Ask a Manager

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

1. I’m in trouble for occasionally arriving a few minutes late

Regretfully, this was indeed a red flag indicating a toxic workplace. Although I am now routinely 15-20 minutes early every day, my coworkers’ attitudes toward me don’t appear to have changed. In the past week, I’ve overheard my manager calling me “kind of stupid” on a conference call and another coworker accidentally sending me an insulting teams message about me before quickly deleting it (not the first time). Mysteriously, the coffee mugs I keep bringing from home keep getting broken, and either an employee of two decades who trained me on something and then signed off on it being done correctly every week for three months just wasn’t paying attention, or they deliberately trained me wrong to try to get me fired as I was called into my manager’s office for “somehow f***ing this up for an entire fiscal quarter” and put on a performance improvement plan which included feedback about both “asking too many questions” and “not asking enough questions.” In my monthly check-ins with management I’m routinely criticized for not being engaged enough with my colleagues. I wonder why.

Anyway, I’m actively looking for a new job at the moment, hoping to get out before they invent a reason to fire me. I haven’t bothered talking to HR as both times I’ve been fired in my life were immediately preceded by me complaining to HR “anonymously” about a manager’s behavior. There’s really nothing to be done here other than get out before they get rid of me. What a mess.

2. Can I say I can’t come into the office because I have to look after my dog?

For the most part, this hasn’t been an issue over the past few months. My husband and I have been able to schedule our days in the office in a way that works for us and meets our workplace requirements, and we both have flexibility in moving our days around if we need to. While I still mostly do Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in the office, I’m in today (Monday) for a client meeting later, and I knew about it far in advance so my husband and I were able to rearrange our days as needed. He’ll go in Thursday this week and I’ll work from home on that day. But if I’d been asked to do it on Friday, it wouldn’t have been possible to rearrange the days at such short notice — not just because of the dog, but because it also wouldn’t have been enough notice for my husband (who has to book a desk in work, would have to rearrange his schedule, etc.).

There also haven’t really been any other situations like the one I described in my email, thank goodness. I get plenty of notice when I have to be in the office or when I have a client meeting on a day that isn’t one of my Designated Days. So all’s well that ends well!

(I will also say – I don’t live in the U.S., and I find work/life balance much better in Ireland where I live and work. I think when I wrote in I was more concerned about refusing to do things last-minute on my days working from home rather than about the fact that I do have to look after my dog. Most people here very much understand responsibilities outside work and I’ve come to learn that at least in my workplace, my outside responsibilities, even sometimes including my dog, are very much reasonable excuses for last-minute requests.)

Commenter Hush42’s answer was the most helpful: “I think that the fact that OP was given almost no notice regarding the Monday meeting is a factor. I don’t think it’s always reasonable to say, “No, I can’t ever come in on a Monday because of my dog” but it is reasonable to require advance notice so that they can make appropriate arrangements for the dog for that day.

In my company, we only have one WFH day and it’s always Fridays. I wouldn’t bat an eye if I asked my team members on Thursday to come in on Friday and they said no, I have to take care of my dog. But if I gave them a weeks notice, then I would definitely question it. I think that there has only been one Friday in the year since we’ve been back in the office where I required them to come in, and they were given lots advance notice.”

3. I’m embarrassed when people ask how my job search is going (#4 at the link)

I wrote in this past January about being embarrassed to tell people I was struggling with job searching at a time when there was constant headline news about how desperate companies were to hire. My job search ended up lasting about six months in total, with a lot of false starts, but in the end I got two job offers in the same week and am really happy with the position I accepted! The search felt never-ending while I was in it, but now feels like a pretty short period of my life overall.

Kudos to anyone out there currently in the thick of it with job hunting, it really is a terrible experience that makes you feel disconnected from humanity (how many form fields can one person be expected to fill out on an application they will never hear another word about!) and I know how hard you are working for what feels like no reward.

4. Hiring for a job requiring a religious background (#4 at the link)

I used the script and advice from you and other readers, focusing on candidates’ knowledge of the religion and not on their faith. We ended up hiring someone who I found out later actually was no longer a believer but had extensive knowledge on the topic and brought everything else we needed to the table, enabling us to create a great product. Thank you for the good advice.

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

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

Remember the letter-writer who slept through an entire day of work? (First update; second; third.) Here’s the latest.

In 2018 I wrote to say I slept through a whole day of work in my third month on the job (at my last job). I am still reading AAM pretty much every weekday! My mom thinks it’s hilarious I read work blogs “on break.”

It was only June of this year that I wrote in with the five-year update but things have changed dramatically since then — for the worse, unfortunately.

I took on this new, challenging pseudo-leadership position just before that update. It comes with a workload that no mortal could finish in a given workweek, I was pulling a lot of nights and weekends. A few weeks after I wrote in, I had another severe illness episode. I didn’t sleep through work, it was something else, equally visible and alarming. I realized that I’d been ignoring warning signs for a while (again) and not taking care of myself. Sigh. I do think I’ve learned/grown in the years since I first wrote, but I still really wrestle with concepts like success and productivity and personal identity being tied to work. It’s also so hard when other people can do things like guzzle coffee, skip lunch, work weekends, or multitask, and not have to pay the price for it after. I can’t, and it’s frustrating to not be able to “keep up.”

I am fortunate — again — that my manager in this role is as compassionate as the first one. I have a completely unique work arrangement now. My team worked mostly hybrid and async already, so we just agreed to take it there completely. We are entirely results focused — nobody cares how you do the work, when, or where, just that the agreed result is met. I extend this to the rest of my team — I don’t need them in the office if I’m not there either. They keep me posted on their progress and I call them if/when we need to discuss anything. We have removed maybe 90% of meetings this way — I honestly believe async work, flex work, is the future of work. My team does really cool things with the flex — I’m obviously mostly just using it to rest and see doctors, but they’re making progress in their volunteer work, their family lives, and hobbies. I was told I am “by far” the best manager they’ve had, which is wild considering how badly I think I’m underperforming. I do maybe 30% of the work I used to do (I reallocated parts to other people and dropped some of the lower-priority stuff), but the team’s metrics are excellent and they’re really happy and seem to be thriving, so maybe that’s a silver lining in all this.

This entire experience has really challenged my sense of identity, maybe that’s true for other chronic illness sufferers. I struggle with intense shame about not being able to do as much work as I think I should. My therapist says I need to broaden my definitions of “success” and “productivity” because if I take care of myself I am being productive, and if I can get well again then that is a success. It feels like a small knife in the belly every time I have to say “no” to a new request or miss a goal/deadline. Ambition might be my hamartia. It also feels like my personal life is stuck, because I’m not well enough to do anything.

I’m just really grateful that I have supportive colleagues who give me the benefit of the doubt. So many of the posts at AAM are about horrendous workplaces, and I think I would be 2x out of a job if I worked at one of them.

I did want to make a note … out of ALL the people I work with, by far the least empathetic have been the HR department. I’ve been shades of purple at how frustrating it is. Literally the day I had an episode, witnessed by the entire staff, I had messages from HR people to “just do this one thing before you go out sick.” (Internal screaming.) And it wasn’t, like, sick leave stuff. It was general work stuff. They’re so infuriating that my boss and I just haven’t engaged them at all in the current arrangements. I probably should be documenting this, or using FMLA, or whatever, but since we trust each other we’re just doing it our own way.

I also neglected to mention in previous updates — my original diagnosis was wrong. Super wrong. So it took about three years to actually sort it all out. We still don’t think we have the whole picture — it doesn’t explain what’s happening right now. I’m working with five different specialists; keeping track of my medical life is a job in itself. (By the way, professional patient advocates are a thing. I haven’t hired one, but if anybody else out there is chronically ill, just know there are professionals who can support you.)

It’s preaching to the choir to say this to the AAM readers, but here’s what I’ve learned in the last 5.5 years:

1. Empathy in the workplace will pay dividends. Give people the benefit of the doubt. This is not the same as being a doormat — you can maintain standards while giving grace.

2. Flex when you can, because you can. There will be times you have to be rigid, save your inflexibility for those times.

3. Communication may well be the most important skill at work, maybe in life. If you learn how to have hard conversations, how to tailor your message to your audience, to understand things from another perspective, you can reap benefits you couldn’t imagine before.

4. Don’t suffer a-holes. Go over, around, under, run the other way, whatever you need to do. There is a huge, wide world out there full of well-intentioned, kind, compassionate people and if you’re not a part of that world yet, make it a priority to find an entrypoint. It makes so many other things possible.

Before I took this job, I told myself I wanted to work with “clear hearted” and “full hearted” people. People who show up as humans, and who know what’s truly important. It’s one of the best decisions I ever made. That, and continuing to be a regular at AAM ;-)

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

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

Remember the letter-writer whose boss was blocking their move to a new team (#5 at the link)? Here’s the update.

I have a very happy update to my question from almost exactly a year ago.

Things got much worse before they got better. They promised me a promotion, which got enthusiastically approved by the VP and then, inexplicably, blocked by that immediate manager (let’s call her Broomhilda). I transferred to the other team, which was great, and the new boss was a wonderful ally… but she was blocked too and eventually pushed out of the company. That promised promotion floated around many times over the course of a year but although I pushed and pushed I was apparently at a stalemate. A more junior colleague got a promotion, so she was then higher up than me, but when I pushed back on this, Broomhilda coldly told me that it would happen for me … at some vague time in the future, but not now, despite my stellar performance reviews. She did not even tell me this face-to-face, but in a video call while she was driving so all I saw was her chin. I had to push for WEEKS to even get this meeting to get clarity.

The last straw was when they told me that I would need to start coming back full-time to the office. As a primary parent with two young kids, eight hours a week in commuting time was a no-go. I kinda shrugged and continued to work from home regardless, waiting for the shoe to drop … which it did two months later. The worst part — the day that they sent me an email telling me that I would need to start coming in full-time as of the next day, I was called into my boss’s office to tell me the GREAT NEWS — they were giving me that promotion I wanted, the one that had been promised a full year before. Clearly they were not expecting my lackluster response. I told her I would need to think about it as I was not sure I would even be staying with the company. I wanted so badly to quit with a million guns blazing, but decided not to burn my bridges and was civil as I told them that I was going to be moving on. The severance they gave me was enough to fund a few months of freelancing as a stopgap. (Or so I thought.)

The day before I launched my company, I got a contract. And then another. And another. Just from word of mouth, from people I had worked with in the past. I am working 25-30 hours a week, booked 4-6 weeks out, and making more than when I was employed full-time, and my career mojo is way up again! It’s been almost six months and I am happier and more fulfilled than I have been in many years! My days are varied and there is almost zero drudge work (because what company wants to pay a high hourly salary for that?).

The “whipped cream and cherry on top” satisfying ending is that my old boss called me and offered me my old job back — fully remote. I told them sorry, that I was making too much money and having too much success to be willing to go back, that they could no longer afford me. They asked me if I was able to freelance and I got to tell them that I was pretty fully booked until at least the holidays but I could possibly free up a day here or there for them — in a month.

And guess what? In my new company, my boss respects me and treats me like a superstar. She gets me coffee, lets me leave whenever I want, even work from bed if I want to. I have been nominated for Employee of the Month EVERY month since I started. (OK, granted I’m my own boss and the sole employee, but still, killing it 🙂)