CLEVELAND—Remarking that his family history was apparently far more complicated than he originally thought, Cleveland resident Nathan Yang received an unsettling Ancestry.com report Monday that said Genghis Khan descended from him. “Huh, that’s weird—this says that I’m closely related to the first khagan of the Mongol…
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. We’re supposed to send compliments for Women’s History Month
I wanted your take on this because for reasons I can’t entirely explain, it feels “icky” to me.
We received an email today through our D&I committee about a new Praise function in Teams that the committee is encouraging employees to use to send appreciation and thanks to female colleagues in celebration of Women’s History Month. On its surface, it’s got good intentions, but it also feels vaguely like one of those Administrative Professionals Day celebrations.
It feels icky because equity for women isn’t about sending female coworkers praise; it’s about equal pay, more parental leave and other support for working parents, having more women in leadership, and other actions that would require your company to do something of actual substance.
What your employer is doing is patronizing. We don’t need compliments from our coworkers; we need real equity.
2. I’m aggravated by the reminders my boss sends our team
I am a GenX/Boomer working at a very large university system. I am staff in a student support department, not faculty. I’ve been in my job for 14 years, in the same role but with increasing autonomy due to frequent restructuring. I’m a remote worker now. (I only go into the office one day a month and no longer have a desk/workstation, I just park my laptop wherever to get through the day.) Anyway, I’m on my eighth manager since taking this job. I’m the person who has been in the department the longest, and have seen the entire structure and staff overturned multiple times. My new boss is 27, has moved up the ranks quickly over three years, from entry-level to assistant director, and has been my supervisor now for four weeks.
Recently, we had a snow day, and our campus has a really good notification system wherein emergency operations blasts a text message to everyone related to campus as soon as they’ve made the decision to close or do a late start. If there is anything I need to know, it will come from emergency ops. An hour after getting the notification from emergency ops, I get a mass text from an unknown number, reiterating that campus will be closed and that we need to log in and put up an out-of-office message. More than half the people on that mass text either replied to it, or “liked” it, and my phone was going off every few minutes.
I found this to be really intrusive and unnecessary, since I’d already received the emergency ops message, and we’ve had at least one snow day a year since I’ve been there, and I’m a grey-haired two-years-from-retirement employee who knows how to read text messages and understand what they mean. We are also being similarly hounded when it is time to turn in timesheets (we are monthly and salaried). We get a calendar popup, an email, a Teams group message, and a text on my phone. I’ve never, in my 45+ years of working, ever forgot to turn in a timesheet. So I’m sitting here today, on my second snow day (which is following the same chain of events from yesterday’s snow day text message stream) wondering if I am justified in being angry about being treated like a child. Is this a generational thing? Our department is 15 people, I’m the oldest, there are three in their early 40s, and the rest are 33 and under, several in their mid-20s. My previous boss, a millennial just over 30, did not send me reminder texts after campus emergency ops texts, nor has she ever sent me a message reminding me to turn in my timesheet. These heavy-handed reminders have appeared recently. To be clear, if there were truly some emergency that I needed to be informed about regarding our department, I would be fine with getting those texts. But reiterating what I already know (and received)? It is over the top.
Should I bring this up with my boss, or just keep my mouth shut and be aggravated on the regular until I retire in a couple years? If I’m off-base, I’m happy to accept that.
Your reaction is a lot more over-the-top than the provocation is!
These are very minor things. Maybe there’s been an issue with people not putting on their out-of-office messages on snow days, who knows. But also, who cares? It’s a small blip in a day that it sounds like you’re getting paid for. As for timesheets, if you’ve never forgotten to turn one in, you’re in the minority; it is very, very common for people to need to be reminded about them. Instead of feeling like you’re being treated like a child, consider that you’re being treated like someone on a team with varied needs that might not all be identical to your needs. You can just ignore the things that don’t apply to you.
I don’t see anything generational here except that you’re connecting things to age that aren’t really about age, and you seem very age-focused in your letter.
3. How should Rachel have handled the restaurant interview on Friends?
I was wondering the other day about the infamous scene from friends when Rachel Green gets an opportunity to interview for a prestigious new position at Gucci and turns up to the interview to find her current boss sitting at the table next to her. She panics, tells him that she’s on a date, makes a complete fool of herself in front of the interviewer, and gets fired anyway.
Obviously this scenario is wildly unlikely, but it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that you could run into a coworker or manager whilst in a public place for an interview. How do you think she should have handled it? I can’t see any situation where that doesn’t jeopardize her chances at the interview and risk her employment.
Agggh! Nightmare. (Although most people wouldn’t mess it up as much as Rachel did.)
One option would be to quickly introduce your boss with a pointed “this is my manager at X Company,” figuring that your interviewer would realize what was happening and help you finesse the situation. But enough people are oblivious to those dynamics that I’d worry your interviewer might out you with some horribly unsmooth comment like “your loss might be our gain, haha” or similar. Another option would be to quietly say, “I’m so sorry, but my current manager just sat down at the next table and doesn’t know I’m interviewing.” But then where do you go from there? Switch tables? That’s going to be obvious. Reschedule? It’s a clusterfudge of epic proportions and possibly the only action would be to fake a choking incident and leave immediately.
4. I did horribly at an internal interview
Ugh I’m still cringing about my terrible performance at an internal interview.
I work in info sec and I have been on the policy and compliance side for some time, but went back to school for a technical degree and have been studying to break into a more technical role. An opportunity at work opened up for a development program for a technical role that was likely over my head, but I went for it. It would be a seven-week program where you would then be placed with a mentor who would help you get situated in your new role.
They scheduled the interview, a panel interview, for 7 am the day I got back from vacation. I was a nervous wreck trying to be present visiting a family member and her new baby and trying to prepare for this interview by working on labs and going through my old school work which was most applicable to the role. My mistake was not looking over the program description again to look at some of the technical terms they’d be asking me and not refreshing on some of my basic learning.
On the morning of the interview, I was ready — I thought. I felt good and was excited to talk about this opportunity — and I totally blacked out and panicked. There were no behavioral questions. I had an opportunity to briefly introduce myself and give a description of my current role, but after that it was a rapid-fire technical panel and my mind completely went blank. I couldn’t answer nearly a single question, and by the time it came to talk about some of the labs I HAD done, I was so overwhelmed I couldn’t explain myself. It was utterly embarrassing.
So now I feel like I’m going to be seen as a fraud — like, why did we hire her again? The self-doubt and doom-talking are also telling me I won’t be considered for other roles. Even worse, I have an interview for a similar full-time role in the same department coming up (different teams, but they work closely together). I feel more prepared for this interview and am using this experience to learn, but now I am so frazzled and embarrassed that I don’t want to go. I’m actively fighting the urge to withdraw. I’m so worried that they have been talking to each other or others on their team who I happily work with in my office.
How can I forgive myself for this awful experience? How do I allow myself to move forward and gain some self confidence back so that I can put my best foot forward for the next interview? I haven’t lost the motivation to learn. My ego is just bruised!
This happens! Most people have a bad interview at one point. And it doesn’t sound like the circumstances really set you up for success with this one (although there’s also a lesson in there about how you prep for future interviews).
Are you up for talking to the person in charge of hiring for that role — not to ask to be reconsidered, but to try to reset their impressions? You could say something like, “I realize I didn’t perform well in my interview; my mind went blank in a way I was not expecting, and I’m hoping that if another role ever comes up, you’ll be able to see it wasn’t representative of how I normally perform.” That way, if it was as bad as you fear, you’ll be cluing them in that something else was going on, and they’re more likely to give you another chance in the future (and less likely to express any opinion that you’re not a strong candidate for that other role, or at least to temper it if they do).
5. Glassdoor can un-anonymize you
It appears that Glassdoor not only requires a name and other personal information with an account, they will actively add that information to accounts that don’t have it against the wishes of the people involved. You mention Glassdoor a fair amount and seem to understand needs of anonymity with this kind of feedback so I thought you’d want to be aware of it. The extremely cavalier attitude to user privacy here is alarming.
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Kamala Harris toured a Planned Parenthood that offers abortion services, the first vice president to do so, where she delivered a speech defending reproductive rights. What do you think?
