Ask a Manager

It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go… 1. My office keeps asking about my baby plans I am a recently married woman who even more recently learned I may not be able to have children. Some seemingly unrelated health stuff led to this discovery and we’re pretty much trying something for now and […]

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. My boss stranded me without a hotel room I started a new job in April. This past week I was sent to training in the U.S. (I’m Canadian and work in Canada). My finances are very tight right now and couldn’t afford to pay for […]

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. I manage a difficult volunteer who’s also a friend I work for a nonprofit organization. I manage a team of five, all volunteers and all at varying degrees of experience when it comes to professional communication, time management, and problem solving. One volunteer in particular […]

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. Rowdy role-playing interview in public A few years ago, I interviewed for a lower-level management position with an education-based nonprofit. The meeting took place in a crowded Panera. During the interview, my interviewers pretended to be rowdy children, and I was supposed to “manage” them. […]

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. One of our bosses got invited to our rowdy beach weekend I am good friends with three of my coworkers, let’s call them Billy, Goat, and Gruff. The four of us are distributed across three different teams, but we work together a lot on various […]

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. My boss wants me to hang up on elderly callers who can’t hear me I work for a small not-for-profit organization which deals with a variety of clients, including the elderly, low-income, and disabled. We’re also located in an area with notoriously bad cell service. […]

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. My employee cries when she’s frustrated I have an employee who’s response when frustrated by a problem is to cry. It started to happen last summer when we were working through her visa renewal process. It was extremely stressful for her and she was worried […]

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. My dad says I should offer to work for free to prove myself I was wondering about a piece of interview advice my father and I recently disagreed about (for context, I am a college student who most recently interviewed for internships, and my dad […]

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. How do I get out of a mandatory lip sync battle? My employer is having a mandatory spirit week with a summer camp theme next week. Each day we are to participate in “voluntary” camp activities with our assigned “cabin mates” for the week. The […]