I didn’t expect my employee to take so much time off, company doesn’t want to pay fairly for a promotion, and more
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. I didn’t expect my employee to take off so much time after a family death
My only direct report, Jessy, recently had an unexpected death in her spouse’s family. This has taken a huge toll on both of them, especially due to its sudden nature.
Jessy let me know a couple of days after the passing. I checked her PTO balances (which are generous in our company), let her know how much time she could take, and encouraged her to take the time she needed. I expected this would be two or three days at the most.
Instead, Jessy was off three days last week and three and a half this week. This has really put me in a bind and left me with a lot of extra work that I hadn’t planned on. In addition to a normal heavy workload, we have several special projects happening. There was no one else who could step in, and one contractor we reached out to never responded, so it’s been a lot of 12-hour days and lost weekend time for me.
I want to be compassionate and understanding, but I can’t help feeling that the time Jessy is taking off is … excessive. She submitted her PTO requests a day or two at a time, so it’s been difficult for me to gauge her availability. Maybe that’s a lesson for me for next time — I’m a first-time manager and I’ve never encountered something like this, so I’m just trying to learn.
I’m hopeful that we can start getting back into a normal rhythm next week, but this has shaken my confidence in Jessy’s reliability and commitment. Does that sound unfair to you? I just get a bad sense that she’s spiraling and I’m not sure what to expect when she (hopefully) gets back into a regular schedule. Jessy has done good work and has been reliable in the year she’s been with us. I’m just not sure how to convey that her absences have hurt us, we’re all sympathetic to the situation and the job needs are the same as before without coming off as completely callous.
Yes, you’re being unfair. You told her to take all the time she needed, but now you’re holding it against her that she took you at your word. If you didn’t really mean “take all the time you need, no matter how much that is,” then you needed to use different language — like “Why don’t you take the rest of the week off?” or “Why don’t you take the rest of the week off and then we can touch base about what you’re thinking after that?”
For what it’s worth, I don’t think the amount of time she’s taken is excessive! But the bigger issue is that, as far as she knows, you’ve actively encouraged her to take it. Plus, people do have crises that can result in them suddenly missing a lot of work; this is one of them.
In any case, at this point you’ve made the offer and walking it back wouldn’t be great. But you could say, “Can you give me a sense of what you’re thinking your schedule will look like over the next few weeks? I’m trying to plan and ensure we have enough coverage, so that will help me know if we might need to push some work back.”
Related:
How does bereavement leave work?
2. My company doesn’t want to pay fairly for a promotion
At the end of the year, I am leaving the company that I’ve been employed by for most of my professional career and am working with my direct boss (CEO) to promote the person within my team that I believe would be the best replacement. I’ve been in my current role as the Managing Director of our division for about seven years. My suggested replacement has 15 years’ experience with the company to my 25 and has followed the same approximate pathway that I did prior to getting promoted to the MD role.
We agree on the person but are far apart on what an appropriate salary should be. My strong opinion is that the salary should reflect, primarily, the job duties — with some factoring for length of service and experience. I currently make a little more than twice what her current salary is and am suggesting an increase to a bit less than what I am making but still a significant raise from where she is now. My boss’s position is that it’s too much of a raise to give someone all at once and she should have some room to grow and is suggesting 1.5x her current salary. I’m nearly certain that if we hired an outside candidate my current salary would be the baseline we would have to offer. Any thoughts?
Would she be competitive with outside candidates if you opened it up to them? If so, the salary should be on par with what you’d offer an outside candidate. On the other hand, if she wouldn’t be competitive with outside candidates but she’s getting the job because she’s a known quantity who you’re confident can grow into the job (and you’re going to be explicit about where she’ll need to grow), then what your boss is proposing could make sense. But it should be based on the job itself and the level you expect her to contribute at, not pegged to what she’s earning currently in a completely different job.
Your boss is far from alone in that “too much of a raise to give someone all at once” framework — but it’s not a raise. It’s a new salary because she’ll be in a new position, and she should be paid appropriately for the work she’ll be doing.
Related:
I got promoted, but I can’t get a fair salary
3. I’m left out of my team’s group chat
I have been working at a great organization for seven years. I really love my job and thought I had the respect of my peers, but something has thrown me for a loop. It is a small staff of only seven, many of whom have been here for a long time. When I came on, I noticed that four of the longest serving staff were very friendly towards each other and were constantly texting each other, which did not bother me at all. However, last year, a new person came on and I recently found out this new person has been added to their texts and chat (I have not, nor has anyone ever told me about them). Again, I am not upset because I thought it was just a social thing. But now it has come to my attention that they are using these group texts and chats to discuss important behind-the-scene work issues. Also, another new person has started here and they are also on these texts and chats.
I am starting to feel very left out, as they are always discussing issues that I have no idea about. To make it worse, my boss is on these chats and texts and does not seem to think anything is wrong. She frequently tells me things going on because she knows I am not part of these texts and chats. She is now on leave and I am completely left out of the loop. I feel like complaining about this will just get me despised.
My boss, who is on leave, is the HR person for our organization, and we have a very punitive board of directions and going to them would be a massive betrayal of my coworkers.Should I just suck it up until retirement or should I start dropping hints that I know it going on? I am scared to confront them as I am worried about backlash. I am obviously the least popular person in this office and I worry for my future.
Wait, you’re looking at this as adversarial when the most likely explanation is that it’s not adversarial or deliberately exclusionary at all. The most likely explanation is that it started as a social chat with people they clicked with socially and then over time work stuff started getting discussed there without anyone thinking about the fact that you’re not in it. You don’t need to suck it up until retirement (!) or drop hints about something going on, and it’s definitely not board-worthy even if the board were more reasonable. You also don’t need to confront anyone! You can simply say, “It sounds like work stuff sometimes gets discussed in your group chat — if that’s right, could you add me so I’m not missing things?” If they want to have a separate social chat, they can make a new one … but it’s very reasonable to ask to be included when work things are getting talked about.
If that doesn’t work, then talk to your boss when she’s back from leave and say you’ve realized you’re missing out on work discussions and can she either add you to the chat where they’re happening or move those discussions somewhere where you’re included.
4. How do I explain that I’m leaving my job because of a terrible boss?
I am currently two years into (my first) job that I find hard but incredibly rewarding and interesting, and the pay is actually rather good, but I am right now polishing my resume because I am tired of dealing with our CEO and his wife. They are an … interesting couple, attached at the hip and with weird word ethic, and great specialists but terrible at managing — treating every resignation as a personal offense, going off at the slightest perceived impoliteness, discussing past and present employees behind their backs, etc. One particularly wonderful instance was the CEO calling everyone pigs in our work chat for not congratulating his wife on International Women’s Day nor on her birthday. Alison, we are all women save for him, his wife was not even present that day, we did not know her birthday, and Women’s Day was only about to happen the next day anyway. No apology followed. There are only seven of us, including the two of them, so it is impossible to stay away from the constant crazy.
I cannot quite understand how to explain to interviewers why I’m leaving the job without coming across as a rumor-spreader or something. I imagine saying “I had a crazy boss and had to run” is not too great to say to your possible future boss, somehow.
You don’t need to get into it at all (and shouldn’t). It’s your first job, you’ve been there two years, you’ve got some experience under your belt now, and you’re interested in taking on something new — and you’re interested in the new position because ___. It’s actually that last part that will be most important. No one is going to think it’s weird that you’re leaving a first job after two years, so you don’t need to get into the real reasons at all.
For the record, though — not congratulating his wife on International Women’s Day, what?! We don’t … go around congratulating women on International Women’s Day; that’s not the way it works, and that’s extremely strange.
Related:
how do I tell interviewers why I’m leaving my job without badmouthing my employer?
5. Quitting when I just hired new team members
I manage a team of one report who’s fairly junior. Typically there would be 7-10 people supporting my function at a company of this size.
I made the case to hire two more people and went through the search process. Both have accepted offers but haven’t started yet. I feel super burned out, and I’m considering quitting my industry to do something else entirely. But I don’t think I can ethically leave until my new folks have onboarded, at a minimum. Hopefully having a bigger team will change how burned out I feel. If things don’t change, how long do I owe it to my team to stay?
If the situation was reversed, I would want my reports to prioritize their mental health and not feel obligated to stay. But somehow it feels different as a manager.
You can leave as soon as you want to. Yes, it’s not ideal for the new hires, but this stuff happens: managers have health crises, family emergencies, unexpected moves, and job offers they can’t turn down. You’re allowed to leave when you need to leave. And you’re not even talking about leaving before they start (which you could also do if you felt you had to); you’re talking about getting them onboarded first! You don’t need to feel guilty about leaving when it’s the right time for you.
Maybe it will help to consider managers of bigger teams, some of which are so large that if the manager couldn’t ethically leave whenever they had a new employee, they’d never be able to job search with any confidence.
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