Ask a Manager

This is a transcription of the Ask a Manager podcast, episode 3: “The Helpless Coworker”.

Alison: Hi, I’m Alison Green. Welcome to the Ask a Manager podcast. Some of you may know me from my website, AskAManager.org, where I answer daily questions from readers about how to navigate all sorts of sticky situations with coworkers, managers, and employees. Each week on the show I’ll take calls and talk directly with listeners about the toughest, most frustrating, or just plain weirdest work predicaments they’re facing. I’ll help you figure out what to do and say to handle these situations successfully and get the outcomes you want. So let’s get started.

Alison: I get so many questions at Ask a Manager about coworkers who are annoying in some way. They monopolize meetings, or they keep political talk radio on all day long, or they won’t stop talking to you when you’re trying to work. Today’s guest has a coworker who is being frustrating in a very specific way, which we’ll get to in a minute – but first, let’s welcome her to the show. Hello!

Guest: Hi!

Alison: Thank you so much for coming on. Let’s see, why don’t you start by reading the letter that you sent to me initially, and then we’ll start talking about it.

Guest: Okay. I have a relatively new coworker, who I will call Jane. I was initially responsible for training her, which I did in depth. She took notes and she seemed to catch on okay. Since she started 9 months ago, it’s become apparent she either isn’t retaining the information we share with her or she’s second-guessing herself, a lot. She repeatedly asks me things I’ve already gone over with her, that she’s taken notes on, and that I’ve emailed her instructions for.

It’s gotten to the point that I’ve saved every email containing instructions that I’ve sent her, so I can simply resend them when she asks the question again. Plus, when she has a question, she’ll go from person to person in our department and ask it with such a sense of urgency that we have to stop work to answer. Even though we all provide her the same answer, she’ll then ask another person.

When we’ve brought our concerns about her to our director, our director says Jane’s former company was a lot more stringent on everything being perfect, and Jane is gun shy about making the tiniest mistake. We also think she may be accustomed to delegating or having staff perform duties for her, since, in her previous position of 27 years, she supposedly managed a team of designers at a company that provided similar services as ours. My manager and our director are aware of all these issues with Jane but keep asking us to be patient with her. Yet she’s a big time-suck and strain on resources and our staff, and I’m finding it difficult to stay patient around her. Help!

Alison: So it’s been nine months of this. That is a really long time.

Guest: Yeah.

Alison: Do you have a sense of how her work is aside from this problem? What you’re saying makes me think she still doesn’t know how to do the job, but I wonder if that’s the case, or if her work is actually fine and she’s just seeking way too much support from you in getting it done.

Guest: I think for the most part, her work is really good. It seemed at first that she was picking things up, and she knew what she was doing, and it just seems like maybe she doesn’t have confidence in what she’s doing, and she’s just second-guessing maybe. And I’m at a loss, because the things I’ve seen are just very minor issues.

Alison: That is really interesting, because when I first read your letter I just sort of took it as a given that she really hadn’t mastered the job and was probably performing poorly. But then I read it a second time, and I thought maybe her work is fine and she’s just really insecure about it, so that’s really interesting to hear. She’s just leaning on you and your coworkers for too much handholding. Do you think she’s really not retaining information, or do you think she is retaining it but she’s lacking such confidence that she’s asking you the same things over and over?

Guest: Yeah, I think part of it is that she just is so afraid, still, gun-shy from her previous job where everything had to be perfect and was very regimented, was my understanding. She’s just really afraid of making mistakes and being called out on it later. That’s pretty much my guess.

Alison: I almost wonder – and this is just speculation, and ultimately doesn’t really change the way you should handle it – but I wonder if her previous workplace was pretty toxic and dysfunctional, very punitive about mistakes, and if she was sort of living in fear of getting anything wrong while she was there, and if she has then brought that to this new job. Because sometimes you see that when people come from really toxic environments that are managed by fear. They don’t shed that habit when they come to a new job. And I almost wonder if she’s dealing with something like that that’s making her terrified of making even small mistakes.

Guest: That could very well be, and as a matter of fact I came from a toxic job three years ago, so you would think, I guess, if anyone would understand, I should. (Laughs) That’s something I can use, definitely, to deal with it.

Alison: It is frustrating, though. I mean it sounds like this is interrupting your work, and it’s frustrating to be asked to reiterate the same things over and over. My speculation about where that might be coming from on her part could be completely wrong (laughs), so we don’t really know, and we might never know. So, I want to recommend that you approach it from two angles. One is your manager, and the other is the way that you deal with Jane herself. On the first point, I wanted to ask – I know you’ve talked to your manager about what’s happening. Sometimes when people talk to their manager about a problem with a coworker, they soften the message. They don’t want to be really blunt, so they kind of dance around the problem. And as a result, the manager doesn’t end up hearing the full extent of what’s going on. Is there any chance that that has happened here, or have you been pretty direct?

Guest: I’ve been pretty direct. I’m usually a pretty direct person. Also, other people have talked to my manager, bringing the same concerns to her.

Alison: Do you have a sense of why your manager isn’t doing more to address it? Is she someone who doesn’t really like having hard conversations, or do you think there’s something more going on?

Guest: Truthfully, I think there’s a couple of things going on. Number one, you’re correct, she doesn’t like having the hard conversations. And number two, just overall our office is really poor at inter-office communications – it’s sort of the office where if somebody’s leaving dishes in the sink instead of in the dishwasher, the whole office gets the email, that kind of reaction, rather than addressing it to the single person. (Laughs)

Alison: Okay. It may be that your manager is not going to be a great help here, which is too bad – your manager should be talking to your coworker and saying “Hey, here’s what I have seen happening, here’s what I’d like you to do differently.” But it doesn’t sound like we’re going to be able to rely on your manager for a lot of support in that way. So that leaves you with you talking to your coworker yourself. You said that you’re very direct which is great, so that makes me wonder – have you already tried talking to her about the big picture of what you’re seeing, or are you still waiting to try to figure out how to navigate that?

Guest: Yeah, I’ve been waiting to figure out how. (Laughs)

Alison: (Laughs) Yeah, sure. Well I think there’s a couple of things you could do. One is that you could talk to her from a big picture perspective of what you’re seeing. That’s potentially a more awkward conversation, and you might not feel comfortable doing this if she is in a more senior role, or if she’s more experienced than you are. That can be a weird dynamic to navigate. But potentially you could say something to her like, “Hey, I’m so glad you’re here, I think you’re doing really great work. I’ve noticed that you check and double-check things that I know that you know, that we’ve covered a bunch of times, and I wonder, is there something going on that’s making you want to do that?” I don’t know that that will get you anywhere, you might just hear, “Oh I’m very cautious, and I want to make sure that I’m getting everything right.” I don’t know how fruitful that would be, but it’s a possibility that you could try.

Guest: Yes.

Alison: The other thing you could do, though, is you could just keep it very much about the work. You could say something to her like, “Hey, I was happy to help train you while you were getting up to speed, but at this point we’re covering a lot of the same ground. I’m finding that I’m resending you emails with things that we’ve already covered in the past. So going forward, rather than coming to me when you’re stuck, can you check back through the documentation that I’ve already sent you in the past and the notes that you’ve taken?” I think if you keep giving her the immediate gratification of easy answers when she comes to you, she’ll keep coming to you. But if you cut off that stream of easy answers, she’s more likely to pull it back. Does that feel like something that you could try?

Guest: I think so. It’s something I haven’t tried before, and I think the trick would just be to try to do it without her getting upset. I don’t know how she’ll be, she seems like she’ll be able to handle it.

Alison: I think the thing to remember is that it really is reasonable to say that you need to focus on your own work, and to remind her that she already has those answers, and if she takes a look through the documentation she already has she could find them. It would be unkind if you were all complaining about her behind her back all the time, or if you were saying these things to her in an unkind tone. But I think as long as your tone is respectful, it’s an okay thing to say.

Guest: Okay, that sounds good.

Alison: It also sounds like you and your coworkers feel very much at her mercy, like she gets to demand as much of your time as she wants, and you just have to give it to her.

Guest: Yeah.

Alison: You don’t need to make yourself so available if she interrupts you with questions, it’s okay to say, “I’m sorry, I’m right in the middle of something so I can’t help right now.” And you can even tell her pretty bluntly, “I know we’ve gone over this before, I don’t have anything to really add to what we’ve covered in the past, but if you’re still stuck you could talk to our manager.”

Guest: Okay.

Alison: And when she’s doing that thing where she asks multiple people the same question, which I can certainly understand why you’re being driven crazy by, I think it’s okay to call that out. Again, you want to say it in a kind tone, but you could say something like, “You know, I heard you asking other people this too. What’s going on? Are you not getting the answers that you need?” Because frankly, what she’s doing is not a great use of other people’s time, and it’s okay to say nicely, “Hey can you cut this out?”

Guest: Yeah.

Alison: My parting advice to you is really to think of this as taking back control of your time. If your manager isn’t willing to do her job and manage the situation, you can at least set your own boundaries for how much you are and aren’t willing to do. And it’s possible that by doing that, it will take the problem off your plate, where it is now, and push it back onto your manager’s plate, which is where it belongs. Or, best case scenario, it’s even possible that by cutting out the source of constant reassurance to your coworker, it might nudge her to get on the track where she needs to be.

Guest: Okay.

Alison: Well thank you so much for coming on the show and talking through this question with me! I really hope this helps.

Guest: Thank you so much too, Alison.

Alison: Thanks for listening to the Ask a Manager podcast, produced in conjunction with Penguin Random House and Anchor. If you like what you heard, please take a minute to subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Play. If you’d like to ask a question on the show, email it to podcast@askamanager.org. And check out my new book from Ballantine Books called Ask a Manager: Clueless Coworkers, Lunch-Stealing Bosses, and the Rest of Your Life at Work. It hits stores May 1st, and it’s the ultimate guide for tackling any and all workplace dilemmas. You can pre-order a copy today at penguinrandomhouse.com or anywhere books are sold.

Thanks for listening! I’m Alison Green, and I’ll be back next week with another question.

Transcript provided by MJ Brodie.

You can see past podcast transcripts here.