It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. How to ask my boss not to mime shooting herself
I have a mostly great manager who has a habit that I am having a hard time with. Anytime she is frustrated or annoyed, she makes a finger gun to the head gesture, indicating in a joking way that the annoyance makes her want to shoot herself. Client being difficult, finger gun, bad traffic on the way to work, finger gun. I have a hard time with this because my father died by a gun suicide and I think about it every time she does this. Nobody that I currently work with knows this and I don’t want them to. I stayed at the job I was at when it happened for several years and nobody ever treated me normally again. I don’t want a repeat of that but I want her to stop with the finger gun. Is there anything I can say without giving my history away or even making her suspect?
Are you willing to share that you’ve been personally affected without sharing the details? Saying something like, “Would you mind not making that gun sign? I’ve had gun violence in my family and it shakes me every time” or “You couldn’t have known but I lost a family member to gun suicide” would likely get her to stop immediately without getting into details. Or if you don’t want to share that much, you could say, “You couldn’t have known, but that hand signal really rattles me — could I ask you not to use it around me?”
I’m sorry about your dad.
2. How to tell our boss to stop “helping” with our work
I work in the public sector in a department responsible for a task-based, volume-heavy body of work. We’ve been on mandatory work-from-home since April, with a skeleton crew of staff rotating through the office to handle the workload that can’t be done remotely. This has been super stressful and we’re nowhere near our normal turn-around times.
My supervisor, “Prue,” will sometimes take materials home to work on items from there (which is kind of problematic on its own). She’s pretty far removed from how we actually do things, which isn’t totally crazy since she’s a supervisor and her body of work differs significantly from us worker bees’. The problem is that Prue does a terrible job on this stuff. She’s sloppy, careless, and not at all methodical. Everything she does has to be cleaned up to some extent and there are occasions where we spend more time fixing her mistakes than we would have needed to do the work ourselves.
Our resources are stretched thin enough as it is and it’s very aggravating for someone to throw a monkey wrench in the mix with their brand of “help.” How can we say DON’T TOUCH THAT? I’m in good standing with all members of the management team but telling a supervisor they’re making things worse seems like a hard message to deliver.
How good is Prue at taking feedback or hearing things she doesn’t like? Ideally you’d explain that because she’s not immersed in the details every day like the rest of you, there’s context she doesn’t have about your systems and the stuff you have to check, and that it’ll be more efficient if she leaves it to your team. You could cite a recent example too — “when you took X home, we ended up having to change Y because of Z — which makes sense since you’re not doing this all the time. But it’s been more efficient to leave it with us since we’re so steeped in it.”
Also, is there anything you would welcome Prue’s help with? It might be useful if you can redirect her — “we’ve got X covered, but we could really use your help with Y if you’ve got time to help out!”
3. I’m burned out and inherited money — should I quit my great job?
Three years ago, I lucked into a truly amazing job — extremely generous pay, benefits so good that my friends get mad when I talk about them, truly flexible, supportive and understanding bosses, and a healthy, boundary-respecting culture. After multiple nightmare jobs (one previous boss had the record for most complaints filed about her and was given early retirement after an employee threatened to go to the local paper!) this felt like a godsend. I’m not especially interested in the work, but I’m good at it and I haven’t really had the energy to think about what other types of work I might enjoy more.
But I think about quitting almost every day. The last six years have been really tough and I feel burnt out. My dad died, my aunt died, my uncle died, my cat died, my dog died, I moved countries twice (both times to places where I knew no one and had to build up an entire life), I left a controlling and draining relationship and was stalked for a year, and earlier this year, my mom died.
I guess my dad left my mom pretty well off when he died, and she invested the money and left a frankly shocking amount to me and my brother. Enough that I could live (frugally) on it for six or seven years.
I desperately want to just sleep for a year. I can now easily afford to take a year or two off to grieve, rest, and try to cure this burnout. But where would that land me in two years? Is it crazy to take myself out of the workforce when I don’t actually need to? I have skills that are always in demand, and I have a strong resume and great references. How would I explain that I took a year off to soak in a tub? I realize this is the most privileged problem anyone can possibly have, but I could really use some perspective on whether this is just the exhaustion talking, or whether this could be a viable option.
Take a year off, and then see how you feel about a second year. You have skills that are always in demand, a strong resume, and great references. You have the money to support yourself during a break, and a huge buffer if it ends up taking longer to find a job afterwards than you anticipated.
People step out of the job market all the time and find their way back in (like many parents of little kids). It can make a job search harder, yes, but not insurmountable — and again, you have a big financial buffer it takes some extra time.
When you’re interviewing again, you’d say that you took some time away from work to deal with some family matters. if you’re comfortable with it, you can explain that both your parents died and you took some time to deal with their estates, etc. People will get it! It shouldn’t be a big deal.
But also, since you like your current employer so much: Have you considered talking to them about your plan and seeing if they’d welcome you back in a year? It may or may not be feasible for your role, but that’s something people sometimes do and it’s worth asking.
4. When should I tell candidates I’m pregnant?
I was recently promoted and am hiring to fill my old position (manager level). I’m also five months pregnant. Even if I hire someone tomorrow, realistically, I’ll train this person for three months and then I’ll be on maternity leave for 12 weeks. At what point during the interview process should I disclose that I’m pregnant? It would be obvious in-person, but we are doing everything remotely.
You can raise it as soon as you’d like! I’d probably raise it once you’re at the point in the process where interviews are getting into the deeper substance of the work, so not in a short initial phone screening but once you get into interviews that dig more into the meat of the job. At that point, you can explain it like any other logistics relevant to the job. For example: “I should mention that I’m pregnant and expect to be out from February to April. We’d work to get you trained before that, and then XYZ will be in place while I’m out.”
5. Old HR manager contacting me
I have recently connected with former coworkers on LinkedIn from a job that I quit almost a year ago and left on as best of terms that I could (two weeks notice, finished as many projects as I could, left a list of all unfinished work and where it stood, etc.). One of them was my old HR manager. We briefly chatted through LinkedIn and today she asked that I email her. Because of how awful my former employer was (super hostile work environment), I am not comfortable emailing her without any sort of reasonable explanation. She also still has my contact information on file from when I applied. My gut instinct is to just ignore it and not email her, but I also don’t want to be fully unprofessional and ghost her message. What should I do?
There’s not a a big difference between chatting with her on LinkedIn (which you’ve already been doing) and chatting with her via email. There shouldn’t be any harm in emailing her and saying, “You asked me to email you. What’s up?” Or you could reply to her message on LinkedIn with your email address, leave the ball in her court, and see what she says if she emails you.
Or you can ignore the request if you want! But my curiosity would get the better of me and there’s not much real danger in just seeing what she wants. You no longer work there and she has no power over you, so if it turns out she wants something you’re not interested in providing, you can cut it off at that point.
my boss mimes shooting herself, asking our boss to stop “helping” so much, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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