My Blog

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Everyone at my new job loves my high school bully

I’m an actor and just started rehearsals for a play. A woman who bullied me terribly in high school is active in my city’s theater community. Luckily, I haven’t run into her as I was busy with college and then lived in a different city for a couple of years. One of my castmates offhandedly mentioned her. I said that I went to high school with her, but obviously did not mention the bullying. The castmate began singing her praises, and others joined in. I thought my heart was going to stop.

I’m nearly 30, but I am not over what she did to me. Without getting into details, she enlisted other students and even a faculty member in her bullying. I began self-harming, attempting suicide, and spent some time in intensive outpatient therapy.

I now have to hear about her almost every night. I can’t say anything about the bullying, because I don’t want to bring up old drama and I don’t want her to find out she still has this effect on me. The show will be over by November, but I don’t know if I can continue like this for that long. I’m physically ill and my work at my day job is slipping. Dropping out isn’t an option. What do you think I should do?

You’ve taken the two most obvious options off the table: saying something or dropping out. If you’re physically ill and it’s affecting your day job, you need to do one of those. Saying something would be the easiest! You don’t need to get into details; you can simply say, “Jane and I have a rough history and it’s messing with my focus to talk about her so frequently — could you not bring her up around me so often?”

Does this sound like there’s A Story and might it make people curious to know what happened? Yes. But that doesn’t need to be your problem. If anyone pries for details, you can say, “I really don’t want to talk about it, it was years ago.” If people wonder, so be it. The alternative is continuing to hear about her all the time.

However … if she’s active in your city’s theater community and you’re going to be part of that community, realistically this is likely to keep coming up. It’s actually pretty weird that they’re bringing her up so frequently — what is so interesting to them about this woman?! — but apparently that’s the situation. So I do think you’ve got to decide if you’re up for remaining active in that community yourself, knowing Jane will be be around/discussed, or whether you’d rather disengage. And that sucks! You should be able to participate in community theater if you want to. But those are probably the choices. I’m sorry you’re dealing with this.

Also, would it help to check in with a therapist for a few sessions, given the impact this is having on your quality of life? I imagine it might be awfully demoralizing to think you’re once again having to seek therapy because of Jane, but we’re talking about something that’s making you physically ill and affecting your job.

If all of this sounds like too much to bother to deal with, I’d honestly consider quitting the play. I know you said it’s not an option, but it would presumably be an option if you had something else health-related going on, right? (There too, I imagine it might be demoralizing to feel like you have to quit something all these years later because of Jane, but you really don’t need to just power through.)

2. My employee is bad at communicating

I am moving into a management position for the first time in many years. The last time I had a direct report, it was a disaster. My current direct report is great — he’s enthusiastic and a quick learner. This is also his first job out of college so it’s a big learning curve. And I really, really don’t want to mess up managing again!

So far the only issue I’ve encountered is a communication issue. When he’s speaking to me, I often find it hard to get a handle on what he’s trying to say, and end up having to ask a lot of questions so I can nail down the information.

For example, he will use the word “they” to refer to multiple individuals in a conversation, so I have to keep asking him which of the various people involved he’s referring to, or he’ll send Teams messages that are vague. The other day, he sent me a Teams message the other day about a technical issue during a presentation that said, “I keep seeing my messages” when what he meant was that his Teams notifications were popping up during a shared screen and he didn’t know how to turn them off.

I want to give him some constructive feedback, but saying “get better at communicating” doesn’t seem specific or actionable enough. Ideally, I’d like to be able to grasp what he’s saying without having to ask a lot of clarifying questions. Do you have any advice for how to address this, or any advice for a new manager who really, really wants to be a good manager?

The next time it happens, name it in the moment and ask clearly for what you want him to do differently. So for example, the next time he’s using “they” to refer to multiple people, say, “You’re saying ’they’ for a bunch of different people and I don’t know who you’re referencing. Can you make a point of using each person’s name, not just now but in all the time? It’ll make conversations easier to follow.” (I wonder if you’ve hesitated to say that because it’s so basic that it might feel condescending — but the fact is, what he’s doing is a problem and there’s no other way to get him to change it.) You can also name the pattern itself: “You sometimes send me messages without giving me enough background to know the context. For example, X and Y. Can you make a point of including a couple of sentences of context when you message me so that I have the background on what we’re talking about?”

More broadly: I don’t know what the management disaster was last time, but make sure you’ve reflected on whatever happened, identified what you should have done differently, and internalized those lessons. There’s also tons of help available for new managers if you seek out it! Weirdly, companies don’t always offer much support to new managers, but there’s guidance out there if you look for it. Ideally you’d have a more experienced manager as a mentor to bounce things off of, but there are books, classes, articles… Here’s one starting place.

3. Company wants us to pay for a work trip

Every year my company hosts a company trip for partners in the company (it’s a start-up, so a majority of employees were offered partnership).

This is my first year being invited to attend. We got a group “discount” at the recommended hotel the meetings will be held in and a $100 reimbursement. Alison, I’m at the admin level, I can’t feasibly drop $700 for a weekend and have to use a day of PTO to ensure I get there on a Friday. It’s optional to go, but we are HEAVILY encouraged and repeatedly asked to attend. After I pushed back, they finally booked the rooms for us and offered a partial work day to head out to the destination. But even then it’s still expensive, and they are refusing work from home. We also are attending work sessions that we are not going to be paid for under the guise that it’s strategic planning.

Am I crazy in thinking they should do more to cover our costs? Or do companies really just pay for rooms and everything else you cover?

Let me get this straight: They’re heavily pressuring you to attend a work trip but expecting you to pay for your own hotel (minus their contribution of $100) and use PTO to travel to it? And then while you’re there, it won’t count as work time?

Lol no. That’s utterly ridiculous.

Employers are expected to pay the cost of business travel (hotel and transportation at a minimum, and ideally meals as well), your travel time shouldn’t come out of PTO, and if you’re non-exempt you need to be paid for the work sessions that happen on the trip. That last part is federal law; it’s not up to them.

If the trip were both optional and purely recreational (like a reward where you weren’t expected to do any work), this would still be pretty stingy. The fact that it’s an actual work trip and you’re being pressured to go moves this into the realm of outrageous.

What happens if you say, “I’d like to go but I can’t afford the expenses or the PTO”?

4. How do I get out of some of these meetings?

My calendar is filling up with 1:1 check-ins with people not in my vertical. These check-ins started as a way to collaborate more in our remote jobs, and often they are helpful. But I think it’s taking over my week a little too much and I’m constantly struggling to find focus time. I think it would be helpful to reduce cadence on a few of these check-ins but it’s hard to tell people “I want to meet with you less!” Do you have a suggestion on how to ask this diplomatically?

“I’ve been slammed lately and need to carve out more time for project work (or “to meet some deadlines” or whatever makes sense in your context). Can we change the cadence of our meetings to ___?” (Fill in the blank with monthly, every other week, as needed, or whatever makes sense.) Hell, you can even say, “I urgently need to carve out some space on my calendar over the next few weeks. Can we put our check-ins on hold for now?”

5. Did I mess up by referring to a “suspended” hiring process?

I recently had a great first interview with an in-house recruiter for a role I am really excited about. The recruiter told me that she would be moving me to the next step and that I would hear from her within the next week. After two weeks, I sent a brief, polite follow-up email just to check in and see if there were any updates.

The recruiter wrote back saying that they had several recruitment processes going on and they were “unable to progress any further for now” with recruitment for the role in question. I replied that I was sorry to hear that the process had been suspended, but I was still excited about the opportunity and asked her to please get back in touch when they were ready to restart.

She responded that the process was not suspended, it was ongoing, they just couldn’t move as quickly. This directly contradicted her first message and the tone suggested that I’d offended her. I fired back a quick apology and reiterated that I would love to hear from her when they’re ready.

Did I screw up? Is “suspended” a dirty word? It seemed accurate in response to her first message. Do I need to do more to fix this?

“Suspended” isn’t a dirty word and I doubt you offended the recruiter or misstepped. She was simply clarifying that they’re not stopping recruitment; it’s just slowing way down / is on the back burner as a priority right now. There’s nothing to fix; all is fine.