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. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.

1. My boss keeps bringing her sick child to work

I tried to talk to my boss about her bringing her sick child to work with her. I tried to start with a lighthearted “they should be home watching the Price is Right,” but she shut down the conversation with a tirade about how hard it is to run a business and have kids, so I dropped the issue. Since then, I could tell that she’s had a shorter and shorter fuse, so I avoided bringing it up. I think her child must have had a good stretch of not being sick, because I didn’t see them for a while.

Unfortunately, she then scheduled to have her business renovated. The working conditions were by no means safe, but she refused to close. I brought up the safety issues multiple times, trying to frame it as “how can we figure this out together,” but she would throw up her hands and say that people would just have to deal with it. Another downside of the renovations is that she’s been so stressed about it that she turned me into her “emotional release valve.” She would lecture me for not doing things I was never told about, immediately blamed for things other people did, and whenever I fixed something she would refuse to acknowledge that I had fixed it and instead just find something else to complain about.

Long story short, I quit and cited unsafe working conditions. I also filed a health and safety complaint with the labor board.

Thank you for the advice (and all of the suggestions and support from other readers). Hopefully my next job will be better.

2. My employee wants to be promoted into a job that doesn’t exist here (and probably shouldn’t) (#2 at the link)

I followed your advice exactly. I told the employee that it would be very hard for us to make a case for the role, and if we were successful, the role would probably be moved to a different department. I was also honest about his current qualifications and how he’d need to close a gap between his current qualification and what’s needed in the role he wanted. I indicated that if he still wanted to pursue this, the first step would be to draft a document that actually makes his case. I also said that the easiest way for him to get this job, if he really wants a job like the one he’s creating, would like be to find it somewhere else where it currently exists (or exists as closely as possible to his ideal job).

I left all this in his court. I’ve heard nothing on this. However, this conversation ended up redirecting the employee. Rather than pursuing this job he’d imagined for himself, he has a renewed interest in his current job, even with regards to parts of his job that he didn’t previously have interest in. He seems to be happy for the moment.

Thank you very much for replying to my letter and your excellent advice!

3. My company has no reporting structure and no training

I’m happy to report that I took your (and your readers’) advice and walked away. I thought that was probably what I needed to do, but it was so nice to hear it from someone else when I felt like maybe I was giving up too soon.

When I gave notice at my old job, Malcolm’s reaction was shock. “But I didn’t think you were that unhappy!” was what he said. As if I hadn’t, more than once, told him “I cannot do my job like this and we have to change things.” He tried to counteroffer and promised to give the changes a try, but I knew he’d never follow through and politely declined.

I handed off my projects, checked in with those people periodically to see if they were doing ok or needed help, and otherwise took my hands off the wheel. I didn’t earn much those two weeks (we got paid based on chargeable hours), but it was worth it for the break.

I did a pretty honest exit interview and gave Malcolm some feedback for what would have kept me from leaving. I hope it helps my replacement, who was one of the team leads, is great at her job, and could really improve things if given the chance.

I’m now working for a private company in a role that is more suited to my professional skillset. Compensation is similar, I’m on salary (no overtime!), and I don’t have to manage people. I’m very happy!

4. My boss keeps asking for rides home

Funny enough, there is no update. Since writing that, he has not asked for a ride. He ended up getting a new vehicle and has not had any issues with it, knock on wood. He’s still a quirky and awkward man, but I haven’t had to give him rides anywhere. There have been a couple instances where we go off site somewhere and he has asked if we want to ride together, and I just always say no I’m taking my own car, and that’s that.

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 coworker was working alone overnight despite explicit instructions not to? Here’s the update.

Your advice was really helpful, as were some of the comments (though many assumed that my colleague was making drugs after hours? Which is a wild thing to jump to, in my opinion!).

So a couple of quick notes:

A few commenters guessed correctly that safety isn’t actually my job, just something that was assigned to me because someone needed to do it. When I wrote in, all of my knowledge was based on personal research and reading guidance materials. I was in a position to make recommendations but I didn’t have any authority. I scheduled a meeting with my boss to talk about what that meant for me, legally, and his stance was that at the end of the day, I’m not on the hook for us being out of compliance. Making the company aware of safety issues was, at the end of the day, just a nice thing for me to do to help protect my colleagues. It’s the responsibility of the company to hire a trained safety specialist to manage compliance, and once we have the capital to make that happen, he will. In the meantime, he just wanted me to make sure that no one was storing open bottles of ethanol next to a soldering iron or wearing open-toed high heels while making 12M hydrochloric acid solution.

ALSO: THAT THING ABOUT OSHA NOT KICKING IN UNTIL YOU HAVE 11 EMPLOYEES IS A MYTH! OSHA guidance becomes mandatory as soon as you have TWO employees. The 11-employee thing is about reporting and posting injuries with the 300, 300A, and 301 logs.

Some people insisted that staying at the lab late was a definite, sure sign that my colleague was up to something nefarious, and he couldn’t possibly be a “good” coworker if he was having emotional outbursts or breaking rules. This is a thing I’ve noticed a lot while reading AAM comments: people tend to jump to the worst conclusions about what’s happening in the background, and have a really hard time believing that people can be complicated. My colleague has saved my butt more times than I can count, he is a team player to a fault, extremely detail oriented, and great to work with. Behaving badly in one area, or for a specific, limited time frame, does not erase that. (Note from Alison: Thank you pointing this out.)

The actual update:

I did end up mentioning it to my boss. My thought at the time was that, even if I wasn’t legally on the hook for anything, if he did get hurt or sick from working alone, I would never be able to forgive myself. I focused on the legal aspect when I wrote in originally because I felt like I didn’t have standing to say anything on any other basis, in part because he had insisted so vehemently that it was none of my business. Reading the responses helped me realize that actually, yeah, it was my business, for a whole slew of reasons.

It didn’t get fixed immediately, but I think coming forward helped flag the larger issue for my boss and his supervisor, who were able to communicate to him how big of an issue his general behavior had been over the previous few months. I don’t want to share too much of his business, but he was dealing with some really severe personal things and basically wasn’t able to sleep at all. Once he realized that we weren’t going to let it go, he made an effort to address the personal stuff, and over the next few months things got measurably better.

I want to be really clear about this: he wasn’t just being a jerk for fun or because he doesn’t care about people. He was dealing with things that no one should ever have to deal with, some of which were systemic and outside of his control, and it took tremendous effort for him to address those things (Extremely redacted version: a medical professional almost killed him through pure ineptitude and ego. Anyone here with a chronic, invisible illness is probably familiar with how hard it is to get doctors to admit that they made a mistake, or to listen to you about your symptoms.)

Things are much better now! I got some additional, real training on lab safety, I have a better understanding of the expectations for my role, and my colleague is back to working normal hours and being a pleasure to be around.

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 patronizing coworker kept interrupting meetings to explain basic things to her? Here’s the update.

I wrote last year about my insufferable coworker “Craig” who habitually interrupted meetings to Craig-splain basic concepts to me. I have a two-part update:

1. Your response to my letter was very helpful in making me see just how blatantly obnoxious this behavior was and that I shouldn’t just be enduring it. The reader comments were very supportive and offered a lot of great retorts to Craig’s blatherings, which I harvested and kept in a file on my phone so I could deploy them as needed. But I also finally went to upper management about the pattern. I believe somebody did bring Craig to a reckoning, as the frequency of the incidents drastically decreased, which was great — although I was slightly disappointed to never get to use most of the suggested replies.

2. Some months later, I got a repeat call from an annoying recruiter, about a position in which I had no interest. The recruiter kept telling me the position was very prestigious, would gain me a lot of respect in my field, class up my resume, etc. It was a not-great role, at a company type I avoid, in a location at which I don’t want to work … and it suddenly dawned on me who would actually be flattered by this sales pitch! I sicced the recruiter on Craig (just gave him Craig’s contact info, absolutely no praise or endorsement of any sort), and soon Craig was off to this dubiously-prestigious new job. I feel a little guilty for inflicting him on his new coworkers. Maybe I should anonymously forward them the list of Craig-diffusing meeting interruption retorts.

Thanks to you and your readers.

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 anti-bullying consultant accused her of bullying him? Here’s the update.

I ended up also discussing my situation with my therapist and a close friend who is in the social work field, both of whom had similar responses to you. I then met with my manager to share how Mark’s behaviour impacted me and to raise my concerns about bringing him into an already fraught environment to offer training on such a sensitive topic. I told her that after a lot of reflection and discussion with trusted support people I had come to understand that I didn’t do anything wrong and certainly hadn’t bullied Mark. My manager revealed that she also didn’t feel good after Mark made the accusations, and that she had questioned his behavior in the initial meeting as well. After we talked I didn’t feel the need to meet with Mark again, so I left it up to her to follow up with him however she saw fit.

Disappointingly, our organization went ahead with the training that Mark had been contracted to do. During the training he singled me out a few times in ways that were subtle enough that others wouldn’t notice, but felt quite pointed. We also had a couple of brief 1-1 interactions where he was very cold with me. Thanks to the support I received from you (and your readers) and the other people I talked to, I felt confident and didn’t react to his behaviour. Incidentally, Mark also made a few off-color and sexually suggestive comments during his presentation, which just underscored how unsuitable he is for the type of work he does! It made some of my colleagues uncomfortable enough to bring it to the attention of management. He had been scheduled for a second follow-up training, but he never came back and we didn’t hear anymore about it.

I have since moved on from the organization to go back to school and I find there is a lot less stress in my life. Thanks again to you and your commenters for all of the thoughtful responses and advice.

P.S. I just realized I forgot to mention the original bully. They are still working for the organization and to my knowledge their behaviour has never been addressed directly. You and a number of commenters correctly pointed out that my former manager’s refusal to manage this issue was at the root of the problem. I think she believes the bully will quit if she tries to address their behaviour directly and since the bully has a unique set of skills, they would be difficult to replace as the organization operates in a very niche sector. As a result the manager has prioritized retaining one problem employee at the expense of an entire department’s wellbeing. I don’t foresee anything changing as long as she is the manager and I am happy I walked away when I did.

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 three updates from past letter-writers.

1. Should I tell a student worker the real reason we’re ending her job? (#2 at the link)

I really appreciated your advice (and the suggestions of the commenters), and it helped frame the nature of my relationship with and responsibilities to my student workers. In practice, though, well…

My boss, who was also my predecessor’s boss, was the person who was adamant that Ciara not be let go earlier and be given a second (and third, and fourth) chance. After spending a lot of time preparing for the conversation and writing out notes of what to say based on your advice, I made the mistake of asking my boss to sit in on the conversation as a neutral third party. Immediately she launched in, saying that Ciara was being let go through no fault of her own, there was truly nothing we could’ve done, and that she’d be happy to serve as a reference in the future. Which, of course, prompted Ciara to ask if she could come back in the fall when her work study funding was renewed. I had to sheepishly slide in, my “we’re firing you” script clenched in my lap, and try to gently convey that we were, in fact, firing her. It was all a bit of a mess, but I think I was ultimately able to hit all the points you suggested and it worked out okay. Ciara left on decently good terms when her funding ran out, and when it came time to hire another student I absolutely hit the jackpot with someone who was curious, motivated, and accountable.

On a broader scale, that one early experience with my boss ended up being indicative of a pretty terrible working relationship. She’d been a professor for most of her career and didn’t have much supervisory experience, and often conflated being a boss with being a bully. She’d assign me extensive, complex projects one week, only to change her mind the next week and send me off on something completely different. She made me ask for her permission whenever I wanted to leave the office (I was a salaried, professional employee)– when I was offered a speaking opportunity in another department, she refused to let me go. A couple times, she yelled at me for “undermining” her, and eventually told me not to “bother her any more with my questions”. It was exhausting and awful. After about 8 months of this, I left for a position at another university in the area.

And I guess, that’s the good news of this update! I love my new job– my boss is kind and competent, the expectations are clearly defined and my work is really interesting to me, and the overall workplace culture is just so much better. I don’t supervise students in my new role, but I learned so much from my previous experience (both as a supervisor and as someone with a bully boss) and I’m excited to utilize that the next time I’m in a management capacity!

2. Can I show armpit hair at work?

I wrote a few years ago to ask about whether hairy armpits were acceptable with professional outfits at the office, and my update is that now (working at a different office, with 6 more years of life and armpit experience), I would never DREAM of going sleeveless at work, hair or no. I have a couple colleagues who do and it’s no big deal, but I have grown to consider underarms an off-the-clock experience, personally.

It has been an interesting adjustment to the professional world, though; at the time I wrote, I was in grad school and in a temporary office job amid a string of gig work and self-employment. I’ve now been at a local government job about a year and a half and have discovered that looking a smidge more polished helps me feel more capable, and that there are a bunch of tricks to balance this goal with my neurodivergent need to be physically comfy during the workday. Most recent discovery is the existence of fake collared “shirts” so I can look like I’m wearing a button-down without anything getting bunched up under my sweater! Also, keeping a cardigan, a blazer, and a super-light jacket at the office has helped me tolerate all kinds of unseasonal temps at my desk. Plus handwarmers and a fan. (I actually would love a reader discussion about gadgets/clothes/adaptations that have helped them feel physically more comfortable at work.)

But as for the armpits: still hairy, now hidden.

Thank you as always for your great advice!

3. Building staff damaged my bookcase (#2 at the link)

Many thanks to Alison and the many commenters for your thoughts! I clarified a few things in the comments: the artwork was business-related, and building maintenance asked that they do any picture hanging to avoid damage to the walls. As to why the bookcase was in the office in the first place: it’s meant to be a client-facing space, but I was given very little money to make the office attractive. I decided that displaying the piece was worth the risk, rather than keeping it in my parents’ attic where it had been for years.

While I was a bit miffed in the moment, I decided (as many of you suggested) to not make much hay. I did mention it in passing to a supervisor, whom I have a good rapport with. He apologized but didn’t offer any resolution–and that was fine by me. I covered the area with a knick knack and nobody is the wiser.

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. My boss and my employee won’t stop asking me to spend the night at their houses

A few little details to clear up things that were brought up in the comments and one big one that I think ended up being the root of the issue (maybe). I am in a large metropolitan area on the east coast, and it is not in any way normal for people to invite other people to spend the night at their house in this area. I grew up Mormon, so my views on alcohol are a bit skewed. I do drink but I find it highly unusual to drink at children’s activities, holidays, and other times when a lot of people think it is normal. Also, when I said I can be a little wild on the weekends, I meant smoking pot and swimming naked in my pool, nothing more.

The biggest thing to clarify, which I think was the root of the invites, is that I actually lived three hours away, but my boyfriend lived about 30-45 minutes away. We (the kids, him, and I) split our time between the two places. We have been dating for many years and the kids had bedrooms and friends in both locations. When I needed to be in the office, I would stay at his house. Most of the time, we were at my house. We referred to both places as home. Since then my kids graduated and went off to college, we sold both houses, and bought a house together that was near his old house and are thoroughly enjoying empty nesting! My coworkers all knew about all of this, but for some reason after the move the invites stopped. The only thing I can think of is that they for some reason thought I (and/or the kids maybe) were not 100% comfortable staying at his house … maybe? Or they didn’t understand that I was only driving back to his house somehow … We stayed there regularly, so I really don’t know.

I definitely agree with you that there are some loose boundaries and sometimes an assumption that everyone else feels the same way. I did say something to my boss about my employee inviting me to spend the night after I had been drinking at a work event and she responded, “I invite you to spend the night too and it isn’t weird when I do it.” To which I just blinked and changed the subject.

As far as my boss and my employee spending too much time together outside of work — my employee has given notice that she is retiring soon. I have been promoted and am being groomed for the C suite. My boss is still my boss, but as the only two women on the leadership team we have developed a very close bond and genuine friendship. All of this makes it feel less awkward to spend time with them outside of work.

2. Should I accept my employee just isn’t well suited to a task?

For the second/final meeting of 2024 where the note-taking was needed, I reassigned the task to someone else, a recent part-time hire we’ll call Sally. Sally did great; she was able to immediately pick up the process, keep up with the conversation, and she tracked edits accurately and with apparent ease. I am really hoping she remains available to do this for 2025 meetings.

I approached the reassignment pretty straightforwardly with Callie, who was, interestingly, surprised and a little embarrassed (I’m not sure that’s quite the right word to use, but it’s in the ballpark). She asked if she’d been doing a bad job and I let her know it just wasn’t a task she was well-suited for and, more importantly, wasn’t using her strengths to their best advantage. She has plenty she’s good at and it makes more sense to have her focus on those tasks than this one. She did say she wasn’t sad to not have to do it anymore, because she found it stressful and difficult. The fact that she was surprised that she wasn’t performing the task satisfactorily did open my eyes to the fact that perhaps I was being less direct than I thought I was in coaching her/giving feedback on her performance, so that was definitely a learning moment for me.

A lot of the commenters focused on how weird the overall group review process was and offered some interesting alternatives, which I appreciated! I don’t have immediate plans to shake things up, but it’s always good to hear (or in this case, read) the outsider perspective to see where there may be room for improvement. While any given chapter of the book itself has a single author and a single technical reviewer, the group review process is a needed third step. The type of stuff we’re writing about is open to interpretation, in many instances, so it’s a case of more heads are better than one to ensure we’re covering content completely and accurately. Person A could read the guidelines and come to Conclusion A, leading them to Implementation A. Person B could read the guidelines, also come to Conclusion A, but they’d choose Implementation B. And Person C could read the guidelines and come to Conclusion C, leading to Implementation C. And so on and so forth. There is usually one right answer, and the group discussion leads us to home in on it and write about it correctly. There are also times where multiple interpretations could reasonably be accepted and it’s important to have that captured in the book as well. All that is to say, it’s content that benefits from discussion more than just multiple people editing the same Google doc or something.

I really appreciate Alison’s reply and all the comments!

3. My company announces employees’ babies … but skipped mine (#3 at the link)

First, I appreciate the supportive comments on my post! (And in terms of the conversation it sparked about work-life boundaries, I’ll just say that I’m on the reserved side of things for my team/organization, and I’m quite confident that no one I work with would call me an over-sharer.)

In terms of the baby announcement itself: I followed Alison’s advice pretty much to the letter. I emailed the HR person, said I realized an announcement had never been made when my son was born, sent a few up-to-date pictures, etc. The update was posted, I received a few well-wishes, and it made me feel like there was less of a weird silence around the topic of my baby. So all good there.

As is often the case with these types of questions, and as I knew to some extent at the time, this small thing was made bigger by the fact that it was a difficult period overall. My son’s medical condition required him to have some surgeries that I needed to take time off for, and some recovery time where he couldn’t be in daycare and I was jugging caring for him, managing a part-time home health aide, and still trying to perform at work to the same level I always had. I felt like my director manager was emotionally supportive but still expected me to get my work done at a busy time of year. My grandboss, who I have worked with for years and with whom I typically have a very good relationship, was clearly so uncomfortable and unsure of what to say about my son that he completely ignored anything to do with my personal life. It was hard logging in to a casual team meeting the week after my son’s surgery and hearing all my coworkers’ weekend stories but not having anyone ask how my son was doing. So it was a hard time, and I felt unsupported at work in general, and the lack of baby announcement fed into all of those feelings.

But: my son had his last (for the time being, and maybe/hopefully forever!) surgery in late April, he resumed full-time daycare after Memorial Day, and he is THRIVING. He is a happy, rambunctious 15-month-old who keeps me very busy and I am so grateful. Now that his health and my home life have stabilized, work is back on good footing as well, and the coworkers who were clearly uncomfortable asking about my son are now comfortable asking the typical “is he walking? what is he being for Halloween?” type questions. So that feeling of having a big thing going on personally that was unaddressed at work has receded.

4. My employee refuses to do her job and leads me in circles about why she won’t (first update here)

I am the manager of Bartleby, who, a couple of years ago, would prefer not to do a lot of the work that was part of their job. Since you asked for updates, even uneventful ones, I thought I’d send a quick note.

I can share that the transformation seems to have stuck for well over a year now: Bartleby has continued to be cooperative and collegial, and they communicate in appropriately-sized chunks of generally pertinent information. If they don’t have paying work, they stop by to let me know that they have time available, and when pointed in the direction of things to do, they do them well. They’re not gonna win Employee of the Year, but they remain solidly on the higher end of “Achieves Expectations.”

I remain more than a bit surprised, but the absence of unnecessary drama has been such a relief.

Thank you, as always, for one of the most interesting and useful sites on the internet.