It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My bosses won’t give me deadlines
I work in a small department and mostly for two people. Jill is my supervisor and Jack is her equal. Both of them hate giving deadlines, but both of them will send me follow-up emails or ask “Where are you on this?” until a project is completed. When I’ve asked for deadlines in the past, Jack has said, “I personally hate them but I can tell that you’re someone who needs them,” yet on his latest project when his assistant and I asked for a deadline, he said, “I don’t have one for you, just hurry but get your other work done.” Jill told me that giving me deadlines is “making [her] keep up with one more thing, because now I have to remember that I assigned you the thing and that there’s a deadline for it.”
No one else in the office seems to have this aversion, but I’m wondering if asking for deadlines is too much in the realm of asking them to “manage my feelings,” which is a phrase you brought up in a recent post. The solution I’ve come up with is to send Jack and Jill a project list of what I’m working on for them every week, yet sometimes I still get the feeling that they wish I would have done something sooner (and to be honest I don’t think they read the list).
Asking for deadlines isn’t asking people to manage your feelings; it’s asking for all the info you need to complete the work successfully. It’s true that not everything has a hard deadline, but managers still need to communicate something about what timelines they’re envisioning, especially if there’s a point where they’d be disappointed not to have it. At a minimum, Jack and Jill should be saying things like, “As you have time, but no later than X” or “It’s not the highest priority but I’d want to get it back within a few weeks” or “I can’t do X until you give me Y, so prioritize it, but don’t let it delay Z.” (And even these can carry different levels of urgency depending on who’s saying them, so they require getting to know your boss a bit.)
If you haven’t yet pointed out that you don’t need hard deadlines, just a rough sense of the desirable timeline, try that. But otherwise, I’d start proposing timelines when you first get an assignment — like, “Okay, I should be able to have this back to you by Friday — or do you need it sooner?” or “Is it okay if I shoot for mid-August with this, since I’ve got to finish X and Y first?”
2. Should my resume focus on what I hope to do, rather than what I’ve done?
Along with scads of others, I’ve been displaced for a few months and am massaging all of my resume and interview resources. My hope is to begin a master’s in HR this fall, and the advice I’ve received is to develop a resume that focuses on what I want to do, rather than what I have already accomplished. Listing passions on a resume feels strange to me, though certainly I want to communicate my personal brand. What are your thoughts on this? Perhaps it’s just simpler than I’m making it. And could you point to any suggestions/resources that would be valuable to reference on creating a resume that lives goals, rather than experience? My resume is currently a good reflection of the balance of my experience along with some quirky (but not, I hope, distracting) infographics that emphasize my interest in creativity and individuality.
Nooooo, don’t do this. This isn’t what a resume is for. When hiring managers look at your resume, they want to see what you’ve done, not what you hope to do. (You can talk a little about the latter in your cover letter — although not too much even there.) Your resume needs to provide evidence from your past achievements that shows why you’d excel at the role you’re applying for. If your focus is on what you hope to do rather than what you have done, you’re not going to be competitive with other candidates. (Also, who gave you this advice?! You probably need to discard anything else they’ve told you too, unfortunately.)
Get rid of the infographics too. At best they’re a neutral, but often they’re a negative. They take up space, rarely present info an employer wants, and typically come across as gimmicky. Plain old resumes in the traditional format are what still your strongest option.
3. How can I ask interviewers about their support for risk-taking?
I’m looking to start applying for jobs again soon and have decided something that’s important to me is the willingness for an organization to take risks. I’m a public librarian and want to be able to try new things that have the potential to crash and to work for folks who don’t have an attitude of “if there’s even a small chance it will fail, don’t try it.” I want to know that the organization will both support taking on risk and support employees when ideas don’t work out, whether it’s a new program or a social media post (all within reason, of course).
I’m struggling to come up with a question for the interviewer/panel that will get an honest answer. Anything I’ve come up with so far doesn’t communicate that I don’t mean risking employee well-being (which I imagine is on everyone’s minds right now, so it would be easy to interpret a question about risk in general that way) but also feels too direct in a way that makes it easy for the employer to just tell me what they think I want to hear rather than the truth. Any suggestions on how to suss out that kind of information?
Some options (don’t use all of them or you will seem strangely fixated):
“Can you tell me about how new ideas get implemented? I’d especially love to hear about an idea that got tested out but ultimately didn’t work well and how that was handled.”
“How much room is there for the person in this role to test out new programs and approaches?”
“What are some new initiatives that the last person in this role tried out, and how did they go?”
“Whenever you try out new ideas, some of them won’t work out. How much room is there for employees to take risks on projects that might not succeed, and how have you responded to that kind of failure?”
Some of this, too, will come from doing your due diligence on the culture, especially by mining your network for people who can give you the insider scoop.
4. LinkedIn marketing after layoffs
I work for a branch of a very large company in a very small city, so when the company recently closed its local office and transferred all its employees to a new location, it made local headlines for several days.
I got an “add me to your LinkedIn network” invite from a name I didn’t recognize. It said, “I am a financial advisor and I am reaching out to [company] employees that may be impacted by recent layoffs. I am available to help with financial questions that arise or to help with 401k rollovers and retirement plans.”
(They weren’t actually layoffs, but the local press coverage made it sound like they were — “hundreds of jobs lost.” So I understand where he got that.)
This would have annoyed me regardless, because I hate it when people say “please connect with me” when they mean “please volunteer to let me spam you.” But this seems particularly insensitive. “I read in the newspaper that you might have lost your job, and so I didn’t want to waste any time before I tried to market to you.” Can you give me a reality check? Is this inappropriate, or is it just me?
It’s not just you. “Hello, you don’t know me but I’d like to make money off of your hardship” is not an appealing message.
5. How do I resign when we’re remote?
I’m hopefully going to be getting a new job offer in the next couple weeks and I’m going to be leaving my current job. Yay! But since my current office is operating 100% remotely for probably at least the next few months, I need to figure out how to resign. Normally, I’d just poke my head into my boss’ office with a “Hey, do you have a minute?” query, but it seems less casual to send them an email asking for a video call. Do I just resign in an email? Or what?
Don’t do it in an email! This is a still a conversation, not a note. You’ll do it the same way you’d do it if you’d always been remote: The specifics depend on how you and your boss usually communicate, but the easiest way is to just call her. Or if she doesn’t do unscheduled calls, send her a message saying you need to talk with her today and can she call you when she has a few minutes, or can you call her at 2 pm, or so forth. (But it doesn’t need to be video until you want it to be.)
boss won’t give me deadlines, resumes that focus on goals instead of achievements, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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