Ask a Manager

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

1. Can you be fired for being fine but not great?

Beyond egregious performance violations and the like, can an employer fire you for doing fine or decent work — but it’s not quite at the level they have in mind? (Maybe a rephrase here: for states with at-will employment, I know you can be fired for any reason. But does something like this actually happen?)

I’m thinking of a former colleague who by all accounts was well-liked, showed up to work on time, didn’t slack off, met their deadlines, and otherwise did a more than decent job in their role. However, I think their manager was somewhat frustrated that, despite this person being fine at their job, they weren’t “great” at it. This person wasn’t fired, but it got me thinking: if you’re an otherwise good and reliable employee, but don’t necessarily perform at “great” levels, could your job realistically be in jeopardy? Or is more industry-specific? To be clear, it’s not that this person was doing sub-par work; they just maybe weren’t as talented as their manager hoped they would be — or develop into.

It depends on the job, the manager, the organization, and the needs of the team. In the majority of cases, someone who is fine but not great probably isn’t going to get fired. But there are situations where the team really needs someone who’s performing at a higher level. You’re most likely to see this when something has changed (a new manager comes in and realizes “we could be doing a lot better than this,” or the job itself changes and the person who was fine in the old context isn’t well suited for the new one, or the org/team goes through belt-tightening and the impact of one person being OK versus great becomes bigger).

Also, for a lot of jobs, performance is about a lot more than not slacking off and meeting your deadlines. Those are bare minimums, but in a job that requires creativity, innovation, or initiative, they generally won’t be enough to put you in the “good” category (let alone the “great” one). So it depends on the nature and needs of the role too.

People often bristle at that, feeling like by definition most people are average so it’s unfair/unrealistic to expect everyone you employ to be great. And for many jobs, that’s true. But if you think about the difference in having, say, a trainer who does an OK job versus one who does a great job, there are jobs where it’s reasonable for managers to hold a very high bar. (With the example of trainers, I used to hire them and the difference in results and participant satisfaction for OK versus great was enormous. It was good for the organization and its clients that they held a high bar on that … but it did mean that people who couldn’t get beyond the OK level wouldn’t succeed there.) In those cases, though, the employer should be very clear about their expectations, both in hiring and in the metrics used to measure performance, so there’s a shared understanding among everyone involved and it’s not just a gut-level, poorly defined “I know it when I see it.”

Related:
how to tell your team their work isn’t good enough

2. I became my friend’s manager and she’s pushing me for “girls’ weekends”

I am a new supervisor to a team of 10 employees. I have worked at this agency for 7 years and have also worked alongside a coworker who became a good friend of mine during that time. This friend, “Ann,” always had some needy, boundary-less qualities but I put up with them because we rarely worked together closely.

Now that I am her supervisor, she is really pushing boundaries, constantly asking to go out drinking and go away for girls’ weekends and I’m so over it! I have said “no” on so many occasions, explaining my chaos at home and the business of work, that I just can’t. She continues to make sly comments that I’m “no fun anymore” and that I “always come up with excuses” or complaining that I say I will try next time and don’t. I’m over her behavior. How do I address this?

If you are telling her you’ll try next time and then don’t, you’re part of this problem! You need to clearly tell Ann that now that you’re her manager, the relationship needs to change and you’re no longer going to socialize with her outside of work, period.

Sample language: “I’m sorry I didn’t say this more clearly earlier. Now that I’m your manager, our relationship needs to change. We can of course have a friendly relationship at work, but we can’t be friends. I need to be able to evaluate your work objectively, and I don’t want others on the team worrying about favoritism or bias or that you have special access to me. So we do need different boundaries than we had in the past and can’t socialize outside of work. I know that’s an awkward change to make but I’m committed to it, for the sake of the whole team.”

Related:
I’m becoming my friend’s boss — do things have to change?

3. My company wants me to pay them back for paid sick leave they advanced me

I have 10 PTO days earned per year. This is my second year at my job. Last year, I had to take bereavement because I lost someone, and then I was sick repeatedly, and at the end of the school year, I had negative PTO hours, and our finance manager told me it would roll over to this year, and I could earn it back. This year, I was sick again for a whole month, and I reached out to management to ask what to do about my negative PTO. I figured they would ask me to take sick leave unpaid, but they never got back to me.

I felt sick today, went home, and let the finance manager know (our policy when taking PTO), and she just emailed me: “Since your current PTO balance is -71.75, no paid time off is available and any time off will be unpaid. So I will prorate your 5/10 pay to be for 72 hours, instead of 80. [Management] also wants you to pay back the remaining -71.75 hours that were taken as PTO. Of course, we can do some kind of payment plan or deduct from any future checks, just let me know what works best for you. The amount owed is $2,508.23.”

What the heck? I don’t have to pay them back, do I? I’m cool with having present and future time off unpaid. But they can’t retroactively ask me to pay all this money, can they?

They can. They handled this badly — they should have clearly informed you when you were first getting into the red that you’d either need to take the time unpaid or pay it back, not wait until you were 70+ hours in debt to inform you — but legally they can indeed require you to pay them back.

Where it gets interesting is that in most states they can’t just go ahead and deduct it from your paychecks. Most states have restrictions around pay deductions, which can include needing your explicit agreement for the deduction and that the deduction in any given paycheck can’t take your pay below minimum wage for that pay period. That said, even if you don’t agree, they can make repayment a condition of your continued employment, and in some states they can withhold the entire amount from your final check if it’s still due at that point (as well as pursue you in court for anything remaining, although most employers won’t do that). Their ability to do the latter may depend on whether their unearned leave policy was communicated to you before you received the advance, so check your employee handbook or other written policies to see if it’s in there anywhere.

But your best bet is to try to negotiate a repayment arrangement. Tell them it would be a hardship for you to repay the amount they’re requesting and that they should have informed you earlier of that expectation or had you take the time unpaid originally, and ask what can be worked out. It’s possible that if you push back, they’ll back off or come up with a more palatable way to fix this.

4. Responding to a group hug designed to violate your boundaries

This happened years ago, but I still think about it sometimes and wonder what I should have/could have done.

I had only been at this job a couple months, and I was working on something on the same computer with the practice owner. He (a man in his 60s) was leaning in, and I (a woman in her 30s) politely moved over so he could see better. He started joking about me being standoffish and not wanting to be touched. I laughed it off and got back to work. He left the room, and a few minutes later when I left, he got everyone who was working and readily available — probably five or six people — to crowd around me and give me a group hug, since I “didn’t like to be touched.” It was very brief and nobody got handsy. I was in shock and just kind of stood there not reacting until they quit. That was the end of it, nothing else ever happened, and it was never mentioned again.

But what if things had escalated or continued? This guy was the owner, the practice manager was pretty much never there, and there was no HR. I moved on less than a year later; unsurprisingly there were a lot of management issues. But would there have been any other options other than just leaving?

Well, speaking up. That doesn’t always work, but it works a lot! If he had continued, you could have said — in a serious tone, not one you softened to downplay the message or sound nice — “I know you’re joking around, but I’m not. I don’t want people touching or hugging me, so I’m clearly telling you to stop.” In a lot of cases, that would have put an end to it. In other cases, it might not have — but those cases are more rare.

Also, for the record, that guy was a jackass. “I think your boundaries are funny, so let’s deliberately violate them” is gross.

5. Is it worth it to interview if you know the hiring manager already chose someone else?

I applied for an internal job (lateral move with almost identical job duties) and recently got an interview request. I shared my news with a friend (Marcia), who is also friends with the hiring manager (Jan), and Marcia informed me that Jan has already chosen a candidate.

However, because the chosen candidate is an external hire, there is a longer process to officially confirm them. And in our company, hiring managers are required to interview a minimum number of internal candidates. Meaning application statuses in the application system stay in limbo until the chosen candidate is hired.

I’ve already accepted an interview date, but I’m wondering if I should cancel now that I know what I know. In addition, now I feel Jan probably invited me to an interview because we have a mutual friend in Marcia and to fill the internal hiring quota while they wait for their chosen external candidate to get through the HR red tape.

That would be giving an awful lot of power to Marcia and to information you heard secondhand. What if Marcia got it wrong? What if something changed since Jan talked to her? What if the external candidate doesn’t accept the offer?

If you’re interested in the job, go to the interview and approach it the same way you would have if you hadn’t heard this.

If the hiring manager is just going through the motions with you and already plans on hiring someone else, that’s crappy — and it’s contrary to the spirit of rules that require interviewing a minimum number of candidates. Those rules aren’t supposed to mean “check this bureaucratic box” (although they often get used that way); they’re supposed to ensure a range of candidates is actually considered. Too often this kind of rule is used to waste people’s time, and that sucks. But it’s not clear enough that that’s what’s happening here.

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

1. The better I do, the more resentful my boss gets

I’m a manager in a technical field and my boss used to be a huge micromanager. He is one of those senior leaders who is good at delegating tasks, but not at delegating decisions or leadership responsibilities, so he wants every decision, big and small, to go through him. Classic case of a person who worries nobody else can do it making that fear into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Recently the company has been going through a reorganization, which has been distracting him from his normal micromanagement. Because he’s not inserting himself into routine work and making himself a bottleneck as much, my team has been knocking it out of the park — about 20% above our targets on the year, largely attributable to better process efficiency.

The thing that’s confusing me is this: The better my team does, the more moody and resentful he seems to get. If I, as a manager, had a direct report who was firing on all cylinders, I’d be thrilled. Yet, the better my team does, the more sour he looks, the more he makes backhanded comments to me in front of my team, and the more dismissive he gets of my ideas and input. I don’t get it. He’s the sole owner, so it’s not like I can threaten his role.

I’ve been looking for a new role for a while, but for personal reasons I don’t have the freedom to be without an income right now. So in the short term, I need survival strategies to keep myself sane. What’s driving this behavior of his, and what can I do to keep the peace while I continue my job search?

He feels important by feeling essential. You’re threatening his self-image by showing that not only is he not essential, your team actually performs better with him out of the way. A more secure manager would think, “Great! I’ve hired great people and set them up well, and their achievements are a credit to me.” (And even if they couldn’t take any credit, they’d recognize that having a successful team under them was still good for them.) But he’s not a secure manager, so he feels threatened and resentful.

You have two paths. You can decide to ignore his moods and resentment and keep knocking out achievements that you’ll parlay into a better job for yourself. Or you can choose to cater to him a bit: find things to let him weigh in on so he can regain some confidence and feel important again, give him credit even where it’s not deserved, and generally play to his ego a bit so that his ruffled feathers are smoothed. Which you pick should probably depend on how much ability to has to affect your day-to-day quality of life, how petulant he’s being, and which you have the stomach for.

2. Should I contact my husband’s old company about how bad his boss was?

Should I tell the HR person of my husband’s former supervisor’s inappropriate and incompetent managerial skills?

My husband was hired by a company under the old department head. His direct supervisor did not like him for the role, and expressed that to my husband. The department head left, promoting the supervisor to department head. Since then, the training my husband was supposed to receive has been lacking to none, he was written up for asking questions about a new skill he is learning, and he was put on a PIP a month after being told everything was going great. None of the items on the PIP were addressed prior, denying him the opportunity to improve before a PIP. Three weeks after he comes off the PIP, he is fired, without a conversation to improve. Directions given throughout his tenure were incomplete and vague, yet the chief reason for his firing was that he failed to follow instructions. Essentially every instance where the manager was supposed to support and improve, he set my husband up to fail, all while telling my husband to his face that everything was going fine.

The company culture purports to be supportive, open to initiative, and embracing of the skills people bring. It claims to encourage people to think outside the box, use their skills in creative ways, and propose new solutions. For my husband’s role, it also required someone who could work independently. His boss was none of those things in action, and barely in verbal context. Essentially his boss set my husband up to fail by not being clear on expectation or instructions and moving the goal posts with every task. My husband would finish a task, his boss would say good job, and then a week later would pull him aside and tell him how he didn’t do a good job on the task. Not there in the moment, when it would have been appropriate, not the next day – a week. The toll of this repeating over and over caused mental anguish in my husband. He would come home feeling good about himself and proud of his work and then suddenly would come home and say things like “I’m such a loser” because of some interaction with his boss where my husband thought everything was going well, and out of the blue his boss would say something to the opposite. He’s a bad manager, and as a manager myself, this behavior is appalling to me.

You should not contact your husband’s former company on his behalf. It would be incredibly undermining to him, and it wouldn’t carry any weight with the company. They don’t care what someone outside the company who they have no relationship thinks about how they manage people, and any merit to your message would get overlooked because of the weirdness of a spouse weighing in. It would get talked about, but not in a good way.

Your husband had a bad boss. It happens. Your husband sounds like he was really suffering from the experience, and that’s hard to watch as a spouse. But your role is to support him, not fight his professional battles for him. You can help him see who he is and who his boss is, but you can’t seek justice with the company or set the record straight there or tell off his old boss. The impulse to do those things is very human, but you don’t have the standing to do any of them in an effective or credible way, and they’d make the situation worse, not better.

3. My boss gave me thank-you money in secret, but it feels like hush money

I work as an office support member. There were some minor issues with some seasonal employees in my area who didn’t like some changes I made, so they went to one of the bosses who abruptly dismissed the changes and put old ways back in place.

Fast forward to after our busy season. A week ago, my boss called me to his office and thanked me for all my hard work and gave me several hundred dollars — stressing it was from him personally, not our firm, and not to tell anyone else about it, and specifically stating not to tell the other bosses or aforementioned coworkers.

Although I didn’t know the exact amount of money at the time because it was folded up, it felt a little weird. I asked several times why he was doing this, and he assured me it was a thank you.

I have held onto the money for about a week. I’m a single mom and could use it, but it just felt like a strange situation, especially since it was done in secret.

A couple days ago, I just found out that the other bosses knew about the issues previously mentioned and are unhappy with those employees and that particular boss for undermining me. Suddenly it hit me — I think he was giving me a sort of “hush money” to make him feel better and to buy my loyalty. Am I wrong?

Although I could use the money, and he has demonstrated generosity in the community, I feel like this makes me beholden to him and is just not professional. Am I wrong? If not, how do I give it back without creating more issues?

I don’t see any reason to assume it’s hush money, like that he’s paying you to not talk about what happened. Using money to make you feel better, yes, but not hush money. It sounds like he felt guilty about what happened and wants to smooth it over, so is handing you some cash from his own funds and hoping it functions as an apology/morale-boost. A smoother boss might have taken you to lunch or bought you flowers. Cash makes it weirder, but it doesn’t mean it’s hush money. I read it as “I F’d up” money.

To be clear, if it will feel like hush money to you, you shouldn’t take it. If you’ll feel obligated not to raise issues you’d otherwise want to raise or to downplay what happened, you shouldn’t accept the money. And if you’d just feel better returning it, do! You could say, “I appreciate the thought, but I don’t feel right taking it, especially if it’s something others aren’t supposed to know about.” But I think you’d be fine keeping it if you want to and if you can see it purely as appreciation and nothing else and if it won’t make you hesitant to speak freely.

4. Should a 25-minute interview trump a year of great performance?

I’m a reading teacher. My job was a one-year position that became permanent, which is why I had to interview for my current job. I received “stellar” reviews in all four observations and throughout the year. I voluntarily attended meetings to learn, grow, and become part of a new school community. I went over and above because that’s my nature and they noticed this.

Admin urged me to apply, saying the job was 90% mine. I prepared for the interview and I didn’t rest on my laurels. The interview didn’t go well. I was very nervous despite how prepared I was.

They said that the interview didn’t go well and that was the sole reason they didn’t pick me. They choose another candidate who has never done the job. I am not overqualified for the job. Can a 25-minute not-so-great interview really trump 150 days of a “stellar” performance?

It depends on specifically what happened in the interview and what made it so bad. If you were just nervous and stumbled through a few answers, no, that shouldn’t trump what they’ve seen of you on the job. On the other hand, if you couldn’t answer key questions or answered crucial things badly — not just fumbling a little, but truly badly … well, maybe. I’d still hope they’d compare that to what they’ve seen of you actually doing the job and allow for nerves, and maybe even suggest a redo, but I can also imagine interviews going badly enough that they could end up being prohibitive.

It’s also possible that they were bound by internal hiring policies. For example, if they score candidates on a rubric and commit to hiring the best scorer, the interview could definitely do you in, regardless of what your actual work on the job has been like. (And if they do use a scoring rubric like that, they might not be able to offer a redo on grounds of fairness to other candidates.)