Ask a Manager

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

1. Asking employees to say I’m out when my abusive mother calls

Is it ever okay to ask an employee to “cover” for you? I am the director of a small, nonprofit county agency. I have two staff and three volunteers. The problem is my 74-year-old mentally ill mother. Long story short, she is very abusive, calls me and my husband vile names, and uses vile language in front of our teenage daughter. Sometimes it becomes so overwhelming that I have to disconnect (until she can get herself together) to protect my daughter.

During these times, my mother will call and call and call. I have told her several times not to call me at work, had my sister intervene, etc. to no avail. Sometimes I ask my employees to tell her that I am busy, which, of course, I am. Sometimes the only way to stop the barrage of calls is to have them tell her I am out of the office all day at a meeting. She is never vile to my staff or volunteers, but I feel guilty asking them to cover for me (and in some instances, lie for me). But then on the flip side, it is very disruptive to my office when she behaves like this and nothing else works. It seems like such a simple thing, but it is unethical?

I don’t think it’s unethical at all. If one of your employees were dealing with an abusive relative who behaved like this, you’d probably be sympathetic and willing to say she wasn’t there, right? I’m sure your employees are willing to do the same.

The key, especially since you’re the boss and so there’s a power dynamic, is to make sure they don’t think you take this help for granted. Express genuine appreciation for their help, and explain the basics of the situation if you haven’t already, including that having her think you’re unavailable for the day is unfortunately the best way to minimize the disruption.

Also, make sure they know that you’re doing your best to get the calls to stop. You don’t want them inadvertently misunderstanding the situation and thinking that you’re just dodging calls from your poor, lonely mother, or that you haven’t taken reasonable steps to control the situation.

Speaking of which, is there a way to block her number? That might sound callous, but if she has another way to reach you (like your cell phone), that might be the way to go with your work phone.

2. HR stole my parking space

My company recently moved to a new office that has a car parking lot. By luck of the draw, I was fortunate enough to get a parking space right outside the complex.
Unfortunately, another employee of the same company has decided to park in my spot every day since.

Because of this need to find somewhere else on a daily basis, I’ve experienced threats of tickets, annoyed coworkers whose spaces I’ve inadvertently taken, and had to move my car multiple times during the workday.

Recently, a member of our HR team asked me to move. After I did so (twice in 10 minutes), I discovered that it was actually their car in my space. They explained that it was double booked to them and that they would continue parking there. I mentioned this to the person who assigned the spaces and was informed this was not true at all. It appears that the person didn’t like their allocated space and has chosen to just occupy mine. This also happened to a colleague who parks next to me, again with another HR team member.

To keep the peace, we have now been assigned their old spaces a way down the road. While this isn’t a big deal (at least I have a space now), I can’t help feeling some negativity towards our HR team for this apparently dishonest behavior. What are your thoughts?

My thoughts are that at least some members of your HR team are jerks who abuse their positions, and that their higher-ups either don’t know or don’t care.

I don’t know whether it’s a battle you want to fight or not, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to complain to someone over their heads about how this was handled. If you do, your framing should be that HR has misused their authority to reassign parking spaces to benefit themselves. (That assumes that the HR department is in charge of assigning spaces; if it’s done by someone else who simply gave into HR’s requests in order to “keep the peace,” then that person is spineless but it’s not quite as offensive.)

Read an update to this letter here.

3. My great employee lied about finishing high school

I am a middle manager and we recently hired an employee, for a non-professional position, who told me after she was hired that she lied on her job application. She said she had her high school diploma, when she doesn’t, and if she had answered that question in the positive, the online application would have booted her from the application as it is required for the position.

She is a hard worker, a great team member, and really needs the job, so I am not sure if I should ever bring this up.

Ugh. Requiring a high school diploma (or a college degree) is supposed to be a proxy for “this person is likely to have certain baseline skills necessary to do the job.” This person has demonstrated pretty clearly that it’s a misplaced requirement. Plus, not finishing high school can correlate with poverty, class, abuse, and other issues that aren’t great to screen people out over.

On the other hand, obviously it’s not okay to lie on your application. But I’m having a hard time working up outrage about it. She didn’t go out of her way to lie on, say, a resume — a document that someone presumably puts a lot of thought and care into. She answered “yes” to an online application question when she should have answered “no.” It’s hardly the lie of the century.

As for what to do now … I’m sure some people will disagree, but you have a hard worker and a great team member with no high school diploma. If she’s otherwise trustworthy, I might just take it as a sign that you should drop that requirement, and then move on.

4. Asking to extend employer-paid interview travel

I am invited by a company to fly abroad for a series of interviews in their headquarters. I am wondering whether I can ask the company, while preparing my flights, to have my return flight a week later, as I would take advantage of being abroad for a few days off. Of course, I would pay everything which is beyond the two days of being there for the interview by myself, e.g. hotel, rental car etc. Do you think it is appropriate? And if so, what would be your advice in terms of the way to ask?

Yes, people do that all the time! Just say something like this: “Since I’ll already be out there, I’d like to extend the trip by a few days to get to know the area a bit. I’ll of course pay for the additional days myself, but could we schedule the return flight for (date)?”

5. How to respond to a LinkedIn invitation from a higher-up at a place I’d love to work

I recently received a LinkedIn invitation to connect from someone I don’t know but would love to — a very tip-top high up person at a company I am very interested in working for. I have no idea why he connected with me; the note was just the generic LinkedIn message. I accepted, of course. But I’m wondering if I should send him a note, ask him how he found me or why he reached out to me, do something! What do you suggest?

Sure. The dude initiated a connection with you, so it’s not at all pushy to write back to him. I’d say something like this: “Thanks so much for the connection request. I’ve followed your company’s work for a long time and really admire what you do. I’d love to talk if you have have an opening I might be a match for. I do ____ (fill in with a description of what you do and ideally what makes you great at it).”

A more aggressive networker than me might say to actually ask for a meeting or say something more proactive than “I’d love to talk if…” So adapt for your own style, but that’s how I’d handle it.

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

1. Senior colleague told me to “stay in my lane”

I recently gave notice at my large corporation. I accepted a similar role at a smaller company. I left due to culture fit; I like a less structured, faster paced organization.

A senior-level executive pulled me aside to give me advice: “Stay in your lane. You connect with too many people. You will look like you don’t know what you want.” My work performance and reviews have been excellent. I am skilled at building connections with stakeholders as its part of my job; hence, I need to develop cross-functional relationships.

I want to grow as a professional, but I am having trouble digesting this feedback. How would you interpret this?

Well, if it’s true, I’d interpret it as meaning that you’re sort of bouncing all over the organization, possibly being aggressive in your efforts to form professional relationships with people, and that it’s coming across as being more scattered than focused, and maybe schmoozy for the sake of being schmoozy rather than genuine.

However, it’s also possible that this executive is just totally off-base. I’d run the feedback by other people whose judgment you trust — people you’ve worked with, so they know your specific context and the habits this person might have been referring to — and see if they think there’s anything to to it. If you talk with other senior colleagues (hopefully there are at least one or two you’d feel comfortable approaching in a mentor sort of way) and they don’t agree, I’d write it off as one person’s odd opinion (and possibly one full of biases and agendas, who knows).

2. Spending six months volunteering before looking for a paid job

I recently stepped down from my high-stress/low-reward position to something much more sedate. It was a good decision mentally, and it’s meant that I can do other things with my time. One of those things is volunteering two afternoons a week with a pretty well-known NGO. Since volunteering with them, I’ve realized this is the sort of work I want to be doing. (The work is looking after their social media, making contacts with government officials/staff, writing media releases, petition signing, event management, phoning previous event participants to see if they would like to participate again, general organization stuff, etc.)

I’m wondering, though, if the work I’ve been doing for them will have a different weighting than work that I was getting paid for. I’d like to spend the next six months volunteering with them so that I have some really solid skills when I am looking for a job (also, it’s really important work and I’m having a ball). But I’m wondering if I should be looking for paid work at the same time?

Yeah, sometimes volunteer work does get less weight than paid work — often because it’s very, very part-time, and often because employers assume that there’s less accountability and the bar for performance is lower. However, you can get around that, especially the second part, by focusing on what accomplishments you had in the role, rather than just what activities you engaged in (which you should always do on your resume anyway). If you can say, for example, that you increased their social media followers by 20%, successfully placed stories in the Teapot Times and the Teapot Daily, and became a go-to resource for local legislators — or whatever your specific accomplishments are — you’ll make moot the question of whether the volunteering made it a less serious job.

So whether you should be looking for paid work now probably depends on how likely you think you are to have those types of accomplishments from the volunteer job at the end of this six months. If you do, you might be better positioned to move into this field professionally at the end of that six months than if you started now, before you have that proven track record.

3. I feel useless at my first high school job

I’m a senior in high school and I recently got my first job, which I thought would be a pretty standard part-time, entry-level retail job. I initially applied for a position that basically involved cashiering, stocking, etc., but during my interview, the hiring manager offered me a different position, more as a salesperson on the tech side of the store, and I accepted because the pay was ridiculously high for an entry-level job.

The problem is, I’m awful at it and I feel useless because of it. I was told I wouldn’t need a whole lot of technical knowledge – I’m pretty good with computers, but tech isn’t something I’m really passionate about – but every few questions a customer asks me is one I don’t know how to answer. I’m not cut out for sales at all (my planned career path has nothing to do with either tech or sales), and I feel like I’m constantly disappointing my manager. (Plus, when there aren’t a lot of customers in the store, there’s nothing to do). I dread going into work because it ends up being hours of just aimlessly walking around or failing to adequately answer customer questions.

What should I do? Again, it’s very well-paying and I’m sure it’s much more comfortable than the average high schooler’s job, but I want to feel like I’m actually contributing to my workplace instead of just getting paid to stand there and redirect questions. How do I make this job better for both myself and my employer?

Can you talk to your manager and explain that you’d like to be able to do a better job answering customers’ questions and ask if there’s any training that you could have? Or if there’s a more senior salesperson you could observe or get coaching from?

Alternately, if you’re sure that you really don’t want this job, would you want the cashiering position you originally applied for? If so, you could talk to your manager, explain that you think you’d be more interested in that role after all, and ask if it would be possible to move to it, and that you understand the pay would be lower.

There’s no shame in any of this; you’re at the very early stages of figuring out what you do and don’t like in a job, and this is part of the process. It’s not like your complaints are “I hate working at all”; you’ve identified very specific things you don’t like … and one of them is that you feel unhelpful and want to contribute more, which is a good instinct to have. So talk to your manager and see what your options are. (And then come back and update us if you want!)

4. Confusing titles on a resume

In five jobs over 10 years (in a field where that isn’t a huge red flag, don’t worry), only the most recent two have had official job titles. The second-to-last one was pretty reasonable (Senior Teapot Engineer), but the current company has its own bizarre system of job classifications and the official title is something like “Pots Developer III-a,” which means nothing to anyone external (and frankly not a lot internally either).

It seems unpleasantly inconsistent to list job titles for only some of the jobs. Is it better to leave them off entirely, or to make up reasonable, accurate, but not official job titles for the earlier jobs? And if the latter, would it be okay to list the current position as “Teapot Engineer”? FWIW, all the jobs are in the same field and could all be classified as teapot engineering, which is clear from the resume.

Well, the big thing is that you want the titles to match up with what those companies will say when a reference-checker calls them. For the jobs without titles, I’d come up with something that captures what you did there without inflating it and which — and this is key — wouldn’t raise any flags if a reference-checker mentioned the title. In this case, it sounds like they were all teapot engineering, so I’d just go with teapot engineer. (I should note, this is pretty straightforward in your case; it would be harder if you were managing the marketing team and wanted to call yourself the marketing director without ever having had the title. In those cases, I’d say to push for a title so you don’t end up in that position.)

For the jobs with the inscrutable titles, you could list them this way:

Teapot Engineer (formally Pots Developer III-a)

… in other words, a descriptor of the job, followed by the official title.

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

1. My company wants me to return part of a gift from a client

I work for a large, well-known organization in the United States. I recently finished up a job with a client who I’ve worked closely with for the last two years. He sent me a very kind hand-written note thanking me for all of my hard work on the project and enclosed four one-day tickets to a major theme park (owned by his parent company) as a token of his thanks. I was surprised and delighted by both the note and the generous gift.

My company has a compliance plan that requires us to disclose gifts received in excess of $250, which the total face value of the tickets does. In order to comply with this policy, I emailed the appropriate people, letting them know that I had been given the tickets. My company’s compliance officer emailed me back telling me that while the gift does not sound unreasonable under the circumstances, she recommends I return two of the tickets to my client in order to stay under the $250 limit.

I understand my company’s compliance plan exists to eliminate the appearance of conflict of interest. But frankly, I’m upset. For two years I worked very hard on this job, regularly going above and beyond, and my client recognized that with a nice gift. (My company, on the other hand, didn’t recognize my work at all.) I could’ve easily not reported receiving the tickets and most likely never have been found out. Instead, I did the right thing, and even though there is no conflict of interest (I am not in a position to affect my company’s business partnership with my client at all) and there is leeway in the compliance plan for the officer to approve the gift (I re-read the plan to make sure), they’re telling me to return the tickets anyway. I am a top performer in my company, regularly receiving excellent performance reviews, but this entire situation is making me feel unappreciated and demoralized. What is your take on the situation?

I totally get why you’re frustrated, but this is part of the deal with compliance rules. It’s reasonable for your company to be more worried about avoiding the appearance of conflict of interest than they are with whether you get to keep all four tickets. We can debate whether or not they’re being too rigid here, but they’re coming from a reasonable place.

That said, you said that the compliance officer “recommended” returning two of the tickets, which sounds like maybe there’s leeway for going back to her and saying, “I hear your concerns. In this case, I think keeping all the tickets could be justified because of (reasons) and I worry about offending the client. It looks like the compliance plan doesn’t strictly prohibit this. Are you okay with me doing that?”

But if she’s not, I really, really wouldn’t take it personally; that’s just how this stuff works. A compliance officer’s decision has pretty much zero to do with what kind of appreciation and recognition your company thinks you deserve. It sounds like you might have other reasons to feel unappreciated by your company, but don’t let this be one; that would be giving it more weight than is warranted.

2. Interviewer told me I need a better answer to what I’ve been doing while I’m unemployed

I had an interview this week. It went very well overall, but at one point the hiring manager asked me how I’ve spent the nine months since earning my masters last spring.

The truth is that I’ve been job hunting without much luck. I’m in a field that’s known as being hot right now, but I am not a conventional candidate for the positions I’ve been applying for. I didn’t want to say directly that no other employers have expressed interest in me, so I said this: “I’ve been job hunting a lot, but I haven’t found the right fit yet. I’ve also been building my technical skills by reading papers on teapot heat transfer and practicing with teapot design tools.” Both are true.

This manager said, “That’s it? You’re going to need to come up with an answer to that.” It seemed like he wanted me to tell him why nobody had hired me yet. Or maybe he thought I might have had a position that I left off my resume after it ended poorly? Are there other good ways to frame extended job searches so that hiring managers don’t assume there’s something wrong with me?

Your interviewer sounds like a bit of a jerk, so I wouldn’t get too thrown off by what he said.

That said, I’d rather you remove the “job hunting a lot” from your answer, since it can make hiring managers worry that there’s a reason no one has hired you (to be clear, this is silly, but it can be human nature). Instead, how about this: “I’ve been taking my time looking around because I want to make sure I find the right fit. Meanwhile, I’ve also been studying teapot heat transfer, which I’m fascinated by because of X, and playing around with teapot design tools like Y and Z.”

3. Dealing with a habitually late low-performer when others come in late too

I am new to HR management and am the first HR manager my company. Time is of the essence with our business and so we emphasize punctuality, despite people’s exempt pay status. We have a habitually late low-performing employee who is under performance review and a few other habitually late (although not as much) employees who are otherwise stellar performers. These top performers also work after hours, and the low-performing one does not. How does one go about handling this without being perceived as showing favoritism/unfair treatment in the workplace?

It’s totally reasonable to treat high performers differently than low performers; in fact, you should differentiate by performance. People performing at a high level have earned different levels of trust, autonomy, assignments, and recognition.

If your low-performing employee asks why other people are allowed to come in late when he’s not, you can say, “We want everyone here on time, but certainly people can earn more leeway when they’re regularly working long hours and performing at a high level.”

4. Company I’m interested in hired someone who plagiarized code

I was recently laid off and am now looking. I was looking at this one company when I realized that they have a guy working there who I’d worked with before at another company. This guy was fired for stripping the GPL (GNU General Public License) header from some code and submitting it as his own. In fact, I was the one who noticed it wasn’t his style and found the code he’d supposedly written with a quick Google search. Otherwise the job looked like it might be a good fit, but if they have a guy there who has in the past blatantly plagiarized code, is that a big enough red flag to not bother applying?

I wouldn’t assume that. It might mean they don’t check references very thoroughly, or it could mean that he convinced them he’d genuinely learned from the experience and changed his ways. If you’re otherwise interested in the job, I’d apply. If you get an interview, you can pay particular attention to how thoughtful and rigorous they are about who’s on their staff, and other signals that you get about how they operate.

5. Grrr

If you had a manager who wanted you to do something against your initial inclination, which of IBM’s elements would work best on you? Why?

Come on now. If you’re going to send me your schoolwork to do for you, at least disguise it better than that.