Ask a Manager

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

1. My employee deserves a higher performance evaluation rating than I can give him

Yearly appraisal time. About a month ago, I was told to turn in any requests to rate employees at the highest performance level of “significantly exceeds standards.” These appraisals were to be reviewed at the highest levels, including our president and the board of trustees. (I work for a non-for-profit of about 250 employees.)

Now that I’ve actually put all the details in writing, I’m regretting that I didn’t recommend one of my team members for the highest rating. The rating just below it is “fully achieves standards” and that’s what I thought was appropriate for him before I actually put it all in writing. We are told as supervisors that this is a very acceptable rating and the one that most of the employees will receive – in the description for fully achieves, it reads “consistently and occasionally exceeds standards.”

My supervisor says it’s too late to request a change even though our formal deadline for conducting appraisals and turning in paperwork is March 4. The deadline for giving the highest rating was early so that those involved had time to review the documents and approve it. Assuming I really can’t get the rating up one notch, what is a good way to conduct the appraisal without deflating my employee – especially if I’m asked why he didn’t get the higher rating?

I’d tell him the truth. It risks demoralizing him, but the alternative — trying to defend a lower rating — risks demoralizing him even more. The key will be to talk about what other actions you plan to take to try to address the situation. For example: “After reviewing your performance in detail, I think you deserve the highest rating. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that until I sat down and put my reflections in writing, which was after our internal deadline for getting the highest-level rankings approved. I’ve tried very hard to get an exception made but haven’t been able to because (explain process). So what I’m going to do instead is ___ (add a formal note to your file explaining the situation / ensure that you’re first in line for raises, promotions, recognition in the coming year / see what I can do about a mid-year raise in a few months that reflects your excellent level of work / whatever else you can figure out to ameliorate it).”

But first, go to bat as hard as you can for a process exception. An organization that’s going to make managers jump through hoops to award the highest rating should pair that with some flexibility for managers who find themselves in your situation. (That said, an organization that has its frickin’ board reviewing performance reviews is an organization with some serious weirdness around this process. I’m all for combatting grade inflation, but there are much simpler ways to do that, and it’s certainly not what the board is there for.)

2. How to respond to “is everything okay?”

I work in a small, open office. There are 13 of us. We’re a friendly, warm bunch for the most part. I’ve noticed that when one of us is stepping out for a doctor’s appointment — I know this, because someone will say “I’ll be back around X o’clock; I have a doctor’s appointment” — one of the two managers will typically follow up with “everything okay?” Usually someone will respond by starting to describe (vaguely) what’s going on (“oh, I’ve had a cold all week…”) but before they can say much, the manager will say “you don’t need to tell me why, just wanted to see if you’re okay.”

I know there asking this to be friendly and show on a certain level that they care, but it kind of puts whoever has the appointment in a awkward position. What should one say? “Oh yeah, everything’s okay”? What if something isn’t okay (such as a serious diagnosis or illness, or just something you’d rather keep private)? I just wish they didn’t ask it. I feel that if there’s a medical issue that somehow affects one’s work/attendance/etc., then it’s okay to share – but for the garden variety appointment, it just feels a little much to ask about. Ultimately, it isn’t anyone’s business why someone is going to a doctor’s appointment. I wish there were a way to convey that without coming across as rude.

Yeah, they’re almost certainly asking to express that they care about your well-being, but they haven’t really thought it through. That’s pretty normal; most people don’t think much about this stuff. We are a species that tends not to think things through.

If you feel strongly about it and you have good rapport with either of these managers, you could point out what you’ve said here: “I know you’re expressing concern and probably don’t realize this, but it can feel awkward to be asked if everything’s okay when one of us is leaving for a doctor’s appointment. It can be hard to answer without giving details, even though I know you’ve said you don’t want them. And of course, sometimes things might NOT be okay, but someone might not be ready to share that.” I’d also add: “I really like that we all have such warm relationships here. This is just something that I thought you might not have realized and that you might appreciate hearing it.”

But if that feels like way too much or you can’t imagine having that conversation with your two managers (since it would be totally natural in some relationships and not at all in others), then that’s a sign that your best bet is to just stick with “yep, everything’s fine” when you get this question. If it helps, see it as just a generic but warm social pleasantry — not a real request for information, but more like the “how are you?” / “fine, thanks, and you?” exchange that isn’t a genuine request for info about your physical or mental state.

3. Talking about an overwhelming workload in a senior position

I am wondering about how to frame a conversation about sustainability/workload with my supervisor in the context of a senior leadership position. The typical advice on prioritizing competing demands is to lay out trade-offs: “I can’t have X until Tuesday, unless I prioritize Y. What would you prefer?” But, this execution-oriented conversation is no longer relevant in my new role. How can I be transparent with my manager that I’m struggling to keep my head above water without making it seem like I’m the problem for not being able to handle the workload?

For background, I am about eight months into a brand new position at a small but growing nonprofit (~35 staff). My role is a big ambiguous in scope, as it focuses on special projects and strategic partnerships; it’s one of the only positions that cuts across teams (which I love! but which also gets me pulled in to lots of different projects). I report directly to the CEO, who gives me a lot of autonomy based partly on trust and partly on lack of time to supervise more closely. I am technically a member of the senior leadership team, though I don’t actually supervise any non-interns. Though I have supervised staff previously, this is the first time I’ve been at this level of seniority in an organization.

Same basic principles, actually, but you should figure out what course of action you think is best and then loop your boss in to your plan. For example: “I’m juggling X, Y, and Z and am not going to have time to get to all of them as quickly as we’d discussed, especially because Y is turning out to be a lot more time-consuming than we’d thought. My plan is to prioritize X, wait on Y until later this month, and keep Z on the back burner until we’re through our big spring push. Sound right to you?”

That’s obviously a simplified version of what’s probably a more complicated workload — but that’s the basic approach. “Here’s the situation, here’s my plan for how I’ll tackle it, what I’ll push back, what I’ll delegate, and what I might table altogether.” And if you’re really struggling, it’s okay to say that and ask for input — “I’m having a hard time seeing what I can push back and I’d love to talk it through with you.”

4. An event I really want to go to is on the same dates as a work conference

There is an admin conference my old boss approved for me to attend, back in November, before she left the company. It is through an outside company, in late April at corporate headquarters–driving distance to my office.

Recently, someone announced the dates for a professional genre writing conference in another state, and guess what date it starts? Yep, same date as the work conference.

And I stupidly forwarded the work conference info to my new boss not long after she took over. So she knows about it. I asked the person who sent the announcement if the seats had been paid for and she said yes–but if you really needed to get out of it you probably could. However, the writing conference has nothing to do with my job. I wasn’t gung-ho about the work conference to begin with after looking at the jargon-filled itinerary, and now I will be mentally checked out wishing I were somewhere else.

I would simply attend a different one, but a substitute guest of honor whom I actually know will be there and this person could be a huge networking help. Given the state of his health, he may not be able to travel to it next year. There are pitch sessions with real agents and I need the practice. And the schedule shows a long list of useful workshops and panels. I need to start going to these things if I’m ever going to publish anything. I wish I had known the dates before the work conference registration—I would not have signed up. Is there any way out of this? Should I risk saying something to my boss (she knows I write)? Offer to buy out my seat? I really really really do not want to go. I wish I had backed out before my old boss left, but I didn’t and now I just want to cry!

Ooof. I do think you can change your mind about attending a conference — “They released the program and it doesn’t look nearly as helpful as I originally thought it would be. Let’s save the money and the work time.” But it’s much trickier to back out if it’s because you want to do something else for personal reasons; it risks looking like you were either being cavalier with your employer’s time and money when you first asked to attend the work one, or that you’re putting optional personal plans above a work commitment now (and maybe letting that bias your assessment of how useful it will really be).

How’s your relationship with your boss? If it’s good, I think your best bet is to just be straightforward and tackle the perception land mines head-on. For example: “I’ve been thinking about suggesting I not attend this conference now that I’ve seen their agenda because of XYZ. And now I have extra impetus because there’s a personal event I’d like to attend during the same dates. I feel weird asking you about this because I don’t want it to seem like the personal event is the only reason I don’t want to attend, but I truly don’t think it will be that useful. But I really don’t want to appear to be biased by the fact that it conflicts with the dates of my personal event. Would you mind taking a look at the program and telling me if you think it would be okay to skip it and get my ticket refunded, or if it you think it’s valuable enough that I should stick with it and skip the other?”

* If your boss says you can skip it, try to get the refund. If you can’t, go back to her and ask if she thinks you should cover the cost yourself and say you’d be willing to.

5. Can my employer ask me to change my personality?

I am not your stereotypical female who talks like a valley girl or in a high-pitched voice. I’m very professional but not rude, in my opinion. I don’t smile much at work. I’m straight and to the point.

We had a customer call and complain that I was too dry over the phone and was rude and needed to be more courteous. My opinion is I was not rude. Maybe robotic is the word.

My HR manager has asked me on more than one occasion to be more personable. Are they allowed to do that? Can they really ask me to change my personality? Is it legal?

They are indeed allowed to ask you to use a different manner with customers and coworkers. If you think you sounded robotic, it’s not surprising that they’d ask you to change that. Companies usually don’t want to sound robotic when dealing with customers; they want to sound warm, friendly, and helpful. This post and this post may help.

(And I’m sure it was probably just bad wording, but be careful about how you stereotype women there! Most women don’t sound like valley girls, and many of us are quite straightforward.)

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

1. Is it normal to get a daily memo with feedback on everyone’s performance?

I write as a reporter for a student newspaper that prints five days a week. We have an advisor whom I’ll call “Joe” who emails individual feedback about our work in mass emails to the whole staff for every paper we print. Joe, a former newspaper reporter, isn’t our boss—or anyone’s boss, really. He’s a paid advisor to our paper who has an office in our newsroom— and he doesn’t directly supervise our work, but he gives us all feedback on our stories, among other duties. As reporters, we each get feedback ranging from “good” to “could be better” for every story we write, often with explanations of why he gave the story that specific rating.

I don’t mind receiving feedback—in fact, I actively seek feedback from my direct supervisor on a regular basis. However, I take issue with the public nature of Joe’s feedback. I think it fosters unhealthy comparisons among the department and has led to lowered morale. Moreover, Joe doesn’t know the specific circumstances and the challenges that surround each person’s print articles (i.e. he says we should have talked to this source when we ran out of print space to include the source or the source was unavailable despited repeated emails and phone calls). My supervisor tells me not to over-invest myself emotionally in the critiques, but when I read them, I know that everyone can see what other people thought of my work.

I want to talk to my supervisor—I have a good relationship with her—and the advisor and see if I can get this practice changed. Would it be reasonable to raise concerns about this practice? Is this normal in the workplace to email mass critiques of individual performance?

Well, I can’t speak to normal newsroom practices (readers who are journalists, want to weigh in here?), but I can give you an answer for workplaces generally. That answer is: No, it’s not normal at all. It’s bizarre.

I do think your manager is right that you shouldn’t get too invested in Joe’s critiques, for all the reasons that you mentioned.

But it also might be worth pointing out to your manager — and possibly Joe himself, depending on what he’s like and what kind of relationship you have with him — that this is a strange and unhelpful practice. In particular, you might point out that feedback is most effective when it’s a two-way conversation, where it can be actual coaching (and accommodate exactly the sort of context you note Joe doesn’t have). It’s not especially constructive or good for morale to have it to be essentially a one-way loudspeaker announcement. That element is actually more important than the fact that it’s happening in front of everyone; after all, if Joe were instead providing feedback at group coaching meetings that allowed for discussion, it could (depending on the specific feedback) be a good group coaching opportunity (although it also shouldn’t take the place of one-on-one feedback).

2. Manager asked my coworker and me to decide which of us gets to do something we both want

I work in an office with several staff members, four other coworkers specific to my area under one manager. My manager micromanages everything, even when she’s on holidays. She never takes her days off, and she’s constantly pointing out our errors, no matter how small.

The other day she told two of us who have been there the longest (the other two are new hires) to choose who she is going to train to help her do billing when she’s not in the office. We both said we’d like to learn it. She says we have to choose who gets it. My problem is, I’ve been there the longest, but in the past she’s played favorites to my coworker. She even made a comment to us about how she doesn’t want to “step on anyone’s toes” and that we have to decide. I’m frustrated because I get along really well with this other coworker, and I do want to learn new skills but I know she won’t say for me to do it. We were at a stalemate yesterday about it. Is it even right for a manager to ask us to choose between us?

Nope, your manager is abdicating her responsibilities here and putting the two of you in a situation that isn’t exactly conducive to coworker harmony. If she had reason to think that neither of you were particularly invested in the decision or that you’d both clearly agree on who should do it, then fine. But that’s not the case, and the “stepping on toes” thing is ridiculous. It’s her job to decide how to allocate work.

I’d go back to her and say, “You know, we’d both like to do it, so we’re asking you to decide based on who you think would make the most sense.”

3. Mandatory flu shots

I work in health care and accepted a job offer, not knowing until the first day of orientation that they had a mandatory flu vaccine policy. This policy is not on the company website or in any paperwork, nor was it ever mentioned during interviews. I do not want to get the flu shot. Period. That is my personal choice. If I had known this, I never would’ve applied and wasted their time as well as mine. I’m aware of some hospitals that have the option to get the shot or file an exemption and wear a mask during flu season. However, this is the first time I’ve been told it is absolutely mandatory, no exceptions.

I’m not a quitter, but I’m not willing to give up my patient rights to have a job. How do I handle this? Will it look bad if I quit before I really even get started?

Yeah, some health care employers do require flu shots and other vaccinations (in order to protect patients from catching viruses from infected workers). There’s a growing backlash against this (including legislation being introduced in some states), but so far, it’s up to your employer unless you can show you need an exemption for medical or religious reasons.

Will it look bad to quit before you’ve even started? Well, your future employers are unlikely to know about it, so we’re really just talking about how it’ll look to this one employer. They’ll probably already understand that they risk losing people over this kind of policy, and as long as you’re polite about it, it shouldn’t be a big deal. Explain that the mandate is prohibitive for you, that you regret not realizing it was their policy before you accepted the job, and ask how they’d like you to proceed.

That said, I think you’re likely to continue encountering this as long as you work in health care, so definitely ask about this in the future (which is probably obvious now), and I’d be prepared with a brief, calm explanation of your reasons for not wanting the shot, even if you feel you shouldn’t have to share that.

4. Shouldn’t people come prepared for informational interviews?

I just finished an informational interview with a young man in his 20s who is the son of a professional colleague of my husband. His attire was extremely casual – worn-out jeans, long-sleeve t-shirt, baseball cap turned around. He probably could have used a bath and a comb run through his hair.

He did not bring a resume. He did not have any questions about my work. He did not have any questions about the academic institution that I work for. His responses to my questions about his education and career aspirations were not particularly specific to the work that we do here. I gleaned that he liked history. He might be thinking about a graduate degree (he was not specific). His present position is tangential to the work we do here.

By the time he did ask for advice about how to approach a job opening in another department, I was just weary pulling information out of him. The position required a master’s degree and project management experience. He does not have the former and did not express any experience with the latter.

I thought that a person should come prepared for an informational interview like a job interview. Am I an old fogy?

Nope, it sounds like he blew the opportunity, and also that he was probably pushed into it by the parent who works with your husband.

For what it’s worth, I think you should have put the onus on him to structure the time with you, meaning not expending all that energy to try to try to draw information out of him. You can signal to people that they need to come prepared to do this by saying something in advance like, “If you’ll send me the questions you’re most interested in ahead of time, I’ll do some thinking on them before we meet.”

I also think you could have said, “I should tell you that you’ll want to dress much more formally for business meetings. The way you’re dressed now is likely to make people think you don’t take your career seriously.”

But I also really like this recent take on informational interviews in Slate (and not only because they reference me at the end).

5. Will this volunteer experience look suspicious on my resume?

I’m an online transcription volunteer for the Smithsonian, working to transcribe archive items in order to facilitate research. It’s a case where volunteering is done whenever and for however long you feel you’re able to work. There’s not a manager or supervisor except in the sense that any work you do will be checked over and either approved or sent back for amending.

While I am currently happy in my full-time job, I realise that this volunteer work showcases skills that would be useful in future job applications. Should I put this volunteer work on my CV? If so, how? I’m concerned that as there’s not really anyone that can be a reference for this work, it would appear to be a false claim to potential employers. Complicating matters is the fact that I live outside of the U.S., so I’m concerned that it might seem suspicious if I claim to be doing volunteer work for a U.S.-based organisation.

Put it on your resume. It’s not likely to seem suspicious! Anyone who has questions about how you’re doing this outside the U.S. will simply ask you, not mutter to themselves that you’re obviously a liar and trash your resume. If someone wants to verify that you do this (which is unlikely, unless it forms a key part of your qualifications for a job), I’m sure there’s a way to do it; you’d get in touch with whoever your contact is there and ask them how to make that happen.