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.

Remember the letter-writer wondering if they should be worried by how pushy an employer was with a job offer over a holiday weekend? Here’s the update.

Thank you so much for the post and the comments were all very helpful during that process. I have an update for you.

Rather than talking to them on the phone because I was getting red flag vibes, I asked them to send the formal offer based on what we had already discussed so that I could have it in hand for the discussion. They hemmed and hawed for several days, acting as though they could not produce the letter until they talked to me yet again. They finally sent it, and it did not have the salary, the work schedule expectations, or several other things we had already discussed and agreed upon, and also had several expectations added in, such as the start date being less than two weeks out and with me having to move across the country and leave another role. So it was quite clear why they so urgently wanted to speak to me over a holiday weekend. On top of all of this, it was an exploding offer with a firm expiration date on it.

Needless to say, I did not accept the role.

There has been some significant fallout because as I mentioned it’s a very small industry and I have to interface with members of their staff, including my would-be supervisor and other members of their leadership team. They frequently choose not to respond to emails that I send, even if it hurts multiple groups within shared cohorts. Petty, yes. Unexpected, not really.

One of their leadership team asked me to have an aside with them and explain why I chose not to take the job. When I explained that the offer letter didn’t match the verbal offer, and that work-life balance seemed to be an issue, the leader told me I had no idea what I was talking about, couldn’t believe I’d make such accusations, and that we had better stop talking before I ruined my entire career.

Ultimately, I think we can all agree I dodged a major bullet there.

But in happy news, an old workplace knew I was looking and offered me a job. The new executive director there is kind, caring, values work-life balance, gives credit to everyone around her even when the work product was hers, sees the forest for the trees and solves problems without having to be asked/begged. We have very similar personalities and I find that I’m energized and always wanting to find ways to help her accomplish her goals for the organization.

It all worked out in the end.

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.

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

1. Misbehaving dog rampages around the office

I didn’t quite follow the advice. Honestly, having a conversation with any of the owners about the dog seemed the most uncomfortable thing to do, even more so because one of the owners is the dog owner’s ex-husband and the other is like her best friend, so if she didn’t care about all the things Pepito did to them, I thought she wouldn’t care about my feelings on the matter. Fast forward to March, one day Pepito (as he always did) grabbed something his owner left on her desk and my coworker decided to go after him to take the thing back and the worst happened — of course the dog got super defensive (making beast-like noises) and bit him on the hand! I couldn’t believe it. My coworker was super chill about the whole situation (I don’t know how, honestly, especially because from what I could see there was breaking of the skin) and from that day on my boss miraculously could afford paying for day care for the animal and I never saw him again, thank god. Two weeks ago I left that job for a new one :)

P.S. I know I didn’t follow the advice, but the comment section and reading people’s reactions to the whole situation made me feel so validated! It was very comforting to know I wasn’t out of my mind for feeling the way I did. Also, the dog owner NEVER continued with training.

2. Why I am irrationally anxious at work when I’m doing so well?

For the past year, I have had a new boss. I work as a program manager in a non-academic role in higher education, which is its own weird culture. It can be (very!) challenging to report to university academics who are researchers with a totally different skill set than the people they are ostensibly “managing.” (Imagine, if you will, being the IT network person, getting your performance review from someone with zero leadership experience who is making five times your salary with tons of institutional power, whose career has been spent researching 17th century German literature or whatever, and has no understanding of your role, what is involved, or how to assess your performance.)

My boss has proven to be incredibly, embarrassingly incompetent, arrogant, and bullies some staff members – but not me, because I think he likes me, and also gains some benefit from some prestige my program brings to the institution. He is a small and bullying person, and I have oceans of expertise in my work and a very good reputation in the faculty. So while this is in some ways anxiety provoking for me – my stomach turns when I see a call or email or meeting request – the anxiety is partially (rationally!) linked to his specific behavior, and the fear that I could end up being a target in the future. So this is a shift from the irrational to the rational, I guess.

BUT plot twist: I have so little respect for him that I don’t really care what he thinks. I know that I’m good at my job, that I am a high performer, and I have worked to build a good relationship with him (even though I truly can’t stand him) so that we can all function. I think I know how to handle him and protect myself, and my objective is to simply get on with doing good work for the institution and students. And because I have so little respect for him, I find that I have a bit less anxiety in some ways, because I truly do not care about his opinion. I am protected by a union and my job is not at risk even if he didn’t like me, which is not an issue, as far as I can tell. Higher ed is something else!

3. My boss is sending me job postings (#4 at the link)

I have a great update! On the day my original letter was published, I got yet another job rejection, so I rage applied to a new company. And I got the job! I doubled my salary, lowered my blood pressure, and am overall happier!

I didn’t realize how worn down I had become at my old job and even though I was passionate about the work, there were very few pros left to the job. I now have better hours, more flexibility, and an amazing new manager who consistently tells me that they hired me because I’m an expert in my field and they trust my judgement. It’s so refreshing!

4. What’s the definition of “professional hours”? (first update)

I originally wrote to you about whether or not “professional hours” is A Thing, then an update about how I was fired on my first day of vacation, but had lined up a much better job the week before being canned.

I am still at the much better job, and while it’s been slow and I don’t feel like I’m learning fast enough due to a very light workload, the job in general is delightful! I’m a scientist by education and now work as a project manager whose teams are 100% scientists. I studied biology, and they’re doing formulation. It’s different enough that I learn something new with every project I take on, but not so different that I can’t understand the science. My coworkers are all incredibly smart and talented and helpful, and everyone seems to prioritize doing their job exceptionally well with zero drama. Seriously, they make my job easy!

I ran into a former coworker lately, and he’s told me things at my former company are getting worse by the day. Judging by what he’s told me, I am thanking my lucky stars that I’m not there anymore. We work in an FDA-regulated industry (pharma, if you haven’t guessed), and you don’t want to mess with the Feds. Sounds like that’s exactly what I’d be dealing with if I were still there. Bullet dodged!

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 called “I’m unprofessional and not detail-oriented — but I still need to earn a living”? Here’s the update.

Jeez louise, what a weird trip down memory lane it was to re-read my letter after you asked for a follow-up.

The basics first: Some commenters guessed correctly that my “religious tradition that emphasizes equality of all people” was the Quakers. I now work part-time as an office coordinator for my meeting. I also teach classes on how to grow psychedelic mushrooms and organize outdoor experiences. I can pay my bills, save a little for the future, and pay for some wants.

It has been so, so, so good. Nine months in, I got a mostly positive review minus my bookkeeping skills. The personnel committee decided to hire an external bookkeeper to take over the bookkeeping parts of the job, and I get to keep the same amount of hours. Settling in was bumpy (keeping regular hours for the first time in years was a challenge), but it has been a joy. I love teaching, and make steady money teaching intro to mycology 101 and how to inoculate substrate. The foraging side of the business makes less money, but it’s fun as hell to get out in the woods and share what I love with people.

The more philosophical second: Coming to terms with a non-traditional career path was hard. Even though it is legal in my city and I make a point to strictly follow the law, it’s definitely been weird stepping out of the corporate world into psychedelics! There’s definitely some shame around working in mushrooms that has come up as I talk about what I do work with people. The palpable disappointment of my parents for not living up to what they imagined would be my future (I have a master’s degree) and my potential has been a definite presence.

There’s also the challenge of how much time and energy to put into mushrooms. They’re federally illegal, and while there is a tremendous boom going on in the therapeutic psychedelics world, I worry about losing future opportunities because of associations on my resume with it, or whether there’s enough of a future in the work to invest in training.

At the same time, there’s a lot of dumb, harmful ways to make money. The FTX trial going on right now is a good reminder of that. I do good work for my Quaker meeting, I connect people to the outdoors, and I teach people a skill I believe is genuinely helpful for their mental health. There’s worse ways to make a living. It’s an especially stupid time in the history of capitalism, and a lot of work that is actively harmful to the world and to people. I’m proud of myself for figuring out a way to support myself without acting outside my values.

I put a lot of energy over the years into trying to jam myself into a round hole as a very square peg. Whether it’s ADHD or ???, who knows. I’m an unusual person, and if I can figure out ways to play to my working strengths without hurting anyone as I build a career, why not.

I think the remaining challenge of my working life is figuring out how to pull together my disparate interests and skills into a meaningful and long lasting project. It’s an especially stupid time in the history of capitalism. I hope that I’ll be able to bring my work in health, community building and the environment together into something wonderful that lasts. Hopefully involving goats and wildfires prevention. Wish me luck!

I’d like to add one more thing. Working out how to work has been a long process, and so, so many people have helped me along the way. I’m grateful for everyone at Ask a Manager who offered advice, coworkers who helped or pointed out when I could have done better, patient and not so patient supervisors.

Many commentators expressed sympathy for the supervisors and coworkers who had to work with me through the years. I have a great deal of sympathy as well! I’m sure I have made many peoples days more complicated. I hope that my growth and change over the last few years means that the balance tips over into making more people’ days easier rather than harder.

At the end of the day, work is to keep a roof over our heads, get along, and maybe make it easier for others to do so as well. I hope you have good work, and people to help you along the way.

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 employee didn’t think they were doing enough about bears at work? Here’s the update.

I am struggling to put everything into words because what I wrote in about was only one example of many different challenges I had with managing this employee’s expectations and performance. The bear safety training question was the least of it. It got worse before it got better, but it did get better. Last year, we ended up in mediation over three or four other points of conflict. Reaching out to you about this topic was an attempt for me to really check myself and think “am I wanting to shut this request down because I am feeling frustrated with being continually criticized by this employee, or do they genuinely have a point and I am not doing everything I can to ensure the safety of my employees in the workplace?” The commentariat on this blog were really helpful in getting me to reflect, too. Their advice and yours helped me have conversations with my own manager about how to address this issue and others going forward to a fresh operational season. Effectively, though, your last insight in your reply hit very close to home: that there may have been a fundamental misalignment between this person and the type of work they had been hired to do.

The crux of the problem was that this employee and I were at odds for how we envisioned their role, as well as the work we were doing as a team. They would continually push back on what I asked them to do. It felt as if every single time a decision was made without their input (which is a lot of them, as this employee isn’t in a decision-making role and only works four months a year) or a direction was set that they didn’t like, it was a hill to die on and they worked on persuading me that I had to adopt a new direction and rescind the tasks I’d assigned them. That’s things like the bear safety training, but also things like whether an activity for children was scheduled for 9 am or 10 am, or directing staff to set up a shade tent for an activity. Some of these are things that I take input from front line staff on. However, I do take input from my whole team, and consider the perspectives and impacts for everyone and their schedules, which of course means that sometimes I go with my own judgement, or with the suggestion a different employee offers. And this employee would not let things lie. One point in the mediation that I successfully raised was how it was exhausting to have to continually justify every decision, no matter how trivial, to ensure that this employee is persuaded enough to follow directions. They were not respecting my position as a supervisor to direct them in their daily assignments.

This person is also a seasonal staff member and only works for four months a year and they aspire to a lot of additional training and responsibilities, which are challenging to accommodate within a very short season that already has lots of mandatory training and content to learn, as well as actually doing the job they were hired to do. That’s not to say I don’t work to ensure that all of my staff get additional learning opportunities. I tailor their work plans so they can grow and gain experience for their particular goals. Usually, I can manage job shadowing or some sort of additional training course around operational requirements. I have done so for this staff member, managing to arrange for them to attend a week-long train-the-trainer course on a subject they’re passionate about so they can deliver a more advanced training session to colleagues in the spring. That train-the-trainer training and their involvement in training other teams was a huge time commitment and I had to go to bat with my manager to make it happen, as my manager was prepared to just turn down the request given this staff member’s short season. When the season is so short, every bit of extra training adds up. We want staff to feel supported in their positions and set up for success, but every time another optional or mandatory one-to-five-day training course is tacked on, it reduces our offer for the public. That’s one of the reasons my boss had me reach out to our visitor safety officer (our onsite bear safety expert) to determine what type of black bear safety training is necessary for my staff’s positions. It’s not that we didn’t want to ensure they were safe around bears, or only wanted to do the bare minimum, but we had to be really conscious about how much time we were spending on training. If we had longer bear safety training, something else, potentially critical training or operations, would have to give.

In general, I found that when I went to bat for this staff member and arranged things as best I could within the limitations of the system, I would only get complaints about what I wasn’t able to accomplish for them. I would work really hard to provide flexibility within the confines of their position and our collective agreement, when it came to things like paid leave (to the point where my manager was saying I had to rein it in), but this employee would complain that I wouldn’t bend the collective agreement provisions on their behalf. I’m thinking of an incident in which I moved heaven and earth to cover their work and get them paid leave that didn’t come out of their vacation leave bank when their dog unexpectedly passed away right before our busiest weekend of the year. However, they were upset that I couldn’t count it as “bereavement leave” in the leave system. The collective agreement (we’re unionized) explicitly defines the human relatives you can have time off for in that category. Again, they got paid time off, it just wasn’t labelled “bereavement.” And then they told coworkers I was being heartless about them “grieving a family member”… which felt particularly galling as this was the same week that my father was diagnosed with a serious, potentially fatal medical condition, and I was the one covering their shift.

I pride myself on having a good knowledge of the collective agreement, the rights and responsibilities of employees and the employer, what resources are available to employees, and being able to work within the system to provide the greatest benefit and support to my team, while still getting our work accomplished. In this employee’s case, I felt like whatever actions I took to support them, my intentions would be misinterpreted or thrown back in my face, which of course makes me as a human feel less inclined to go out on a limb in the future. The focus was always on what I didn’t or couldn’t do, and which of their suggestions I didn’t or couldn’t implement, instead of the things I did do for them. I am not perfect. I can’t know everything or anticipate every possible eventuality. Our system, our workplace, and our collective agreement isn’t perfect. But I do try my best for my team.

Yes, it is and was emotionally exhausting.

However, the other reason I am still grappling with this is … things have genuinely improved with this employee this past season! A lot of it was the hard work we and the mediator put in to getting things out in the open and recognizing when we were talking at cross purposes. So we have a much more frank and open working relationship now in which they don’t jump to assumptions about me having ill intent anymore. I don’t overcorrect and over-explain my decisions anymore either, which I had fallen into the habit of doing because I got continual pushback. We also had some good discussions in performance management meetings about ways that their behavior and our dynamic had to change to be successful in their role.

Specifically, when it came to the question I wrote in about… I had followed steps one and two of your advice already (confirmed with bear safety experts about appropriate training for this location, found a different kind of training to provide to my staff) but stalled on step three (having the frank conversation about this topic) because there were so many other issues that needed to be more urgently addressed. So for bear safety training, a bear safety expert who worked for a sister site did a comprehensive two and a half hour virtual training session this year about black bear behavior, bear conflict prevention, safety in bear country, and tips and tricks for using bear spray (which is still only to be used in extremis and isn’t provided to all staff). It was recorded and made available to all staff who may not have been able to attend the session live, and that person and others on site who have a lot of experience with black bears and bear spray were available for staff who may have additional questions. I only loan out the bear spray stored in my office upon request of my team members and only one regularly borrows it (not the staff member under discussion).

In any case, I still have some performance concerns with this staff member, which we are working on collaboratively. They did report to me that this past season was the one in which they were happiest with their work assignments, and I was very pleased with improvements to their public-facing work and the way that they interact with me. I’m hoping they continue on this path. I certainly learned a lot as a supervisor through this process. Compared to last year, we have started on a blank slate and now have a much more respectful and fruitful dynamic.