history and education — confirming that you actually did the things you said you did (worked the places you said you worked, for the time periods you said you were there, that you’re not ineligible for rehire, etc.). Some also include criminal background checks. They don’t look the sort of thing your friend is worried about. The thing that could get the closest is that some types of jobs will run a credit check, but they’re not going to see whether or not someone received public aid.

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

1. An employee we fired keeps making “inspirational” posts about it on LinkedIn

About four months ago, I had to fire an employee due to performance issues. She was a generally nice person, but unfortunately fell short of expectations so we had to let her go. We gave her severance and allowed her three months to quietly transition out of her role. We allowed her to announce her departure to the rest of the team as if it were a normal resignation.

However, a couple weeks after she left, I was shocked to see a post of hers on LinkedIn. She publicly announced that she had been let go from our organization and that she was looking for work. I was baffled as to why someone would announce that so publicly. However, I decided to ignore it, because what could I do? Unfortunately, the posts continued, documenting her job search journey, and how every day was about exercising “resilience” and “dealing with challenges.”

My concern is that this will affect morale among my staff. I don’t want them to think that they will be affected by mass layoffs, but I also don’t want to compromise my former employee’s privacy. What is the best way to address this issue with my team? And is it a possibility to ask my former employee to no longer mention the organization in her posts?

Leave it alone. Your team isn’t going to worry about mass layoffs just because they learn one person was fired. It’s going to be clear to them that you allowed her an exit with dignity, which if anything they’re likely to appreciate.

Let your former employee do whatever she’s going to do. Definitely don’t ask her to stop mentioning your organization; that will come across as heavy-handed and will cause more drama if she starts telling people that.

If most of your employees know you to be a generally reasonable person who doesn’t fire people punitively, this won’t be a big deal. But get involved, and it will start looking weirder.

2. Coworker escalated a problem with how I use my Outlook calendar to our VP

My colleague and I are both licensed engineers who have to alternate weeks where we work overnight on a large project (9pm-4am). On weeks where we are not working overnight, we schedule daytime site visits and catch up with our respective project management teams. Site visits generally last 2-4 hours. We each work with two teams almost exclusively. Two junior level engineers also work with two teams, but they have us check their work before finalizing anything.

Last week, Ann, a project manager from one of the teams that work with a junior engineer decided to bypass her by putting a morning site visit on my calendar for a week that I would be working overnight. She then sent me a message about it, citing budget reasons for cutting out the project engineer. I informed her that I would not be able to make it because I work nights that week, but the project engineer could attend and review with me in the afternoon.

She became frustrated and said that wouldn’t be possible because her budget won’t allow for two engineers to be duplicating work. She went on to tell me that my colleague and I should have put our rotating night shifts in our Outlook calendars so she could coordinate with us. I ignored this message because it didn’t seem productive.

Today, my colleague and I received a message from our company’s executive VP, telling us that we had to update our calendars and specifically stated that Ann was trying to schedule a site visit with one of us but our calendars don’t accurately reflect our availability. I asked my colleague if Ann had reached out to him and he said she had not. We both told the VP that we would update our calendars and left it at that.

However, I am not happy with Ann or how the VP handled this escalation. When my colleague and I originally took on these shifts, we had a discussion with the VP and other managers about the project duration (over a year) and everyone acknowledged that this would impose greatly on our regular work, as well as our personal lives. We worked out an arrangement where we have a standing notification of our modified availability for the project duration on our messaging platform, as well as a change to our working hours on Outlook. In addition to this, we have an open line of communication with the teams we work with and are very responsive to them. They don’t really use the calendar as a communication tool and also prefer direct messages, calls, and texts. They know what weeks we are on or off and schedule things accordingly, so we never felt the need to input our alternating shifts on our calendar. I understand that coworkers outside of these groups may need me, but in those cases they always chose to send me a message asking when I had time.

I feel that it’s disrespectful for someone on a team that is not connected to us can dictate how we organize our calendars, but I feel unable to draw and enforce a boundary if the VP has been made aware of the situation and ultimately sided with Ann.

It’s not unreasonable to say that your calendar should accurately reflect your availability.

I think you’re frustrated because Ann could have avoided all of this by just communicating with you directly, and you feel like you have a system that works for you and the people who work with most often — and you’re already carrying the burden of having these overnight shifts for a year! But “please make sure your calendar accurately reflects your availability so people you don’t work with as frequently are in the loop too” is really pretty reasonable. It’s not so much someone outside your team (Ann) dictating your work habits as it is a VP in your management chain saying, “Hey, this isn’t working as broadly as it needs to so please change it.”

3. I’ve been called for grand jury duty — and it would eat up 15% of my pay for the year

I have been in my job as an executive assistant for almost 2.5 years. I work for the president of the division and am happy. But I just received a jury summons, not for regular jury duty, but for grand jury duty. It’s scheduled for 1-3 days per month for the next 18 months and the summons lists the specific days per month. And it’s not even my local county court, it’s federal district court in a city 80 miles away. I have no issue in general with serving jury duty, and would have no problem with serving a regular jury summons, but the time commitment on this summons is egregious. Not to mention the time and costs of driving 80 miles one way three days per month. (The court would pay mileage and parking, plus $50 per day.) It’s potentially 54 days over the next year and a half. The jury duty policy at my job covers five paid days and I assume I’d be expected to take the remaining 49 days unpaid or use vacation to cover it. Not to mention the fact that my work would suffer and I would not be able to take a real vacation for the next 18 months, as I would be using all of my vacation days for the jury duty.

I submitted a hardship request to the court online and was told that having a job isn’t an excuse and I need to come to court the first day and plead my case to the judge. If I am unable to get out of this duty, and I am stuck missing 54 days of work, what recourse do I have to fight against the five-day paid policy in place at my job? Not being paid for 54 or even 49 days equals around 15% of my salary — it’s not a small amount that I can just forgo. Is there language I can use to ask my HR to rewrite the policy?

My boss told me he would have the head of HR write me a letter to assist when I go to court to try to get me out of it, but the head of HR offered no other assistance, other than pointing me to the policy. In a very brief conversation with one of the lower ranking HR members, she said she didn’t think anyone at the company had ever been summoned for grand jury duty and she imagined they’d have to rewrite the policy if I ended up having to serve. So what can I do? My summons date is August 20 and I’m not sure if I should force a conversation with HR before that day, especially since I am hoping to get out of it. But in case I am unlucky enough to not get out of it, I don’t want to be stuck losing part of my salary through no fault of my own.

In most states, you’ll be able to appeal to the judge to be excused based on financial hardship; explaining the situation (that your job won’t pay you for more than five days off, this will be 15% of your salary for the year, and you’d have to drive 80 miles each way every day) should give you a good shot at being excused. However, be careful about what your company puts in that letter; it being inconvenient for them will be much less compelling than documenting the fact that they will only pay you for five of the days off. (In fact, some courts won’t even accept letters from employers pleading hardship at all; they’re focused on the hardship to prospective jurors, not to their employers.)

If for some reason you’re not excused, you — and ideally some of your coworkers, who could also be affected by this if they’re summoned in the future — should lobby your company for a change to their policy. Many companies pay the difference between the jury pay and your normal pay; it’s not an outlandish thing to request, particularly in a situation like yours.

Some potentially helpful legal info: Some states require employers to pay you for all or part of jury duty. To find out if yours does, search the name of your state and “jury duty employer pay” (no quotes). Also, if you are exempt, you must receive your full salary for the workweek if you work any part of it (although they could still require you to use paid vacation time for it, which isn’t really what you want).

4. My boss’s boss’s boss saw me wearing shorts to work

I tried to circumvent the cardinal rule of men’s dresswear: don’t wear shorts. I figured that it was the summer, hot, and I was walking to work.

However, this is the day that my great-grandboss happened to be in. Do I excuse myself when I next see him?

Eh. Is he someone you talk to regularly? And someone who’s likely to care? If so, sure, when you next see him you could mention it. But if you don’t talk to him regularly and/or don’t have a specific reason to think he’d even remember, it would be overkill.

The better move is just not to wear things to work that you’ll feel uncomfortable being seen in by a higher-up. I’m sympathetic to walking to work in the heat, but you could change when you arrive, a la generations of women and footwear.

Related:
why can’t I wear shorts to work?

5. Why do people say “longer hours”?

Why do people say “longer hours” as in “we have to work longer hours”? Shouldn’t they say “more hours”? Unless we’re redefining an hour to be, say, 63 minutes and now you get your hourly rate every 63 minutes you work, which seems very illegal, you’re not working longer hours. You’re working more hours.

Because they’re using “hours” to mean “the totality of my work week” and language evolves to includes lots of shorthand that doesn’t strictly make sense.