“when going to a nude sauna with coworkers, what do I do about nipple piercings? … and other questions” plus 3 more Ask a Manager

“when going to a nude sauna with coworkers, what do I do about nipple piercings? … and other questions” plus 3 more Ask a Manager

when going to a nude sauna with coworkers, what do I do about nipple piercings? … and other questions
should I leave my awful job with great pay and great benefits?
how do I get over losing out on a promotion?
my husband’s boss/our friend is sleeping with their married department head

when going to a nude sauna with coworkers, what do I do about nipple piercings? … and other questions

Posted: 25 Sep 2018 09:03 PM PDT

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

1. When going to a nude sauna with coworkers, what do I do about nipple piercings?

I’m an American living in Europe, in a country where nude baths, nude saunas, etc. are normal. So normal, in fact, that my company has a yearly trip to one.

On principle, I have no problem with this, but I have nipple piercings, and I’m worried that they’ll be noticed/commented on. Normally I love getting compliments about them, but I don’t want my coworkers to know about this very private body modification. I try to maintain a gentle, low-key work persona, and I keep my work and personal life very separate. I’m worried that that would be negated by people knowing about this.

It’s entirely possible that no one will even notice them, or say anything, but the work culture is relatively conservative, and I don’t want to shock people. I just want to enjoy the sauna. Any advice for getting through this, or how to respond to comments if I do get them, would be highly appreciated.

If you don't want people to know about the piercings at all, you'd need to either remove them ahead of time (which might be impractical if they close up as quickly as people say they do) or skip the nude sauna. But if you just don't want to talk about them … well, personally I'd respond to any comments with "Hey, I'm American, and thus I need to maintain a fiction that no one can see me right now." Adapt to fit your personality.

But I suspect you'll find that in a culture where public nudity is no big deal, people will have seen nipple piercings before and won't be as shocked as you fear they will be.

2. Interviewer wanted to tie their offer to my current salary

I had a phone interview today where I’m not sure if I did the right thing. Before the call, I had done some research on the company and the job, and had an idea of what they normally pay for the position they’re hiring for. Based on this, and where I’m at in my career, I had a general salary range I was prepared to negotiate whenever it was brought up in the interview process.

However, during the phone screen, the hiring manager asked what I’m making at my current position and I told her what I make. From there, she said “Okay, so then I’ll mark down that it would be your current salary + $3,000 to hire you on.” I was unprepared for this and didn’t dispute it, and the interview went on normally.

The problem is that I understand that I am underpaid for my positon, and it is one of the reasons why I am job hunting. Should I have lied to the hiring manager about my current salary to be more in line with what I feel is realistic? Or is there a good way to mention further down the in the interviewing process that I would need a bit more salary for this to be a viable option?

Don't lie about your salary. Some companies, especially companies that base salary offers on your current salary, will do a salary verification later in the process, and if it comes out that you lied, they'll pull your offer.

Ideally you would you said in the moment, "Actually, being underpaid at my current position is one of the main reasons I'm looking for a new role, and I'm seeking a salary in the range of $X-Y, which seems to be more in line with the market rate." (Of course, to do that, you need to do enough research beforehand that you can get those numbers right.)

It's not too late now to email the hiring manager and say, "You brought up salary and I should have noted in the moment that I'm seeking a salary in the range of $X-Y. My current salary is below-market, and it's one of the reasons I'm looking to move on, so I wouldn't want to base a new salary on it."

Also, this practice sucks and is increasingly on the way out.

3. I'm asked to lead workshops that feel like lip service

I work for a decent company that runs a survey twice a year to take the pulse of the workforce. HR will then group like comments and the large problems sift to the top. More than once, I have been asked to facilitate one of these workshops to drill down and get more meaningful data — affinity diagrams, SWOT analysis, and the like. All of this seems like the right move, and during the workshops people are energized and hopeful. It always goes well.

Then the next survey comes up and the same issues float to the surface, which is not that surprising. More training, better communication, etc. Again I am asked to help, mostly because I work in a different department and I am perceived as “neutral” and "safe.”

Here’s the rub. When I look at the notes and recommendations from the last workshop I realize that nobody took the baton and did anything with the root cause. No wonder it’s still an issue! It is only my role to be a non-biased facilitator to gather data and help the group develop a few focus areas where gaps are. The group recommends something to the department lead, and I go back to my actual job where I have zero visibility on this other business function.

Even though the group is comprised of different folks each time, I still feel like it will not take long before these workshops are perceived as lip service and that the company doesn’t really care. I do not want to be the poster child for a corporate facade. I also want my efforts to be valuable and meaningful.

I would like to politely decline to help going forward and explain that I have noticed that there is no follow-up and maybe they should just work on the recommendations from the last workshop. Should I simply decline? I could do this with zero repercussions. Should I decline with the “no follow-up” reason stated above? Recognize that even if nothing is happening, it’s still team building and people feel like they are being heard? Basically just keep doing it and hope for the best? Try to reach the group that has the ability to make change and strongly recommend they act on these recommendations… again? On one hand, I care about the company and I want what is best for all. On the other hand, it’s not my circus and they are not my monkeys!

I definitely wouldn't decide it's still useful team-building and people feel like they're being heard — because people have probably already figured out that they're not being heard, and that's the opposite of team-building. And you risk your own credibility getting tied up in that if you continue to facilitate the sessions.

I think your best bet is to say, "I'm concerned that the sessions are starting to be seen as less credible and as only lip service, with no real change resulting from them. Given that, I'm going to pass this year — but my suggestion if you want them to be effective is to figure out what to do with the recommendations that come out of them. I think people will be much more invested, and we risk less demoralization, if we show people we're really acting on those."

However, if you'd be saying this to someone who reacts poorly to dissent and who has influence over your work, there's no incentive for you to take that risk. In that case, since you say you can decline with no explanation and no repercussions, that might be your better option.

4. Company wants me to take a course that I'd need to reimburse them for if I leave

I’m a project manager at a smallish company. Without excessive detail, it’s a very dysfunctional workplace and I’m planning my exit for my own sanity. However, my manager really really likes me, and wants to send me on a very expensive training course … a condition of which is that I have to repay the company for the cost of the course if I leave within 12 months of completing it. How do I refuse without making it clear that I’m not planning to hang around? I definitely cannot confide in my manager that I’m looking elsewhere because she is very dug-in, and will feel personally betrayed by my departure (I’ve seen it happen). How do I navigate this??

It's not uncommon for companies to require a repaying agreement when they do tuition reimbursement — but that's usually education that the employee herself is pursuing and the company is paying as a benefit. It's not typical or reasonable to do this for job-related training that your manager is proposing on her own.

Say this: "I'd be glad to take this course, but I'm not comfortable signing an agreement to pay back the costs if I leave within a year. I don't have any current plans to leave, but I can't predict what life might throw at me. I could end up needing to leave for reasons I can't predict now — health, family, who knows — and I don't want to be tied into owing money if that happens. If that means you'd rather not send me to the course, I completely understand."

5. Explaining how you spent a year of unemployment … when you didn't do much

My boyfriend has been laid off a year ago and he hasn’t found a job since. Aside from job searching and feeling sorry for himself, he didn’t really do much. Being laid off was a huge blow, and when he started to search for a job he didn’t manage to get interviews, so he got quite depressed. Now he’s ready to actively job search again. I’ve bought your book (I finally got a hold of his resume, and it needs work!), but what does he say when interviewers ask about the past year ? He hasn’t followed any training or did volunteering or anything like it to be able to say that he still kept busy. He spent time with friends and family, played games, or was too down to do anything.

One option: "I was lucky enough to have the ability to take some time off to attend to some family issues. But now I'm ready to jump back into work, and I'm using this opportunity to be very selective about my next role."

Or, if he's had a fairly high-pressure career history where he could credibly say this, here's another option: "I used the opportunity to take some time off! I'd been working in high-pressure roles for a while, and I welcomed the opportunity to take a break and spend time with my family. But now I'm ready to jump back into work." (This works if he was, saying, working on political campaigns or in another industry with notoriously high pressure and long hours. It doesn't work if he was a job with more typical pressures.)

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when going to a nude sauna with coworkers, what do I do about nipple piercings? … and other questions was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

should I leave my awful job with great pay and great benefits?

Posted: 25 Sep 2018 10:59 AM PDT

A reader writes:

I work for the largest employer in region and have been in my current job for over four years. For four years, I have been telling myself that my job will get better but it hasn't. My employer is a mess with constant scandals in the news, reorganizations and firings with no explanations, and poor outcomes. In my role, I am being underutilized, don't have enough work to keep me busy, and have no one to advocate for me due to the numerous leadership changes. The morale is terrible at work and I feel like this job is destroying my self-confidence and sucking the life out of me. When I actually have work related to what I was hired to do, I enjoy the work. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case, so most days I hate my job. For reference, I was in my previous position for 10 years and supervised 22 individuals and oversaw numerous multi-million dollar projects at a time. Now I don't supervise anyone and my projects are much smaller.

However, my job works great for my family and personal life. My job pays very well (especially given how little work I have), has great health insurance, and lots of vacation and sick time. I am also part of the state retirement system which I already have 17 years into, and if I stayed in my job for 13 more years I could retire with 30 years of service at age 55. I also have significant flexibility with my hours which allows me to pick up my elementary age kids from school, attend school events during the day, etc.

Do I stay at my current job because it works well for my family, has great pay and benefits, and I can potentially retire young or is it time for me to look for a new job? Unfortunately, I know I will not find another job in this region that pays as well or has as good of benefits. We moved here four years ago to be close to our families and do not want to move out of the area as we love our personal lives here. If I should stay in my current job, what strategies should I employ to make my work days more enjoyable and tolerable?

I get a lot of “should I stay or should I go?” questions and my answer is usually “you have nothing to lose by looking around — and applying other places doesn’t commit you to leaving.” And while I think that’s true here too, I suspect you know what you’re talking about when you say you won’t find another job in your area with benefits like this, particularly the retirement benefits. But it wouldn't hurt to look around and make sure that's true because if you're able to find something that gets pretty close, presumably that would change your calculation significantly.

My answer to these types of questions is also normally “when a job is destroying your self-confidence and sucking the life out of you, it’s time to go” … but it’s also true that sometimes there are ways to mentally reframe things for yourself so that’s not happening.

Sometimes you can decide that you're just going to see your job as a job, that you're being paid to be there and do the work you're assigned rather than investing any more deeply than that. In theory, you could decide to accept that the many downsides of the job aren't going to change, to stop caring that they won't, and to focus on the reasons you've chosen to be there anyway. That's easier said than done, but when you can pull it off, it can be a pretty powerful change.

But you're also not a failure if you can't do that! Sometimes things are bad enough that it's truly impossible to do that. Or you might be the type of person who simply won't be happy if you have to go to a job every day that you can't be invested in. But in that case, I do think that you should seriously consider leaving. If you were just saying "meh, I don't like it here," that would be different — and the upsides to you still might make it worthwhile to stay. But you're saying you're miserable and it's affecting your mental health. If there's no way to change that, I do think you need to get out.

If that's the case, keep in mind that the choice here isn't between (a) being miserable but well paid with health insurance and (b) being happy but poorly paid and with no benefits. It's probably between (a) being miserable but well paid with great benefits and (b) being happy with pay/benefits that are decent but just not as unusually stellar as you have now. In other words, the gap between what you get if you stay and what you get it if you leave is probably smaller than you might be fearing.

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should I leave my awful job with great pay and great benefits? was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

how do I get over losing out on a promotion?

Posted: 25 Sep 2018 09:30 AM PDT

A reader writes:

I'm struggling to deal with my emotions after my teammate was chosen for a promotion ahead of me, and I was given vague feedback.

I've worked for my company for two years. I'm on a team of two, and recently we both interviewed to become the lead of our team, because our manager is moving up. At the same time, a similar lead role opened up in a parallel team, where I have work experience. So I essentially had one interview for both roles, but didn't get either.

On my team, my teammate was chosen for the team lead role. And on the other team, someone who started less than a year ago was chosen, because they have prior experience as a manager, whereas I don't. My manager told me there was no question that the newer person would get that role. And for my team, my teammate apparently came across as more motivated than me.

I feel upset that I wasn't chosen in either case because both of these people will benefit from manager training and get to develop their careers at the company. It feels like the bubble has been burst: I've stayed late many times, I've often been the person who people come to when they have questions, I've happily accepted new challenges in my role when it took on new directions during my time so far, and including change, in the past year I've had four team leads due to people leaving or moving up.

Something like this hasn't happened to me before and I don't know how to deal with the emotional reaction I'm having. Unfortunately I cried when my manager told me. It's her first time as a manager, and I think she handled it clumsily as well, telling me I shouldn't focus on things I can't change (when I asked if there are things I could improve on). I was flummoxed when I heard this and didn't know how to ask more questions. I did say out loud that I didn't feel any leadership from my colleague. I know I shouldn’t have said this. I have often felt that I'm pointing things out and explaining things to her, and it just bothers me so much now that I will have to take direction from her.

I feel depressed and as if the floor has dropped from underneath my feet. I am normally quite cheerful and happy to chat to everyone at work but I just can't bring myself out of this slump. it's been three weeks since I found out. I am trying really hard to be professional but I fear I'm creating a bad atmosphere and I don't want that either.

I believe I performed badly during my interview and wonder if the decision was based on this instead of my work record. I was nervous because one of our C-level executives was present, I was meeting them for the first time, and they asked most of the questions.

After the decision was made, my senior manager sent me a private message offering to explore different growth opportunities and support me, so all is not lost. I haven't taken her up on this yet. But I'm finding it so hard to recover.

You can read my answer to this letter at New York Magazine today. Head over there to read it.

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how do I get over losing out on a promotion? was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

my husband’s boss/our friend is sleeping with their married department head

Posted: 25 Sep 2018 07:59 AM PDT

A reader writes:

My husband works for a well-known and well-respected organization. The supervisor of one of his projects, "Jane,” is also a personal friend of ours since before she was promoted. We're pretty close; we house-sit for each other, etc.

Jane broke up with her long-term boyfriend earlier this year because she fell for her boss, "Bob” (also my husband’s boss on another project, and one of the overall department supervisors) and they’ve been sleeping together in secret for several months. Only I and one of her other friends know. He is married with two kids, and is pretty obviously in it for the thrill with no intention of leaving his family. He comes across aggressively in my opinion, but my friend is in love with him. She is absolutely miserable with herself. She can’t make herself break it off so she’s looking for a new job several cities away. My husband has no idea, and thinks she broke up with her boyfriend due to stress that has been getting worse, and that’s why she must be leaving. He himself is worried now and gets depressed about work, because he feels like his workload will soon be as impossible as hers must be, and her example has been one of self-destructive, workaholic misery.

I don’t want to betray Jane’s trust, and since my husband works for Bob, I don’t want to jeopardize their relationship either by telling him what’s actually happening. But it’s getting hard to keep it a secret, and it almost seems like she isn’t trying. She doesn’t give anyone (of the 6-10 coworkers who know she’s looking) a reason for why she’s taking an offer elsewhere. Not even a fib like “the workload is just too much” or “I want a change of pace.” Most people think it’s because of the break-up. I have a feeling I will need to keep supporting her because her new job is still only an hour away … not that far from this married man.

What do I tell my husband? Is there anything I can do to intervene, when talking to her directly just results in sadness and destructive behavior? Can I reasonably confront the predatory boss (who has always been SO charming and truly loves my husband)? Can I put in an anonymous note to HR without him knowing it’s me? I’m at a loss, sad for her, and feel weird keeping a secret from my partner.

This is tricky because parts of this are affecting your husband; because he doesn't know what you know, he's drawing incorrect conclusions about what's going on with Jane and starting to worry about his own job.

And Jane has put you in a difficult situation by asking you to keep a secret about your husband's boss that your husband might care about quite a bit if he knew.

But it is absolutely not your place to get involved to the extent of talking to your husband's boss or sending a note to his HR department. You don't work there, and both of those would be oversteps. The fact that you're considering those is, I suspect, a sign that you've gotten too close to the situation and aren't thinking clearly about where your responsibility for fixing this begins and ends. (Can you imagine if a friend of yours who didn't work for your company contacted people who worked there about your affair? Even if they had your best interests in mind? It would be wildly inappropriate.)

As far as intervening goes, you really only have standing to intervene on the part that's affecting your husband. But you do very much have standing there.

At a minimum, you could say something to your husband like, "I know you're concerned that Jane is under so much work stress that it's driving her to think about leaving, and that that bodes badly for your own workload. Jane talked to me in confidence about what's going on, and while I can't share details, I do want you to know that she's dealing with some personal stresses right now — it's not about work at all, and it doesn't sound like you need to worry that it means anything for your own workload."

You could also talk to Jane about this aspect of it, saying something like, "I can't tell you how to handle this, but I do want you to know that (husband) has assumed that the reason you broke up with (old boyfriend) and the reason you're looking for a new job now is because of work stress — and he's really concerned that his own workload will soon be as impossible as he assumes yours will be. He's becoming depressed about work because of it. I don't want to betray your trust and tell him what's really going on, but you're putting me in a position where I know information that would make him feel significantly better about his own workload, and preventing me from telling him. That's not something I want in my marriage, and I'm asking you to find something to communicate with him to fix that."

If Jane blows that off, it's reasonable to tell her that you can't stay silent with your own husband when you know information that would significantly change how he feels about something, and that you're going to need to let him know what's going on. It's not that you can't know things your husband doesn't know or that you won't keep friends' secrets; it's that in this particular case, her secret is actually affecting him, and as his spouse you can't watch that happen, know more than he does, and say nothing. If he finds out at some point that you knew and said nothing, he'd rightly feel betrayed.

Frankly, you might even decide to go straight there rather than start with the "tell him something that will fix this" request of Jane. That's up to you and your sense of what your intimacy with your husband requires, but you're allowed to decide that you're not willing to have this big of a secret from your husband, particularly when it involves his job and his boss.

It also would have been okay to say to Jane at the very start of the affair, "Hey, I can't have this kind of secret from (husband) when it involves his job and his boss. If you want to talk to me about this, I need you to know that I won't be comfortable keeping it from (husband)." And it's not too late to say a version of that now.

But those are really the only pieces of this that are yours to handle: what you discuss with Jane, and how you and she handle it with your husband. The rest of it, as gross and problematic as it is, is not yours to fix.

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my husband’s boss/our friend is sleeping with their married department head was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

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