Ask a Manager

This is a transcript of “My Boss Uses an Offensive Slur.”

Alison: Hi, and welcome to the show! Today I’m going to answer a bunch of shorter questions from people. The first question today is from someone whose boss is using a pretty offensive term.

Caller 1: Hi Alison. I have a tricky situation that I’m not sure how to navigate. My boss keeps using the word “retard” as a derogatory term. She doesn’t use it to describe people, but she does use it to describe things and ideas. We don’t work in the same office, but we often travel to client sites together. She did once say it in front of my client, which was really awkward for everyone but her, it seemed. She’s an otherwise great manager, but I’m not sure how to approach this. Some people think being offended by this word is just being too sensitive. How do I ask her or tell her not to use this term tactfully without causing resentment or making things awkward? Or is this just something I should ask her manager to handle? Thanks for your help.

Alison: This is an interesting one. I do think there’s some truth to the idea that the message about how offensive that word is has not reached absolutely everyone yet. At least until recently I think we were a transition phrase with the word – there people who grew up with it being an acceptable thing to say and I think it’s taken a while for the message to reach all of them that it’s not and that it’s now widely considered a slur against developmentally disabled people. I think we’re at the tail end of that transition though, but you do sometimes run into this situation where otherwise decent people don’t seem to understand that it’s hurtful or they think that the people who will find it so are just a small, overly sensitive minority and they truly believe that it’s still okay in the mainstream, even thought it’s not. It’s odd. . They seem not to realize that many, many people will be shocked to hear them say it, may be hurt by it – especially if they have a developmentally disabled friend or loved one — and will think less of them. And then of course, you’ve got the people who have heard the message, know that it’s considered a slur, and just don’t really care.

I think the best approach with your boss is to approach her as if you’re assuming that the message just hasn’t reached her yet and that you’re sure she wouldn’t want to inadvertently cause offense or hurt anyone around her. Even if you suspect she’s heard the message plenty, I think the conversation will be more effective if you approach it more from a place of giving her the benefit of the doubt. It doesn’t mean you have giving her the benefit of doubt of the doubt in your head; it just means that you want your tone to sound that way.

So you could say something like, “Jane, can I ask you to stop using the word ‘retarded’? It’s a hurtful word to a lot of people and I know you wouldn’t want to cause pain to anyone.”

If she pushes back on that – if she tells you that it’s no big deal or that she doesn’t mean anything by it – then I’d say, “I’m sure you don’t mean to be hurtful! But it really is widely considered a slur these days, and it can be especially hurtful if you say it in front of someone who has a developmentally disabled family member, which a lot of people do.”

Now, that assumes that you have a relatively decent relationship with your boss. Frankly, even if you don’t, I still might say it anyway – because it is a reasonable thing to point out, especially now that she’s saying it in front of clients. But especially if you do have a pretty good relationship with her – and I’m betting that you do since you said she’s a great boss – this shouldn’t make things horribly awkward. She might feel a little bit embarrassed, but there’s no way around that. We all feel embarrassed when we get corrected on this kind of thing, but we learn from it. As long as you keep your tone warm, and you make a point of being warm with her afterwards, I think it should go okay.

And actually, before we move on, I want to say something more about what I just said about making a point of being warm with her afterwards. This is a really good tactic for whenever you have to have a slightly awkward conversation with someone and you’re worried about things being tense or feeling weird. As soon as possible after that, find an opportunity to have a more normal, better feeling conversation with them. By being warm and by being normal, you can help them return to feeling normal more quickly too. It sort of resets things between you. But if you let things go too long without talking after the awkward conversation, things can start to feel weird. So as soon as you can, just reset things with a different interaction – so that their most recent interaction with you is one that felt good, or at least normal, rather than one that felt weird.

Okay, let’s do the next letter.

Caller 2: I started a job search about a month ago ago, and I’m still actively interviewing with about four companies that are all in the same industry. Most of the companies that I’m speaking with are progressing at a pretty normal pace, so I’m close to wrapping up my interviews but I’m not quite there. However, one of them has moved really quick and I think they’re pretty close to giving me an offer. I’m hesitant to accept and stop my job search because I’m more excited about a couple of the other companies I’m interviewing with, but I don’t want to accept now and decline later. Especially since my industry is pretty small, I would definitely burn a bridge. I’ve asked the other companies to speed it up, but it might be another few weeks before another offer comes in. I know that we always say that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but do you think that advice applies here? Any help you can offer would be much appreciated.

Alison: I get so many questions about versions of this because no one knows how to handle it because there isn’t a perfect solution that will guarantee the timing will work out right. Sometimes the timing is just not in your favor.

But there are some things you can do, and it sounds like you’ve done the first thing that I’ve recommend, which is to contact the companies that you’re interviewing with that you’re more interested in and explain the situation. Ideally you say something like, “I’m really interested in working with you, but I’m likely to be receiving another offer very soon. I will probably need to give them an answer within X amount of time. I don’t know if there’s any way for you to work within that timeline, but you would definitely be my first choice.” And then, if a company is very interested in you, in a lot of cases they’ll expedite their timeline so that they don’t lose you. Not every company will do that – some have really rigid hiring practices or timelines that they won’t deviate from or maybe they would like to be flexible but the scheduling on their side just won’t line up. And of course, if they’d be just as happy going with one of the other candidates they have in the mix, they’re probably not going to speed things up for you. But if you’ve gotten the sense that they like you and consider you a really strong candidate, it’s worth asking.

It sounds like you’ve already done that part. So that leaves you with trying to figure out if you can do anything about the first company’s timeline, the one that you think is about to make you the offer. Sometimes you can build in a bit of delay by asking for time to look over the benefits package or having questions about the offer. And you can always ask for some time to think it over. But generally speaking, in most cases, they’re only likely to give you about a week. There are some industries that exceptions to that, where it’s  normally for people to weeks. But in most fields, they’ll probably only want to give you about a week– because they want to get their new hire in, and because they also have other candidates who are waiting to hear back from them, and if you’re not going to take the job, they want to offer it to someone else. Plus, if you ask for more than a week to think it over, in a lot of cases they start questioning if you’re really interested.

That said, once you do have the official offer, you could go back to your top choice and update them – say something like, “I wanted to let you know that I did receive another offer and need to give them a decision within one week. You’re still my first choice, so if it’s possible for us to work within that timeline, I’d be thrilled, although I understand that may not be possible.” The type of response that you get back if you do that should give you some amount of insight into your chances with them. If they don’t reply at all, or if you get a kind of formulaic “sorry, can’t do it” response back, that might be a sign that they’re not super invested in you as a candidate, and that’s good to know.

Ultimately though, the crappy truth of it is that the timing just might not work out, and you might have to decide if you want the first offer, regardless of what happens with the other companies. And you have to decide, are you willing to risk being left with no offers if you turn this one down and the others don’t come through? That’s a really hard calculation to make, and it’s going to depend on things like your sense of how many other options you have and how easy you think it’ll be to get another offer from a totally different company. There’s no easy answer here. But definitely because it’s a small industry and people know each other, the thing I would not to is accept the first offer and then back out if anther one comes through later. That will burn a bridge, and in a small field, you’re likely to run into people again down the road, you don’t want to be applying for a job you really want in 5 years and find out, uh oh, the hiring manager for that job is the person whose job offer you reneged on this time. So I think if you do accept it, it’s got to be with the intention of really taking it and withdrawing from the other companies. Which sucks, I know!

Caller 3: I just received a voicemail from an employer checking references for an employee at my previous job. I was not this person’s direct manager, but I did have daily oversight on her work. She did not get along with our manager, and it was probably due to a personality mis-match on both sides. This employee was a quick learner, great with customers, and did good work, although there were definitely some attitude issues. I did have some mild concerns, but I do feel a lot of it was due to immaturity and this being her first job. I would have been happy to give her a positive reference.

Then, she quit without notice. I think she was trying to send a message to our manager, but all she did was put the rest of the team in a bind. A few months later, I left for another job, but I do still keep in touch with our manager, who was fantastic. I found out through her that our former employee also quit her new job without notice.

I have not been in contact with her and I didn’t not expect to be asked for a reference. If she had reached out to me, I would have told her I would not be able to provide one. I’m planning on just ignoring the reference checker – she’s young and I’d feel horrible if my reference cost her a job, Then again, she’s now quit two jobs without notice! What would you recommend?

Alison: This is an annoying situation to be in. You want to cut someone a break, which is great, but then they make it really hard for you to do that. It is definitely kind of you that you were willing to give her a positive reference, despite having maybe mild concerns. You’re definitely right that when it’s someone’s first job, there can just be some immaturity just due to that and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to be carrying those traits with them forever. But yeah, once she left without notice and put your team in a bind, that does kind of burn the bridge and make it hard to give her a good reference. And then when you heard she did it a second time, that’s not someone who you want to use your own professional reputation to vouch for.

It’s annoying that she listed you as a reference without talking with you to make sure you were willing to give her a good one. I will say, sometimes when people get reference calls and they get annoyed that the person didn’t give them a heads-up them first, I will tell them, hey, don’t assume that that’s what happened. Just because you get a reference call doesn’t mean the person listed you as a reference; some reference-checkers will just call your last few jobs, regardless of whether you put them on an official reference list or not. But in this case, because you weren’t her direct manager and especially because they’re no longer at that job anymore and so they must have  reached you through your personal contact info, it does seem like she must have listed you. And it’s not great that she did that without bothering to verify with you that you’d give a good reference … especially since she knows she left that job without notice, and that you would know that! So it’s a weird assumption on her part, and I suspect it does go to youth and inexperience.

Anyway, when you’re not able to give someone a good reference but kind of want to give them a break, one way to handle that is to just not return the reference call. Your silence sends a message of its own. And even if that message is not picked up on, it at least gets you off the list of people being asked to vouch for her work. So I think it’s fine that you chose to handle it that way.

But what I would recommend is contacting her and letting her know that you’re not able to be a reference for her, both so that she stops listing you and so that she gets a sort of reality check on her understanding of how you view what happened, because it sounds like right now she might be thinking that you’re fine with how she handled things, and so it’ll be helpful to let her know that that’s not really the case. So you could say something like, “Hey, I received a voicemail from someone looking for a reference for you. I don’t think I’m well positioned to be a reference for you, and I wanted to let you know so that you don’t include me on future reference lists.” And if you want, you could explain that it’s because of how she left the job, but you don’t need to get into that if you don’t want to. Whether or not to get into it, I think, depends on your sense of how she’d take it. If she’s someone who handles feedback well and isn’t going to argue with you, it would be a kindness to explain it to her. But if you think she’ll be argumentative or even a jerk about it, then you could just stick with “Hey, letting you know that I can’t do this, hope you’re well.”

Now all that said, I do think there can be an argument for giving an honest reference, if that’s something you’d be comfortable with. I totally get that you don’t want to be the reason she’s rejected for a job, but if you were the employer about to hire her, you probably would want to know these details about her work history so that you could make an informed decision and maybe decide to choose a candidate who really wants the job and hasn’t left her last two positions with no notice. I don’t know – I know that can seem harsh, especially to people who don’t do a lot of hiring. But I will say that from the hiring side of things, I’m always grateful for references who speak candidly. And that doesn’t mean that you’d get on the phone and slam her – it means that you’d give a full, nuanced reference, talking about her good points but also the parts that did not go so well. But you definitely don’t have to do that – either of these approaches is reasonable to take.

Okay, next letter.

Caller 4: Hi Alison. I’m a mid-level manager in a male-dominated industry in Sydney, Australia> After six months off being manager-less, I’m finally getting a boss. 

When I interviewed for my role a year ago, I was very forward about my expectations in regard to work-life balance. I need to work from home when I feel like it, I’m not getting in till 9 am, and I prefer transparency. In my annual review with my old boss, who is still with the company, I was told that I’m an excellent performer with an eye for innovation and that I work incredibly hard.  I’ve got four weeks to figure out how to approach my new manager and lay down the law about the way I work, that I don’t want to be micromanaged, and that my work life balance is very important to me, but in a respectful way. Can you help me?

Alison: This is an interesting one. It can be really tricky when you negotiate certain things with a manager as conditions of you taking a job … but then a new manager comes in and they haven’t necessarily agreed to those things and might not be as amenable to them as the old person was.  So the way approach it is important. Definitely don’t approach it as laying down the law, because the reality is that she does have the ability to say “actually, I’d like to try something different.” Of course, if that happens, you might decide that you don’t want to stay under those conditions – but ideally you want to handle it in a way where it doesn’t get to that point at all.

That said, you also don’t want to approach it as asking for her permission, because you’re not really doing that either. It’s more “this is the arrangement I have, it’s something that I negotiated when I took the job, and I want to let you know about it.” So it’s kind of an FYI, but with an opening for her speak up if it’s going to be a problem for her.

That’s for the schedule stuff and the working from home. The pieces about transparency and not being micromanaged are a little bit different. No one really wants to be micromanaged, especially not after a certain professional level, and it’s likely to come across as strangely adversarial if you just announce that you don’t want to be micromanaged. And the reality is, if your new manager is a micromanager, it’s probably not something you’re going to be able to solve in one conversation or one declaration. So that one is something where you’re more going to need to wait and see how things play out. You could say something early on about what kind of structures you’ve been using with your old boss that have worked well. For example, you could say, “So what I’d been doing with Jane, the previous manager, is that I run the X program pretty autonomously but I meet with her monthly to give her updates on Y and Z, and I’d consult with her about things like A and B. And my goals for the next six months are (blah blah blah), and I’m on track to meet all of those, but I’ll flag for you if it ever looks like that might not be the case.” So that’s sort of a declaration of “here’s how I work, it’s working well, here’s how I’ll keep you in the loop.” And if your new boss does have micromanaging tendencies, potentially that can head some of it off, by making it clear that you’re on top of this stuff, and laying out a structure for regular communication. A lot of micromanaging happens because the micromanager doesn’t have good structures for those sorts of things in place – and because people don’t have clear goals and regular updates on their progress toward those goals. So if you proactively lay that stuff out, that could be really helpful. Not 100% guaranteed, some people are just terrible micromanagers no matter what. But it could help. And if she’s NOT a micromanager, it’ll still be really useful to lay this kind of thing out. I mean, I would love it if I came into a job as a new manager and sat down with someone and they had all of that ready to go.

But some of this is going to be about waiting and seeing. If you start getting pushback on your schedule or you do start to feel micromanaged, at that point you’d sit down with her and have a conversation about it, but I wouldn’t start from an aggressive pose on this. Do the FYI stuff about your schedule and be matter of fact about it, ttalk about the structures you use for communication and keeping her in the loop, and then give it some time to see how it goes.

Caller 5: The place I’m employed with does United Way. This is my first year working here. Every employee will have money deducted from their paycheck over the next year until next September. We have been challenged to “bump it up a buck” and contribute more than the mandatory amount. We have to give minimum $4.00 per week at least. It is automatically deducted from our pay with no exceptions.

I don’t want to give anything and the pressure to give more than $4.00 per week or an extra one time donation has been on. We were all told it’s a condition of working here to support the cause. What do you recommend I do to speak up about not wanting to give anything, even a mandatory donation? Thank you so much.

Alison: I’m going to rant here for a minute about pressure to donate money at work, because I get so many letters from people whose employers put inappropriate pressure on them to donate money. And to be clear, charity is great. I believe everyone should donate to charity. But that is a private, individual decision, and it’s not appropriate for your employer to pressure you to donate through them. It’s one thing to make the opportunity available to people to participate in a workplace giving program – that’s great. But this kind of pressure from employers is BS. First of all, not everyone wants to donate through the United Way. Some people have legitimate concerns with their operating practices, or they prefer to donate directly to their charity of their choice without sending it through United Way. Other people prefer to keep their charitable giving private, which is very much their right to do. And sometimes people have already allocated their charitable budget for the year, don’t have the money for more, and shouldn’t be forced to defend that.

And in this caller’s case, the employer is saying that donating is mandatory, which is just ridiculous. You’re at work to earn money, not to have it forcibly taken back from you.

That said, your employer is legally allowed to do this, as long as the mandatory deduction does not take your pay below minimum wage. So the question for you is what to do about it.

If you really want to push back on it, you could try saying, “Unfortunately my budget doesn’t allow for this and it’s really not possible for me to contribute. I’m sorry about that, but how do I correct that with payroll so that it’s not being automatically deducted from my check?” You might get a lot of push-back on that, in part because a lot of companies that do United Way have pressure to get 100% participation. If that happens, you could try a compromise – you could say, “I’m really not able to afford a regular ongoing donation, but so that I’m able to participate, I could make a small one-time donation at the end of the year.” And if you do that, that donation can truly be small – like 5 or 10 dollars.

That said, context matters here. If you’re in a very well-paying job, it’s going to come across strangely if you say you can’t afford $4 a paycheck. We can argue about whether or not it should – and certainly even people who earn a lot of money can have very high expenses and debt and so forth – but the reality is, in the world that we live in, if you are well paid, you’re going to come across oddly if you tell them you can’t afford $4. So if that’s the case, the better move for you in the long run may be to suck it up and consider this part of the price that you pay to work there. I hate giving that advice, but I think it’s very much the reality of the situation. Maybe look at it is a business expense like having to buy a suit or a briefcase. It’s annoying and it’s wrong on principle, but it might be that it’s better for your career to do that.

The other thing is that at some point it might make sense to consider getting a group of coworkers to all push back on this as a group. Whether or not to do that depends on what kind of standing you have in your company. If you’re pretty junior or pretty new or you just don’t have a lot of political capital to spend, this might not be a battle that makes sense for you to take on. But if you are senior and you do have some capital to spend, you have the option of addressing this from a more big-picture angle –getting some colleagues together to all push back as a group and say, “Hey, we’re happy to have the company organizing charitable initiatives, but we really object to making it mandatory, and we’re asking you to reconsider the amount of pressure you’re putting on people to participate.”

But again, that depends on how much standing you and how much capital you have to burn. It’s not going to always make sense for you to be the one fighting that battle.

And really, companies that truly want to organize something for charity should foot the bill themselves, not stick their employees with it. This is a way of seeming to do something for charity, while quite literally taking the money from their employees to fund it. I know it’s really common, but I am not a fan.

That’s our show for today! If you’d like to hear your question answered on a future episode, you can record it on the show voicemail by calling(855) 426-WORK. That’s 855-426-9675. Or, if you have a longer question, a question where you’d want to actually come on the show and talk with me, email it to podcast@askamanager.org. That’s it for today! I’ll be back next time with more questions.

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