I’m off today, so here’s an older post from the archives. This was originally published in 2019.
A reader writes:
I started a new position recently and was promoted quickly to a management position. Great, I have a long supervisory background, looking forward to helping in a wider capacity.
One of my direct reports is a very conscientious and ambitious young man named “Scott” who I have found pleasant to work with.
Last week, during a normal conversation about a project, Scott brought up that he had done a background search on me and then asked me about an arrest on my record — an insurance snafu that led to a driver’s license snafu and when I was pulled over for a normal traffic stop in a rather conservative county, I spent a night in lock-up. Which was both humiliating and illuminating.
This is not immediately googleable. I gave it a try myself after he brought it up, and some of the specificity of the details he used leads me to believe he went to one of the publicly available background report sites and paid the nominal fee to obtain a detailed report.
His question was framed as that he “had been doing some research and wanted to clarify what happened in X state, because it wasn’t clear if it (the arrest) was in X or Y state.” I lived in Y state more recently, but there’s nothing easily found that links the two without paying for it.
In the moment, I answered truthfully that these items were from more than a decade ago and were the result of a particular set of circumstances. I then excused myself from the conversation and returned to my office.
The longer I think about it, the more weirded out I am. Scott would like to advance and I feel like a follow-up conversation is definitely warranted, but I’m struggling with an approach aside from “hey, you super violated a boundary for me and that will go over like a ton of bricks if you do it with future managers.”
To be fair, this is an overtly aggressive office culture and asking to explain your professional background in a fair amount of detail to coworkers/employees is par for the course. But while I understand having a background check run by the company during the hiring process, I’d like to keep my personal background personal.
(And while I’m not wild about discussing this embarrassing incident, my reaction was more of a “how and why did you obtain this information?” than a deep, dark secret that I’m worried might come to light.)
How do I let go of my weirded-out feeling and how do I best address this in a follow-up conversation?
WHAT?
You are being way more chill about this than I would be.
It’s an incredible overstep to run a paid background check on your new manager — but what’s really weird here is that he thought he somehow had standing to (a) make it clear to you that he did this and (b) ask you to clarify what he found.
The way he asked you about this sounds like he genuinely thought it was appropriate. He was “doing some research and wanted to clarify what happened”?? Because he didn’t feel he had sufficient details? About something that’s none of his business whatsoever?
Have you seen anything else weird about his judgment? Because this is such a bizarre thing for him to approach you with that I’ve got to think there’s a bigger issue with him. Maybe it’s just incredible naivete — but regardless of what’s at the root, this is just wildly inappropriate and I suspect it’s part of some broader pattern.
And as you note, it’s not that this is a deep, dark secret. It’s just that it’s personal and spectacularly irrelevant to anything he would ever have cause to “research.”
So I don’t think you need to let go of your weirded-out feeling. Your weirded-out feeling is warranted and appropriate.
I would say this to him: “I was taken aback last week when you asked me about a traffic incident in my background. Frankly, I was too taken aback to address it in the moment, but I’m not clear on why you were undertaking that kind of background search on me in the first place — and especially on why you decided to inquire with me about it.” And then, depending on his answer, you could say, “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you didn’t realize you violated a work boundary here. But I want to make sure that going forward you know that this was inappropriate, everyone you work with deserves privacy, and this is not something you should do again to anyone here.”
And I’d keep a very close eye on his judgment after this, especially around interpersonal stuff — and be prepared to swiftly shut down anything else inappropriate.