It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My boss wants me to “share my location” with her constantly
I’ve decided to hunker down in my current toxic job for now. My boss is old enough to be my mother, which I mention because she likes to “mother” the younger people of our team. She sometimes refers to us as her kids. I travel quite a bit for work, sometimes with my boss and most times without. I’m the only person on my team that travels the most. My boss asked me if I could turn on Find My Friends (we both have iPhones) and share my location with her when I travel so she can “know I’m safe and where I’m at” while I travel. I feel uncomfortable with this because I don’t even do that with my own parents, unless I go overseas. I am not close to my boss but she often pushes that we are family.
My boss knows my travel schedule but it seems like this is … too much. I pushed back and said I wasn’t comfortable with that, and she said I could turn it off on the weekends if I’m at home. I don’t want her seeing where I am in my off hours while traveling, and I generally find it uncomfortable with her tracking me! I don’t have any reason to believe that she’s worried I’m not working because I’ve had positive performance reviews, but rather I think she sees herself as a parent figure. She also is very insistent about meeting my partner (whom I dated for three years before working here) to “approve of him” so I find that her boundaries are not really there. How can I push back on this?
Wow, that’s really inappropriate. If she just asked once, I’d ignore it and hope she won’t bring it up again. But if she does, just say, “I’m just not comfortable doing that” and then swiftly change the subject. One other option, if you feel you’ll need it, is to say you keep really strict privacy settings on your phone — because you do have strict privacy settings with your phone, in that you aren’t willing to use it to let her track you — and let her conclude on her own that you’re talking about some technological restriction.
Also, if she continues to insist on meeting your partner so she can “approve of him” (wtf), I hope you’ll consider saying, “Ha, imagine if you really meant that — that would be so odd!”
2. Employees want to throw me a baby shower but we just need money
I was promoted early this year to lead a team of seven people in a branch office that has 35-ish employees (outside of my team, everyone else is in a different department). I’m fully on board with your standing advice about not giving managers gifts on Boss’s Day and things like that. I don’t need, expect, or typically want gifts from my direct reports. I have good relationships with them, but in my mind any gift giving obligations go downhill, not the other way.
Recently, my wife and I adopted a newborn boy (who’s doing quite well). Because of how the adoption process tends to work, we didn’t get a ton of lead time before he was born. As a result, family and friends generally fulfilled what was on our registry in the space of a week or two after he was born. Anything else that was essential, we went ahead and bought since, by definition, we needed the essentials.
Several people at my office have approached me about doing a baby shower for us, which normally I wouldn’t object to. The thing is, really the only thing we’re still asking for is money to help offset the unfortunately MASSIVE costs of adoption, not to mention child-rearing. I feel very uncomfortable asking for money from people below me on the org chart, but I also recognize that some of them really want to do something for us. What’s the appropriate way to handle this?
Go with your gut here because it’s steering you right! It’s definitely not appropriate to give your blessing to an event that would have your employees giving you money.
So turn down the shower. Say you really appreciate the offer but you have everything you need. If you want, though, you could suggest doing a small celebratory thing with cake or such. Just decline the shower/gifts/money part.
Congratulations on your baby!
3. Interviewer asked if I was pregnant before she offered me the job
Right out of college, I applied to be an entry-level assistant at a research organization. The position required walking around a large hospital, but it by no means required an extraordinary level of physical fitness. I was pleased to receive an interview but was thrown off by the chaotic, fast-talking approach of the interviewer, “Fiona.” I fielded her questions as best I could and was pleasantly surprised to get asked to a final interview.
At this second interview, Fiona spoke as if the position was already mine, including language like, “When you start in two weeks, you’ll be reporting to Shrek,” etc. I wasn’t sure why I was there since no real questions were asked. Then in a sudden hushed tone, she asked, “Before we offer the position, I must ask you a sensitive question. Are you pregnant?” This shocked me quite badly — I’m pretty sure my jaw actually dropped. I stuttered no, which seemed to please her. My face remained confused/offended because she then followed up by saying she needed to know if I was capable of walking around the hospital for the job, seemingly implying pregnant women can’t walk?!
Naively, I took this job and made the best of it. Once in the job, I found the amount of walking to be completely reasonable. Fiona always seemed to freak out when a coworker became pregnant, claiming the job couldn’t get done properly when in such a condition.
I hated Fiona for multiple reasons, but cannot tell if my bias is affecting the way I think back on this interview question. Am I overreacting, or was this an inappropriate question for an interview?
Whoa, you are not overreacting. It’s wildly inappropriate.
It’s illegal to factor pregnancy into a hiring decision — and it sure sounds like she was asking because her hiring decision would depend on it. That breaks federal law, and it’s a big deal.
4. Our company recruiters are sending rejections “from” me with errors in them
I’m an interviewer at my company, and I’ve recently discovered our recruitment department has been sending interview candidates emails ostensibly from me – with my name on the bottom and my work email address in the “from” line – that I was completely unaware of, to tell candidates that we’re not offering them a job. This feels really weird to me; I’m not comfortable with having words attributed to me that aren’t mine, so discovering that’s been happening without my knowledge feels like a betrayal of trust.
Is this a normal business practice and I’m just being overly sensitive, or is this genuinely a bit weird? I know, for example, it’s common for marketing material to have quotes attributed to senior management that they didn’t actually say, but I’d always assumed they’d at least signed off on them or otherwise consented to their names being used that way. This was completely without my knowledge, and I’m not in a particularly externally visible role, so it seems different to me.
It perhaps isn’t helping that the form email that’s being sent with my name has a bunch of minor errors. Nothing terrible, but the sort of semi-common stylistic and grammatical problems that irritate me when I see them on others’ writing, so I absolutely don’t want associated with my name.
They’re likely using the same form letter for all rejections but just pulling in the name of the relevant hiring manager or interviewer. It’s not terribly uncommon to do it that way; the idea is that they handle the work of sending the emails while making it seem slightly more personal than if it were from a generic company address. I wouldn’t really consider it a betrayal of trust, especially if you’re at a large company. (However, if this is a small company, it’s easier for them to check with individual hiring managers on this stuff, and I’d have a higher expectation that they would.)
However, you can definitely speak up about the content! You might be able to ask them to use a different letter entirely for rejections “from” you (with language you provide), but if that’s not possible, you should definitely ask them to at least fix the errors in it (something they should want to do anyway once they’re pointed out). If they resist, try saying, “It’s really important that emails with my name on them represent me and the company well. I imagine other interviewers feel the same.” Go over that person’s head if necessary; it’s very unlikely that person’s boss will object to fixing errors in an email that’s presumably going out to thousands of people each year.
5. Telling my new coworkers I don’t use social media
I’ve just begun a new job within a new department at a state agency. It’s a large, diverse organization. It seems like a very outgoing friendly and supportive group. It’s become very clear that my new coworkers and supervisor are all “friends” on Facebook or follow each other on other social media.
I don’t do social media for several reasons. I found my PTSD was constantly being triggered the short period of time I tried Facebook a decade ago. I had been a victim of a violent crime a number of years ago and the perpetrator has severed their sentence and now out of jail. Other reasons have to do with abusive family and stalkers so I just need to do due diligence and keep myself safe.
It feels like any day now, some one will ask if I’m on social media anywhere. I will say no, since it’s the truth, but what if anything do I say if they press further and want to know why? For now, I’m thinking of just saying, “I tried it for a short time a number of years ago and found it just wasn’t enjoyable.” Also, do you think my new coworkers will judge me negatively for not being on social media?
That language is fine, but you don’t even need to give that much information! You can just say, “It’s just not my thing!”
It’s very unlikely that people will judge you negatively over this. A lot of people aren’t on social media! Be matter-of-fact about it and it won’t be a big deal.
my boss wants me to share my location with her constantly, interviewer asked if I was pregnant, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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