1. My boss flips out when people resign
I work for a small nonprofit — one of those where everyone “wears a lot of hats” and knows each other. People also tend to stay for a while. Unfortunately, our executive director, Ron, does some genuinely concerning things when people give notice. A few examples:
– A department director gave notice. Ron initially tried to convince her to stay by offering a sizable raise, then tried citing a relative’s ongoing illness, saying he didn’t understand how she could do this to him “with everything going on.” He started pretending she didn’t say anything when she spoke during meetings … including external meetings. He also talked openly with others in the field about how she only got the job due to his connections (not true).
– Another department leader gave notice when she was offered her dream role. Same attempt to keep her by invoking the relative’s illness. After she doubled down on leaving, Ron called the board of her new organization to ask when she really needed to start and if it was really in two weeks. The person responded that he’d have to talk to her about her timeline. Ron then fired her on the spot for “lying” about her new start date, which he later described as “an extreme betrayal of trust.”
– A different department director wanted to leave. She had been underpaid, dealt with a lot of exasperating situations, and wanted to return to her previous field. Ron said he’d give her anything she wanted if she stayed a full year. She got a title bump and a significant raise as a result.
For various reasons, I’ve started job hunting. I’m not a director, but I’m a senior leader who has been here for several years and manage some integral tasks. I want to do the professional thing and give at least two weeks notice, but I’m not confident that he won’t lash out. If I didn’t give two weeks, I’d quietly prepare everything for a smooth transition behind the scenes; this still doesn’t sit right with me, though.
Should I plan to give two weeks and just brace for the fallout? If so, do I need to let my new employer know? And, if it’s smarter to give less notice, how do I mitigate the impact of that choice?
First and foremost, don’t tell Ron where you’re going when you resign so that he can’t call them up (!). If asked, you can say, “It’s not public yet, but I’ll let you know once it is.” (That last part is just a social nicety; you’re not obligated to circle back with the info later on.)
As for whether to give two weeks … Ron is coming very close to forfeiting the right to expect any notice by the way he behaves, but his behavior isn’t so abusive that you should skip giving notice altogether. Give two weeks (but not longer) and just know he’s going to spend that time lobbying you to stay. (In fact, you might use that to your advantage and tell him you’ll think about it, just so he stays in nice mode for longer. Obviously, don’t commit to anything.)
If he does become abusive, you don’t need to stick around at that point — and knowing that you’re willing and able to say “I’m not willing to be talked to this way so I’m going to wrap things up today” can make the final two weeks of dealing with a Ron a lot more bearable.
Related:
how do I resign when my boss is a horrible person who will yell and insult me?
update about the boss who’s angry over two weeks notice (advice on revoking a notice period and leaving immediately, if that becomes necessary)
2. Fired manager keeps showing up around the office
About a month ago, a supervisor of mine was fired, likely for performance issues but my office is being very secretive about the reason. Overall it wasn’t unexpected as they used to butt heads with leadership, but they were liked and are missed.
Since then, I’ve seen them in the vicinity of the office on three separate occasions. Once they were meeting someone else for lunch, another time they were in the nearby public library (which is not near their home), and most recently I saw them just out front of our office building. They actually stopped a couple of my coworkers. I asked what they were doing was doing and my coworkers said our former supervisor asked them for a favor. A few other people have seen them out and about as well.
It feels weird to me that they keep coming back to the office they were fired from, but I’m not sure how to handle that. To my knowledge, they aren’t coming in the office and they really haven’t been doing anything. Honestly, I’m just looking for a gut check on whether this is odd behavior and something I should bring up with my current boss.
It’s odd. A single time wouldn’t be odd (meeting a former colleague for lunch isn’t weird, and they could have a reason for being in that library), but hanging out in front of your building asking coworkers for a favor is fully weird and makes me really want to know what that favor was (and why they couldn’t contact people another way to ask for it if it’s not something shady). That last one is what I’d mention to your boss — not in a scandalized “this must be stopped” kind of way, but a lighter, “Hey, this seemed off to me and I wanted to mention in case it’s something you’d want to know.”
3. Colleagues keep giving me underbaked papers for editing
I am a mid-career academic, and, as is typical for academics, I volunteer to read other researchers’ drafts (paper drafts, grant applicants, dissertation chapters, etc.). I’m a good writer and I read fast, so this isn’t an undue burden on me, and I enjoy the editing process.
Recently some people have sent me some paper drafts that were in really, really rough form. We’re talking, like, a dissertation chapter with an introductory section that was completely missing, or, a bunch of case studies dumped down on paper with no thesis and no connecting narrative, or a discussion of a set of experiments that had no basic structure imposed on it at the section or paragraph level (no introductory/concluding paragraphs, topic sentences, etc.). In all of these cases, my comments back were just that the work needed this high-level structure, and I’d be happy to read it again and in more detail when it did, but if they were having trouble with this part, I’d be up for a brainstorming session, as someone to bounce ideas off of.
One of the people whose paper I looked said that I was bad at giving feedback because I wasn’t willing to put in the effort to look at the paper in detail and edit the parts that worked. I told him that I can only judge the content of a paper relative to the overall argument it constructs, and if that argument is lacking, I don’t have any basis to make those judgments. Also, when people have given me papers that already worked well at the structural level (or even when they didn’t, but the argument they were making was clear), I have edited in that level of detail. But when the author hasn’t chosen an argument, I can’t fix their problems by making that choice for them.
Am I off-base? I’m honestly annoyed that people are sending me papers in such rough form — my own feeling is that if you’re asking someone else to look at the paper, you’ve already gotten it up to a baseline level of competence and want a second set of eyes to identify weird phrasings, logical gaps, confusing passages, and the like. If I had a paper in this sort of shape that I were sending to a friend, I’d have some specific questions for them about where they thought the paper should go, and not make a request for general editing.
You are not off-base. That one guy is just being ridiculous.
It’s completely reasonable (and frankly necessary, especially for work you’re doing for free and as a favor to someone) to say, “It looks like this is in early stages — with no thesis or connecting narrative yet — and so it’s not ready yet for the type of editing I was envisioning, but once you have a full draft, I’d be glad to take a look.”
And to that guy in particular, it would be reasonable to say, “It sounds like you’re looking for someone to talk through the ideas themselves before you draft the paper, which is a different thing than what I was offering.” (Left unsaid can be, “I might have done that if you’d asked politely, but that’s not on offer anymore.”)
4. Am I obligated to attend office Christmas parties when mom died right at Christmas?
My mother died right at Christmas, which rendered the holiday season as the sad anniversary of her death rather than a joyous time, and that persists despite the years since her passing. I am single and, since that time, I have always scheduled my PTO to go out of town around Christmas to spend the holiday with my only surviving sibling and their family in a distant city. I always try to avoid attending holiday celebrations, especially at work.
My current manager places great emphasis on festive jolly group celebrations, especially at Christmas. Am I still obligated to wear a game face and attend something that only brings me sorrow and sad memories?
Nope. You can simply have other plans for that time. If you’re pressed, you can say, “It’s a rough time of year for my family so I’m going to opt out.”
I’m sorry about your mom.
5. My company just laid off an admin, but still has contractors doing admin work
I work at a fully remote nonprofit. Until a few days ago, we had three full-time salaried admins, with the same title and job description, each supporting different teams. It’s been a chaotic year, and a whole department just got eliminated. Including the admin supporting them.
The thing is, there’s at least one contractor-status admin doing the same work for other teams, without the benefits, etc. There could be more, since the org is very opaque about contractors. (They don’t go on the org chart, and we don’t get announcements when they join/leave/change teams.) The use of contractor admins already seems like a stretch legally (especially long-term), but keeping them on while firing a full-time employee … surely that’s a legal violation, right?
Everyone lives in different states so I’m not sure where to look besides federal law, and I don’t expect HR to do anything, so I’m considering reporting this directly to the Department of Labor. I don’t want to get the contractors fired but I think they should have redistributed this person rather than tossing them out the door. Obviously, if we’ve got contractors, the org thinks there’s enough work! Am I right that there’s something happening here worth raising a fuss over?
It’s not illegal to lay off employees while keeping contractors. Employers are allowed to do that, and they’re not required to reshuffle work to keep an employee instead of a contractor.
If there’s a legal violation here, it’s if they have that contractor admin misclassified as a contractor while treating her like an employee. There are specific legal standards work needs to meet for someone to be paid as a contractor, and if she’s full-time and doing the same work as employees, there’s a decent chance she’s misclassified. However, if she’s a W2 employee of the contractor firm (not an independent contractor who receives a 1099), that would be legal. All of that is a completely separate thing from the layoffs, though; the layoffs themselves aren’t in violation of anything.