“director is asking about my struggling coworker, an ethical dilemma, and more” plus 3 more Ask a Manager

director is asking about my struggling coworker, an ethical dilemma, and more
is my husband’s chronic unhappiness at work really about him, not his jobs?
I’m so burned out at work
I manage an easily distracted manager, and it’s frustrating her employees

director is asking about my struggling coworker, an ethical dilemma, and more

Posted: 08 Aug 2018 09:03 PM PDT

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

1. My director is asking me about my struggling coworker

The director of my department recently asked me whether I’ve noted anything about the behavior of a coworker who sits across from me. I’m a recent manager, but I don’t manage this person. She’s someone I consider a friend, but we don’t hang out outside of work or anything. The director asked if I’d noticed that this person is often absent, coming in late and leaving early. I had noticed that, but had assumed that they had permission from their boss (who is currently away on maternity leave, hence the director stepping in), which wouldn’t be that weird because we’re a pretty flexible workplace. I confirmed her absences, and the director told me that this person not only does not have permission, but was told weeks ago that she’s on notice because she’s simply not putting enough hours in (i.e., not making it up during nights or weekends, which I had previously assumed).

The director asked me if I knew anything about this employee’s personal situation that would help them understand all these continued absences. Here’s the thing, I maybe do, but I feel weird about sharing it. I believe she’s struggling with mental illness. She confided in me a few months ago, and I was able to draw her out to talk to me because I also struggle with anxiety and depression, and I could understand what she’s going through. She hasn’t talked with me about it since, so I don’t know exactly where she’s at now.

Also … she’s crying at her desk. She’s being discreet about it, but it’s amazing how distinctive cry-breathing is. This has been happening at least once a week for the last month. The one time I walked over to ask if she was okay, she waved me off. Other people might suspect, but I’m the only person with a direct line of sight into her cubicle.

Do I have an obligation to share either of these pieces of information with the director? I feel like I probably don’t want to say “I think she’s suffering from anxiety and depression,” not least because I don’t want to contribute to stigma about mental illness, but I’m on the fence about telling them about the crying. My instinct is to protect her, but if the director finds out about the crying I don’t know how I’d explain why I didn’t report it. Should keep out of this situation? Or, as a manager, should I be helping the director by passing on all my information?

It sounds like the director might asking you because there's potentially information that could help your coworker, by giving the director some mitigating context. (Or not. I can't be sure, but it sounds like that's how they framed it.) That said, I agree that it's not your place to share her mental health info. The crying is more of a grey area, but of course you should still be respectful of her privacy. I think you can walk that line by saying something like, "I do have the sense she's going through something difficult and might be having a tough time outside of work, but I can't say for sure. It could make sense to ask her if she's doing okay." That flags that yes, indeed there might be something difficult going on, but it doesn't violate her privacy, and nudges the director to ask your coworker directly, which is what they should be doing anyway.

2. I asked my employee to nominate me for an award

Moral dilemma. I was recently nominated as a finalist for a pretty important industry award. To get nominated, I needed 3 nominators, not including myself. For some reason, I asked one of my direct reports if he would consider nominating me. He did willingly and said I deserved it.

However, now I'm feeling really guilty about the whole thing. I have a decent chance to win the award, but having asked my direct report may have created a conflict of interest. Was he really going to say no to his boss?

Anyway, I'm thinking about removing myself from consideration. Am I overthinking it or is this a real ethical dilemma?

I don't think you need to remove yourself from consideration, but I do think you're right that you put him in a position where it would have been really difficult for him to say no. That said, there are plenty of people who genuinely think their boss is great and would be delighted to have the chance to write this kind of nomination. If you know for sure that you have that kind of relationship with him, this isn't terrible. (But it can also be hard to know for sure. I'm certain there are bosses out there who think this is the case for them when it's not.)

Anyway, is it too late to get a fourth nominator? If not, that might be a good way to handle it. And either way, it wouldn't hurt to go back to him and say, "Hey, I realized after I asked you that that it put you in a potentially awkward position, given the power dynamic in our relationship. I'm sorry about that, and I'll be more cognizant of that in the future." Either way he'll probably tell you it's fine, because that's what most people would say to their boss in that situation. And he may really mean it! But if he did feel a little weird about the request, he'll probably really appreciate hearing this.

3. How much risk is there in complaining to HR about a no-show interviewer?

I just got stood up today on a phone interview and will see if I hear from the recruiter who scheduled it. If I hear nothing, I would like to write to the HR director to thank them for being contacted as a candidate but to professionally point out that they tarnish their brand when candidates have an experience like this. What risk am I taking, aside from with this one company?

It's not a very big risk, beyond this one company. With this company, there's a risk that they'll write you off as a complainer (although if your message is polite, a healthy company won't dismiss it that way and may even appreciate hearing from you). But it's very unlikely to have ramifications beyond that. It's possible that you could run into the person you write to or the recruiter herself when applying to a different company — since people change jobs — and that they could remember you, but the risk is pretty small that that'll happen and they'd be holding a polite letter against you.

4. Can I ask to shadow someone doing the work I'd like to do?

I'm currently an ESL (English as a second language) teacher who wants to make a career change to a data analyst position. I've applied to dozens of data analyst roles, but I was only able to score one interview (which was unsuccessful). Due to my lack of experience in this industry, I've been self educating myself and was able to get some analytics certifications, and I'm taking a couple of other online classes to beef up my resume.

I've been thinking of contacting some major companies and asking if it would be possible to shadow someone on their analytics team. What is the right way of doing this and would it seem strange that I'm a grown adult looking for a shadowing opportunity and not a kid out of college?

I wouldn't ask them to let you shadow someone. That's a really big request and they're not likely to grant it outside of a formal program for students or something like that (plus there would often be confidentiality concerns). It's also not likely to be especially helpful, since you'd be watching someone work at a computer most of the day.

I also don't think it's likely to significant strengthen you as a candidate. I'm wondering if you're seeing this as a sort of back-door networking opportunity or if there's something different you're hoping to get out of it. If you're seeing it as a way to build relationships with people in the field you want to go into, I'd rely on more traditional networking instead, and possibly informational interviews. But I suspect the issue you're running into is that you're making a major change in your field, and it's one where hiring managers aren't going to immediately see a lot of transferable skills unless you really spell them out for them — which will be a challenge but not necessarily an insurmountable one.

5. Company rounds down our time in order to pay us less

You always talk about how hourly, non-exempt positions must be paid for any time they spend working. How does that work when a company rounds their time? I’ve worked for three different companies that do this and they’ve all done it a little differently, but here is how my current company handles it. If I punch in at 8 am, that’s when I start getting paid. If I punch in at 8:01 am, they round my punch in to 8:15, which gives me 14 minutes of off-the-clock work. The opposite happens at the end of the day. If I punch out at 5:15, I’m paid through 5:15. If I punch out at 5:14, I’m only paid through 5:00.

The way they're doing it isn't legal. Companies are allowed to round to the nearest quarter hour, but they can't always round down so that it comes out to their advantage. The rounding has to even out (or to be to the employee's benefit) to be legal.

You could show your employer this factsheet from the Department of Labor, which spells out that what they're doing is illegal.

Of those, the longest he held the same one was for three years. It required overnight travel two nights a week, every week. I could see the windshield time was wearing on him, as well as the drama that can come from small, family-owned companies (my husband wasn't related to any of his coworkers; however, it became evident that those who were in the family were definitely treated at an advantage over every one else). Everything came to a head after they wanted him to move to a new city. He chose to leave that job rather than move, and that's when our whirlwind really began.

The next two jobs he held were disasters. Poor planning and minimal due diligence on my husband's part left him unfulfilled, frustrated, and more or less in the same position he was in with the first job: bad bosses, little guidance, terrible sales territories, and constant travel. The first job he left after five months, and with such a short tenure he was told not to even put it on his resume or use them as a reference. The next job: eight months, but it paid so little and was jumped into so blindly due a desperate situation that it quickly soured. The next job lasted a little over a year. But his boss was incredibly verbally abusive, and my husband started dreading work: he couldn't sleep, was withdrawn. As much as I needed him to keep his job, no job is worth your health. He was fired in early March, and it was terrifying; my employment alone could not keep us afloat.

Luckily, he found his new, and current, job, after only three weeks. And now, after five months, a familiar pattern is starting to emerge: burn-out, a terrible boss, and anxiety on my end.

Here's where my question really starts: how can I be supportive when I'm starting to suspect the problem isn't the jobs, but my husband? Sometimes I want to grab hold of him and say, "Get ahold of yourself! Suck it up! You will never get anywhere if you keep leaving jobs and/or are let go." I let irrational thoughts creep into my head: "My life will never be stable, we'll never be able to start a family," etc.

For additional info that might play into your answer, I've been at my current job for six years. While the work can sometimes be tedious, I truly love my coworkers, the culture, everything. They are my second family. I plan on staying here until I retire!

Meanwhile, I feel like I'm having to be a constant cheerleader to my husband, telling him to please stick it out, do good work, prove that asshole boss wrong! What, if anything, can I do to help my husband see his potential and do good work, and not fear him getting the boot every day? Or, conversely, tell him to look within himself, recognize his own behavior might be leading to incredible job dissatisfaction, and do so without being a horrific person? I feel like I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop. My husband is such a natural born salesman; he's never met a stranger, can make connections so effortlessly. I just don't know where to go from here.

There are three possibilities here:

1. For some reason, your husband can't stay in jobs long-term. He has unrealistic expectations and so gets demoralized and burned out by things a reasonable person would be able to roll with. Maybe he sees mildly bad management as terrible management, or maybe he needs a really specific type of management to thrive, who knows. (But he did have that earlier job for three years, which is a respectable tenure.)

2. He picks bad jobs. He's so desperate to get out of a bad situation that he leaps too quickly, without screening employers rigorously enough, thus ending up in new situations that are equally bad or worse, and then he keeps repeating the cycle.

3. He's had really terrible luck.

It's possible that it's #3 … except that if this was all just bad luck, then I'd expect him to have noted at some point during this cycle that his job history was getting choppy enough that he was going to need to commit to staying somewhere for a solid chunk of time unless something was truly unbearable. (I'd put that abusive boss in the "unbearable" category, assuming he truly was abusive.) If your husband hasn't been saying things like that — if he doesn't seem to recognize that his job history is becoming pretty problematic and that he's going to need to just tough it out somewhere to give himself a work history that will make it easier to get a good job in the future — then I suspect #2 is the more likely explanation.

I'm also inclined to think it's #2 because there's a lot of "he felt desperate and needed to get out quickly" in your account of his history, and that's when people are most likely to take the first thing they find without much vetting. Which is understandable — but you can't do that more than once or twice or you will mess up your work history.

Have you two talked about why this keeps happening, and what he needs to do about it now? Does he agree that this pattern is going to make it harder and harder for him to find good jobs, especially if it continues? Does he recognize that he's keeping himself caught in a cycle of taking an unvetted job, becoming miserable, and then taking another unvetted job because he urgently needs to get out, and then repeating the whole thing all over again? Does he think that's a problem? Is he willing to consider whether his standards for bosses and jobs are realistic?

And what are his thoughts about what to do from here? Does he feel like he needs to get some two-years-or-longer stays on his resume, and if so, can he see committing to stay someone for a few years even if he doesn't love it? Or does he not think it matters? And is it possible that he's in a field where it truly doesn't matter? (There are some of those, although they're rare.)

If you haven't had that conversation with him, that's where I'd start. I'd frame it as "I know you're really unhappy at work, and it's got to be especially upsetting since this keeps happening. Can we talk big-picture about what might be going on? I hate seeing you so unhappy and I wonder if there's a different way to look at all this that might help.”

It's also okay to talk about the impact on you — about the instability it brings to your lives together and your hesitance to start a family in the middle of this. You want to be careful not to sound like you're kicking him when he's down, of course — but these are things you're allowed to talk about, as long as you do it sensitively.

Speaking of which — in doing this, keep in mind that you're in a very unusual and lucky position with how happy you are with your own job. I can imagine your husband feeling like you won the job lottery and can't necessarily understand how hard things have been for him. That doesn't mean you can't talk to him about what's going on, but make sure you’re sensitive to the difference in your situations.

I’ve been getting complaints about her from employees both inside and outside of the department. They all say the same thing, that she loses focus, gets easily distracted, and goes off on tangents during work-related conversations. The employees from her own department are frustrated about it because it is affecting them getting work done. They tell me they will be in a reciprocal conversation about something related to work when she will suddenly change the subject with no warning to stories about her family or high school friend group, something that happened at a past job, or a random musing. It also happens when she is directing her employees to do a task or when she comes to them with a work issue. Entire meetings have also been derailed and made pointless because of how she loses focus, and it’s impossible to get things back on track once she starts. She frequently gets lost in her own thoughts.

Her employees have all been here for years. There are no slacking or work-avoiding problems, and they all work hard. They say they are getting exasperated because her subject changes are random and unrelated to whatever the conversation at hand is about.

Employees from outside the department have come to me telling me she does this when they ask her a question about the department or a work-related item.

How do I address this with her? I don’t think she realizes she is doing it, but the complaints make it obvious it happens during almost every conversation. I don’t want to seem like I’m going after her personally because she is nice person (everyone says they were hesitant to complain about her because of how much they like her). This needs to stop though or I’m afraid employees will quit or leave the department.

First, good for you for taking this seriously and being willing to take this on. I've gotten sooo many letters from her employees' side of things, and it really sucks to have a boss who can't focus and keeps derailing work conversations and meetings.

She's been there four months, and that's a good time to check in on how things are going overall (although you could have this conversation at any time; I don't mean to imply you have to wait for any kind of formal interim review). I'd sit down with her and talk about how things are going on all kinds of fronts — where is she doing well, where should she focus on developing, etc.

Then, as part of that conversation, say something like this: "I've heard a lot of feedback about how much people like you personally, which is really great to hear. I'm also hearing, though, that people feel you often get distracted from the main topic during work conversations and meeting — that you'll often change the subject to tell a personal story or otherwise take a work conversation off-topic. We all do that occasionally, of course — we're human and I don't want you to be a robot. But it sounds like it's happening so frequently that people feel like focus is being lost and it's hard to get things back on track. Is that feedback you've ever heard before?"

A caveat here: I don't generally love the "I'm hearing X" approach, because it can make people feel paranoid about who's complaining about them behind their back, and sometimes they'll wonder how you can be confident the complaint is even valid. But when you're managing managers, you're sometimes going to need to talk about feedback that's bubbling up from the person's team. (It can help to frame it as "my goal here is to understand the experience on everyone on the team and help you be a stronger manager.") That said, if it's possible for you to observe this happening firsthand and then give the feedback based on your own observations ("I've noticed…"), that can be a better way to go.

Anyway, it's possible that she'll tell you that yes, she's heard similar feedback before or that she knows it's a trait she has. Or she might be surprised to hear it, who knows. In either case, you can say something like, "This is a team that's really hard-working and gets frustrated if conversations feel like they're getting derailed. To succeed in this role, it's a habit you'll really have to rein in so that people feel like conversations that start off about mostly stay focused on the topic at hand. Can you work on doing that?”

That's step one. From there, give it some time (like a week or two, not months — you want to figure out pretty quickly if this is going to be solvable or not) and see what happens. Check in with some of the people who work most closely with her and who have talked to you about this already, and ask if they're noticing a change. And find ways to observe her yourself as much as you can — consider sitting in on a few meetings or otherwise finding ways to see her in action (which is always a good idea with a manager you're managing, and you can frame it as part of your normal practice, which it should be anyway).

If you see change and hear about change, great. If it continues to be a problem, at that point you'd need to treat it like any other performance problem since it's getting in the way of her managing her team effectively — meaning that you'd continue to coach her on it, while escalating the seriousness of those discussions, and have in the back of your head the possibility that she might not be the person to lead this team if direct conversations and coaching don’t resolve it.

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