These are five answers to five questions. Here it is…
1. I confessed my crush to my manager
I’m asking for advice about my manager. He’s a level above me, and dislikes hanging out with different levels outside of work hours, although it still happens. My manager told me he takes the rules very seriously, although I recently found out that’s not true because he hangs out with lower level people outside of work, and he has flirted with women in his department, which seems hypocritical.
He was transferred to my department a few months ago, and while he was going through the training process, I confessed my feelings for him. I explained that I want to respect a professional relationship, but it’s my responsibility to let her know that this is more than just a crush to me. He accepted the compliment and said we couldn’t date because we work together, I said I would be willing to change shifts or departments, and he gave a memorized summary of the rules and said we had to get the whole thing approved by HR, etc. Even though it was a soft rejection, it didn’t feel like a complete lack of interest.
My confusion is this: one of his closest work friends said he was known at his previous facility for chasing women he liked around like a puppy, and he brought that same energy to this site by chasing another woman who was flirtatious and also married. I also found out from someone else that he is now in a relationship, before I made my statement. I don’t understand why he didn’t use my moment of confidence as a way to be open about seeing someone, instead of me reciting the rule book.
After my confession he became even more friendly and quirky/playful with me – became more familiar with how I interacted, tried to make more eye contact, make more jokes, stay longer. I took it as a reason for hope, but now I think I was just an ego boost for him and I was needlessly vulnerable and honest. Now I don’t feel like I can trust anything he says as a friend or manager.
No, it’s all a problem. You have a manager who is known for chasing women “like puppies” (which is scary and can easily lead to harassment at work), is stalking a married coworker (while in a position of authority, no less), and is now being friendlier than ever with an employee who confessed she has a crush on him. This is all useless and the opposite of being an effective manager (and a decent co-worker for that matter).
This end of yours pales in comparison, but you don’t “owe it to yourself” to admit to an attraction to a co-worker, especially one higher up your chain of command. Where attraction is involved, you owe it to him colleagues Prioritize their comfort at work over your romantic interest in them. (This doesn’t mean coworkers can never date. It means you need to look for genuine signs of mutual interest first, and still don’t make dramatic statements that will put someone on the spot, and it does mean that people in your chain of command – in any direction – are off limits.)
But you are right that you cannot trust your manager as a friend or as a manager. You can’t trust him as a friend because he is No your friends; He’s your boss (more on that here). And you can’t trust him as a manager because he has shown himself to have terrible judgment.
Seriously, this guy is bad news on every front. You want professional distance, nothing more.
2. Carpenter misbehaving with his colleague
Some new cabinets were being installed at my workplace, so we were encouraged to work from home unless we needed to be on site. The next day, two coworkers who were there shared that the lead carpenter had been very unpleasant toward a much younger coworker, calling him an idiot, making snide comments, and being rude to him.
I keep thinking what would I do in that situation and am unable to decide. What advice would you give? Report to his company? Tell him to keep his tone respectful when he’s in our office? Tell the young co-worker that he or she is being treated poorly and that’s not right? There’s nothing?
We are renting our offices within a building owned by a larger organization that occupies the rest of the space, so the contractors were purchased by our landlord (after asking for a very long time about who was responsible), so we have no direct relationship with the carpentry company.
You have every right to say to someone who is bringing this kind of hostility and disrespect to your workplace, “Can you please speak to your coworker more respectfully? It’s very disruptive to hear that.” Or even just, “Wow, this isn’t right here.” You also have to take the stand to call his company and share what happened (even without a direct connection with them).
3. Leaving when you are a director and your departure will bring disaster
I’m writing as a follow-up to your March 31 post with the question, “How do I train my team to do their jobs without making it clear that I plan to leave?”
In your response, you say, “The more senior you get in your job, the greater your responsibility to make sure things like this are taken care of. If you’re the director of a department and say “If I got buried in an avalanche tomorrow, no one would be able to cover even the basic things, oh well, too bad,” that’s a problem. That kind of planning is part of that job.”
What do you do when you’re the director of a department, and no one will be able to cover even the basics because you’re overworked and understaffed? I am the director of a very small department that has immense influence on both internal and external stakeholders. My supervisor and my grandboss (the head of our organization) acknowledge that my job description calls for at least two full-time positions and that I’m working even more than that. I have told them that the situation is not sustainable and without additional staff and support, I will be leaving. My manager knows I’m looking and knows the staffing situation is the reason. As part of these conversations with him, I’ve documented what would happen if one of my responsibilities wasn’t accomplished, and made suggestions about how to improve those outcomes, so he’s very aware of the impact of my leaving.
I’ve read your site for a long time and finally realized that this situation will never change. There’s really no one who can do most of my work. What is the best way for me to create succession planning for when I leave? I have complete documentation of everything I do, but no one in my department will be considered by higher ups and HR for coverage of my responsibilities, because their positions are classified. I haven’t left yet because I feel very guilty about abandoning my employees and the communities we serve, but my irritation and anger are ultimately strong enough to outweigh the guilt.
You cannot do succession planning in the situation you describe. You’ve accomplished the second part of my advice from that post, which is to make the situation absolutely clear to the person above you. They know. You are not just ignoring the situation. You have raised your concerns and made it clear to the organization’s leadership about the risks they are taking and the fact that you do not have the ability to resolve this yourself. They know. They’re choosing not to deal with it.
You can leave with a clear conscience and no guilt.
4. The company is not paying my employee for the lunch break he or she is not taking
I just started a new role, and I wanted to check in on something going on for one of my direct reports. I think it’s a “legal, but your boss sucks” kind of situation. My hourly direct reports travel for work. She charges from the time she leaves her hotel room in the morning until she returns home at night. The days can be very long sometimes.
When she gets paid overtime, the finance team doesn’t pay her until she completes 45 hours, because technically she got a “lunch break” even though she worked through that lunch break most days. Besides…he’s on a work trip. She got up early to board the plane. He is not at home. She has very little control over her day because she’s on someone else’s schedule. Are they really going to take these five hours?
Should I recommend she take a lunch break, or how do I best advocate to our finance team to pay her for working full time?
Actually, it’s not legal! If she is working during lunch, the law requires her to be paid for that time (or they need to tell her clearly that she has to take an actual lunch break where she is not working and then enforce it).
However, if the amount they are currently paying her for the travel time from her hotel to her workplace and then back later is more than what is required by law (usually this would be treated as commuting if it falls outside her working hours), then on a practical level it may be worthless.
If you want to address this, the framing you want is: “I’m concerned that we’re out of sync with federal law on this, because if she’s working instead of taking a lunch break, we can’t legally make her up for the break.” You can add, “I also don’t want her to feel like we’re being mean and undermining her, given how long she’s working and how disruptive so much travel can be to someone’s life.”
