It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My boss responds to every email with “calm down”
I am a woman and am very reserved in my work life. I work as a sales assistant to our sales team, so me keeping a cool head is very helpful (I think).
I have an issue with my interim boss. My new boss should be starting soon. This was an issue before we started working from home, but now that the majority of communication is email, I find myself grinding my teeth on the daily. Essentially, the interim manager responds to every email from me with, “Calm down.” That is, without fail, his first line in every email. Even if he is copied on an email to me and I respond to someone else, he will tell me to calm down. He does this whether I am bringing up a concern (“I think X will happen”) or just asking a question (“should X be like this or that?”).
I have no idea how this started, but now it happens daily. He must think this is funny, but I hate it. It’s not funny. But I don’t know how to tell him to cut it out. It seems like it has gone on too long. Is there a script I can follow to get him to stop, or do I wait until my new manager is hired, sees this on an email, and ask him to address it?
Your manager is an ass. “Haha, let’s pretend a woman is hysterical, and not take anything she says seriously! It’s hilarious!” Whether or not he intends this to be sexist or realizes how gendered it is, it is; women have been told for centuries to calm down as a way to dismiss them on things big and small.
Go talk to him in-person (or call if you’re not in-person) and say this: “You have been responding to all my emails with ‘calm down.’ Why are you doing that?” … followed by, “Could I ask that you stop? It’s demoralizing to hear that in response to every work-related communication I send.” Or if you prefer, “Could I ask that you stop? Maybe you’re not aware of this, but there’s a long history of women being marginalized in this way.” (Personally I would also add, “I know you strive to support women and would never want to inadvertently reinforce something so sexist” because I enjoy watching people feel obligated to live up to a compliment they don’t deserve … but if he’s a certain kind of ass, that will just egg him on, so you have to know who you’re dealing with.)
Or if you don’t want to deal with this guy, you could indeed wait until your new boss starts — but at that point, don’t wait for him to notice it and address it, because who knows how long that might take. Instead, once he starts, ask him to put a stop to it.
This is sexist and gross.
2. My office is overrun with buzzwords
I’m one of my office’s word nerds — copywriters, editors, etc. A few of us have noticed that recently, buzzwords have picked up like crazy among our colleagues. Lately it feels like senior management’s entirely vocabulary is only buzzwords. In a presentation last week, for example, a director said that a “new piece of work is a runway to manifest our brand value proposition.” What does that mean?
Now my peers are using the same buzzwords in presentations, and they’re seeping into meetings and conversations. Another example that makes my eye twitch: Suddenly everyone is using the word “solutioning,” as in, “Thanks, Matt, for solutioning our IT request.” You know. Like a detective solutions a murder.
I’m all for language evolving, but morale is poor right now and there’s been a lot of water-cooler griping about senior leaders acting inauthentically. I think buzzwords may be contributing to this. When senior leadership’s talking a lot but not saying anything, it doesn’t make anyone feel that what we do has much real-world value.
Part of me wants to address the issue head-on. I’m one of two staff members who train our organization on brand tone of voice, and jargon is one of the things we ask people to avoid. Shouldn’t buzzwords be treated the same? So it might be okay for me to bring it up to the team as a tone of voice reminder — “remember, we want to communicate like human beings, even to each other.”
The other part of me doesn’t even want to couch it in “tone of voice.” I want to shake everyone out of work zombie mode. I’m sick to death of conversations that don’t mean anything and waste everyone’s time. Am I overthinking this, or is it something I should address? If so, what’s the best way to do it?
Buzzwords and jargon are annoying, and they can indeed obscure people’s meaning and make listeners wonder why the person won’t speak plainly. But if you’ve got a cultural problem with people feeling your leadership is inauthentic, it goes way beyond buzzwords — and you’d be focusing on a symptom rather than the core issue. That’s not to say the overuse of buzzwords isn’t contributing to that perception; I’m sure it is. But it doesn’t sound like you’re part of your organization’s senior leadership, and so you’re probably not well positioned to do much about it. You can certainly edit the hell out of this language when it appears in written communication or materials meant for the public — but it doesn’t sound like you have standing to make it a major campaign beyond that. (If I’m wrong about that and you are in a senior position with a lot of influence, then by all means go for it. But you need that standing in order to really push on it effectively.)
That said, there are undoubtedly opportunites to take it on case-by-case. There are probably times when you can say, “Why are we suddenly saying ‘solutioning’? Can we stick with ’solving,’ in the interest of sounding like normal people?”
3. Can my current boss block me from moving back to my old job?
I was hired to work at a nonprofit in January to run a youth volunteer program, I worked very hard to turn around the failing program and made some headway with collaborating with other departments. In March, COVID-19 caused us to have to work from home, and my city defunded the program for the remainder of the fiscal year. To keep me within the organization, they offered me a new position with our after-school/summer camp program. I was less than thrilled, but I worked diligently with my new direct reports and began to enjoy the work we produced. My supervisor likes the work I’ve been doing and has integrated me into her team. Last week, my city decided to overhaul the volunteer program and funded us for half of our usual allotment. I was excited because I believed I would be able to go back to my original program.
However, my current supervisor is being difficult and doesn’t want me to go back. She refuses phone calls and ignores emails from my original boss, and when higher-ups got involved she called and asked what I wanted to do. I told her, “I want to go back!” My supervisor said they have a meeting today regarding my status and that she only made this call as a “professional courtesy.”
I’m frustrated, to say the least. My original program is my passion and I love the work I do there. Can my current supervisor block me from returning to my original program? Why don’t I get to decide?
It depends on the priorities in your organization, and to some extent the politics there. It’s possible your organization will decide it wants to keep you where you are — either for good and legitimate reasons or because they want to keep your current manager happy. (That second option sounds bad and sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s something like, “The X team is already strained from overwork and instability and if we move Jane, things will be even worse … so we need her to stay where she is currently for the good of the larger picture.” Other times, though, it’s more like, “We can’t deal with any of Lucinda’s drama if we move Jane, so just give her what she wants.”)
In any case, blocking someone from moving is generally very short-sighted , since it typically means the person is likely to end up leaving anyway — but this time they’ll go outside the organization.
If I were you, I’d call your old manager and talk to her directly. Tell her you’re concerned your current boss is blocking your return. Sometimes in a case like this, simply being very clear about your preferences — and about how strongly you feel — will be enough to get the move approved. Other times it won’t. One option to put some pressure on them is to hint (or say outright) that you’re not likely to stay long if you’re not permitted to move back, but there’s risk to that (especially right now, with lots of jobs getting cut) … so only do it if you’re not bluffing and feel confident it won’t get you pushed out sooner than you’d want.
4. Can I tell my coworkers I’m leaving before I tell my boss?
I am getting ready to resign from my job of 10 years. I am struggling with the fact that two of my coworkers, who are good friends, will hear this news from my boss instead of me. Is it ever appropriate to tell coworkers about resignation plans yourself?
Sure, absolutely. Professional protocol says you should tell your boss first (partly out of courtesy and partly so she’s prepared to answer questions or concerns from coworkers about logistics), but there’s no reason you can’t tell those two coworkers yourself immediately afterwards. There’s no convention that you have to wait for your boss to announce it, unless you and she explicitly agree on that. If the norm in your office is for departure announcements to come from managers, you can still discreetly give those two coworkers a heads-up.
For that matter, you can also give them a discreet heads-up before you’ve even talked to your boss, but I’d only do that if you absolutely trust them to keep it to themselves until it’s announced publicly.
5. Is moving within the same company job-hopping?
I’m wondering if moving around in one company looks like job hopping, and how to make it look less job-hoppy if possible.
I’m a few years out from graduating and I’ve had an interesting, albeit hodgepodge, job history. I was planning to negate some of that with a longer, three-year stint at my most recent company. Unfortunately, my first role in the company made me miserable so I switched to a much better role in a completely different area after 1.5 years. I’ve been in that role for a year but am now facing a reorg that will mean another new title and new team for me, although my role description is staying relatively the same. I will only be in this new role for a few months before moving back to my home country and starting a new job hunt.
Would it be okay to list the last two roles as one line like “Office Manager/Coordinator” (assuming those were my real titles)? Should I leave off the new title all together? Am I worried for nothing and does the fact that I stayed with the company for the full three years make it not job hopping? … Maybe recruiters will think I got promotions/transferred to better roles?
For what it’s worth, I’ve received amazing reviews from my manager and colleagues who say I’m a “star” employee. I’m generally good at interviews, but my job history is getting harder and harder to explain and I’m worried the job hopping will get my resume thrown out before I even get the chance.
Nah, since this was all at the same company, this isn’t job-hopping. Job-hopping is about frequently changing companies; if you’re moving around within the same company, that’s not going to set off alarm bells. Within reason, of course — if you switched internal roles every few months for years without having an explanation for it, people will wonder if managers passed you around like a hot potato, and also how much you really learned in any of those short tenures. And if you had, say, five roles over two years that were all wildly different from each other, that would make it harder to show any progression or clear trajectory. But otherwise, you’re fine.
(And since it always comes up when job-hopping is discussed: Job-hopping isn’t about a series of short-term contract roles either. It’s about a pattern of quickly leaving jobs that were intended to be longer-term.)
boss responds to every email with “calm down,” my office is overrun with buzzwords, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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