“hiring a candidate with controversial political views, my boss doesn’t like it when women curse, and more” plus 3 more Ask a Manager

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hiring a candidate with controversial political views, my boss doesn’t like it when women curse, and more

Posted: 13 Jun 2018 09:03 PM PDT

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

1. Should we consider a candidate's hot-button political views in hiring?

We recently interviewed a candidate who previously held a position at an organization involved a hot-button issue. This candidate is also very involved in the issue through social media, even having created a public persona that attends shows and posts in support of their stance on the issue. The candidate was purely professional during their interview and didn't bring up their stance on the issue. They only spoke about the work they did at the organization. That said, it was fairly simple to deduce which side they were on.

How much of this, if any of it, should be taken into consideration? This candidate's point of view is not a popular one with some of the folks involved in hiring for this position, and they've made that clear. But I don't think their bias should play into our decision when we're talking about finding the best person for the job based on skills and culture fit. We are not a political or media organization. If we were, I do think this would matter more. And I expect that any professional will leave their strongly held political beliefs at home. What say you? Should personal politics be taken into consideration during the hiring process? Or does this fall under the category of biases to recognize and avoid?

It depends — does the public speech involve hatred or bigotry? If so, I think that's fair game. We've decided as a society (rightly, I'd argue) to treat bigotry and hate speech as different from other political discourse. And if this candidate is out there advocating against the rights and safety of groups that may include some of your own employees, that's additional reason to decide not to welcome that into your workplace.

But if the issue is something like, say, charter schools or environmentalism, that's a different thing, and you might point out to your colleagues that diversity of perspectives is a good thing on your staff (as long as people are not evangelizing at work and annoying their coworkers) — but also that you're hiring people to do a job, not to go on political marches together.

2. My boss doesn't like when women curse

I work in a professional office setting. My manger curses very frequently and often says inappropriate things. The men on the team are not as vulgar as my manager, but do frequently curse. We don’t work with external clients so this is not an issue, although my boss does cross the line with his cursing.

I am one of the few women on my team, and each of the few times that I have cursed, by boss has told me not to curse and to watch my mouth. (The extent of my cursing is saying “oh shit”). He did the same to a female colleague. Not a single comment like this has been made to the men. I find this obnoxious and demeaning. How would you address this?

Wow, yes, that's obnoxious and sexist. Some options:

"I'm going to assume you're joking, given the level of profanity from the men on our team."

Or, "You know the men on this team curse prolifically, right, yourself included? Surely we don't have have gender-based rules for cursing."

Or, "I'm going to ignore that since reprimanding women for cursing while men here curse prolifically is not a great look."

Or, "Are you serious or joking?" … followed by, if he says he's serious, "I'm baffled — the men on this team curse regularly.”

Or, if you want a different approach entirely, sit down with him at some point and say this: "Hey, can I ask you about something? The few times I've cursed — and it's been quite mild! — you've told me not to. But i've heard you and other men on our team curse frequently. The only thing I can conclude is that it's because I'm a woman. Am I misunderstanding?" In some ways, that's a more confrontational approach than the others, but which of these to use depends on what your relationship with your manager is like.

3. Responding to questions about an employee who's on maternity leave

I currently have a team member who is out on maternity leave. Other members of the team and I have taken over for her ongoing work, which includes a lot of correspondence with individuals outside our organization (i.e., clients and vendors). My question is how to respond when some of these people ask questions such as “How is Mary doing?” or “Did Mary have the baby yet?” or “When is Mary returning?” I am sure these questions are coming from a good place of genuine concern, but I don’t want to respond with any private information about my employee and we do not yet have a specific return date. Even when I respond with “Mary is still out on leave,” I sometimes get follow up with more specific questions about how she is doing. How to you recommend responding to these sorts of inquiries?

People almost certainly aren't expecting details ("her episiotomy stitches are giving her a lot of trouble!"); they're generally just looking to hear she's doing well.

So be positive but vague — "Last I heard, she's doing well." You could add, "We're trying not to bother her on leave, but we're looking forward to seeing the baby at some point!"

4. What should I do with an employee's abandoned personal belongings?

An employee stopped showing up to his job in mid-April and I haven't heard from him since. A couple people have seen him around town, but haven't been able to talk to him (they were driving). I've tried calling his cell phone and have left voicemails each time, but still haven't heard back. I called his emergency contact and they haven't heard from him either. I even went over to the address I have on file for him but he doesn't live there anymore and has no forwarding address. I have a small box of his personal belongings and am wondering how long I should keep it. It's nothing extravagant, just a pair of shoes, a couple hats, a can of soup and some other miscellaneous things.

You've tried to reach him multiple times (excessively, I'd argue, once you showed up at his house) and he hasn't responded. At this point, you're on solid ground in disposing of the belongings if you want to. There's nothing wrong with leaving him a message saying "If I haven't heard from you by (date), we'll dispose of the belongings you left here" … but at this point, I think you've put as much energy into as you're obligated to.

5. Can I get out of writing a coworker a recommendation?

Recently, I was asked by a coworker to write him a recommendation on a popular business networking platform, as it is likely that he will be leaving the company in the near future. I said I would, as I like this guy as a person and want him to succeed in his next venture. However, he is incredibly hard to work with for a variety of reasons, and I'm having trouble coming up with specific positive things to say about him as a coworker and team member. Is there a good way to get out of doing this? Should I use it as an opportunity to be frank with him about what he might want to improve on? Or are there areas I can focus on that will be general enough so that I can actually write the recommendation for him?

If he's incredibly hard to work with, I wouldn’t write him a recommendation, particularly one for a networking platform that will make it public — because that's going to reflect on you too, to some extent. You might be able to get away with just not mentioning it again (people often ask a bunch of people to write them LinkedIn recommendations all at once and don't always follow up with people who don't), but if it does come up again, maybe you could say this: "I gave this some thought, and I don't think we had enough strong work experiences together for me to be able to write a recommendation." (That's intentionally vague about whether you're saying you didn't work together enough, or whether it didn't go well when you did.)

But if you want to be more direct (which you may or may not want to do, depending on what kind of rapport you have with him and how well he takes feedback), you could say: "I gave this some thought, and I don't think I'm well positioned to write one. We've always gotten along on a personal level, but to be honest, I found it pretty tough to work with you at times because of X and Y. I want nothing but good things for you at your next job, but I wouldn't be a great person to write a recommendation."

I'm about seven years into my professional career and have intense anxiety daily about my performance. I was always a high performer and have been promoted many times. About two years ago, I left my previous position for a new position that was more money and allowed me to get back into a particular industry. Shortly before I started the job, I lost 160 pounds and found a new confidence I never had before. However, shortly after I started the job, things in my life took a bad turn … I had four deaths in my family, including two people who I was very close with, and my long-term relationship with my live-in SO ended. Because of splitting up our things and having to pay for the apartment myself, I also began to have significant financial issues too. The stress of all the change, especially the negative things, aggravated my already existing mental health issues, after having been relatively stable for about six years.

I'm not trying to make excuses, just trying to explain the "perfect storm" that developed that caused me to act on some of the impulsiveness that is common in those with my mental health issues. To add to all of the personal things going on, my new job had a culture that was extremely different than my previous workplace. For once, I wasn't the youngest person — almost everyone working there was in their early 20s to mid 30s, many were "young professional" types who were unmarried and had no children. The culture ended up being one that centered around a lot of joking around, close friendships outside of work, happy hours and other alcohol fueled events, and romantic relationships. I was newly single and newly thin and confident — the environment was awesome! I was making friends, going out, having a great time!

However, as the negative things in my life started happening, I got deeper and deeper into the drinking with work friends and things quickly became unprofessional (not just for me, but for the sake of this post I'm going to focus on my behavior). I don't want to be graphic but I think it's important to give you an idea of exactly how inappropriate things became, because it's necessary context. Some highlights include: giving one of the managers oral sex in the parking lot, getting black-out drunk in front of the director at a happy hour, attending my boss's family functions, having a tumultuous and abusive five-month relationship with a different manager, making out with one of the facilities guys in a conference room at work, doing shots with my boss's husband, sleeping with a supervisor that my best friend at work also slept with and ruining that friendship forever, getting hammered on lunch with a supervisor and returning to work drunk, heavy petting with a senior manager at a work function in front of multiple coworkers, smoking weed with coworkers and giving oral sex to another manager, who is now my current boyfriend, in my office. I became known amongst the management team as the happy hour go-to and a partier and people were constantly asking me to go out drinking with them. For additional context, I work in human resources so this kind of behavior is especially egregious.

It got to the point that I was drinking heavily 4-5 nights a week and I could no longer maintain my responsibilities. I started coming in late and skipping work frequently and became very depressed about my situation and especially guilty about my actions. Eventually, through therapy and substance abuse treatment, I was able to begin to piece things back together. It quickly became clear that I needed to get out of that work environment, both for my mental health and the sake of my career. So, I started a new job about six months ago. My behavior at my previous employer wasn't known by those giving a reference so I didn't have any difficultly landing a new job, even one that ended up being a promotion with more responsibility and a significant pay bump.

I've come far in my treatment but it’s a process. Since I've started this job, I haven't done anything even remotely unprofessional. In fact, I probably come off a little cold sometimes because I'm so afraid of even making friends here at all. The worst part though is that I went from a high performer who was confident in her abilities to an average performer with crippling anxiety. Every day I wake up thinking about the horrible things I did and how I don't deserve this job. I am so deeply ashamed of myself and feel guilty daily. I feel like I so thoroughly messed up at my last employer that I didn't earn this. I've lost all confidence in my judgment and my abilities and I second-guess every single thing I do. I'm constantly worried I've made a mistake, even on mundane things. It's similar to the feelings I've seen others describe about imposter syndrome except … maybe I really am an imposter? What kind of HR professional does the things I did? I'm considering backing out of this field all together and trying something new because I feel like I don't deserve to do this anymore. Am I off-base or is there any coming back from this?

It sounds like you have come back from this.

Everywhere except your own mind, at least. (And to be fair, probably in the minds of people from your old job — although it's likely that no individual person there knows the full list you presented here.)

And for what it's worth, you must have done a good enough job there to land yourself the position you have now. I'm not saying that your extracurricular behavior there doesn't matter. It does matter — but clearly you have enough strengths that didn't have any trouble landing a great new job. That says something.

Everyone has a past. Some people's pasts are weirder/more troubling/more embarrassing/harder to explain than others. We still all have them, and I suspect you'd be surprised by the weird/embarrassing stuff that people you really respect have in their pasts.

Luckily, we all have presents too, and our current-day selves have control over those.

It sounds like you're dealing with an enormous amount of shame. Shame can be useful when it causes us to reassess our behavior and resolve to change it. But shame isn't useful when it just hangs around making us feel horrible. It sounds like you have resolved to change your behavior — and have done that successfully — but you're still mired in the shame and it's paralyzing you.

If you accept that mental illnesses are diseases like any other, and I hope you do, then maybe it would help to put this in different terms. Imagine you know someone with a physical ailment that exhausted her and destroyed her focus at work, and while she fought the disease she ended up performing horribly for a year. And then she recovered, got the disease under control, started a new job, and went back to performing at her normal high level. Would you think, "She performed so badly while she was sick that she doesn't deserve her new job and she should change fields because she can never be trusted again"? Or would you think, "She had an awful year, I'm so glad she's recovered and is back to herself and back to being great at what she does"?

I know that when we're talking about life choices, it can feel like the analogy doesn't quite hold up, and that losing focus at work is different from oral sex in the parking lot. And sure, they're different. But that difference is where so much of the shame and stigma around mental health comes from, and it's cruel and damaging to people — as it's currently being cruel and damaging to you.

You were sick. It affected the way you acted. You got it under control, and you're working with a professional to keep it that way. You're doing all the right things here (although if you haven’t yet apologized to anyone at your last job who deserves it, that might be worth doing too). You're allowed to forgive yourself and move forward. I hope you will.

Rapitful Shqip

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