1. I was hired to manage an unmanageable team
Just about a year ago, I started managing a team of creatives. I had worked alongside them for several years and had a good rapport with all of them. That all changed the instant I was promoted.
Right up front, two of the seven called our division director and said he had made a huge mistake by promoting me. Another told me to my face on day 1 that she would have been a better manager and then took an unplanned vacation for two weeks. Two more started hiding their work from me. Another sends me messages about how “disappointed” she is in how I handle situations. Only one was open to the change, and has frankly thrived under my management.
I have made exactly two changes since taking over: First, I asked each of them to share their (existing) project plans with each other in advance since they often need to go into all-hands-on-deck mode when deadlines hit. And second, I wrote some documentation for other divisions so they would know which team members were responsible for which project. My team characterized these moves as micromanagement and complained en masse to the division director.
I confided in a colleague about my struggles and they told me the team has always been unmanageable. In fact, it turns out I was promoted into this role because the department director was fed up with their attitudes. But since our company doesn’t have a “my way or the highway” philosophy, the director couldn’t clean house and instead tried a Hail Mary, hoping a new manager (me) would shake things up. Is this just an unwinnable situation? Do I need to get out?
It sounds pretty unwinnable, yeah. That is some strong and frankly bananas opposition to the changes you described. I admit that before I got to the middle of your letter I was thinking, “Any chance the problem could be on your side?” but after hearing what your colleague told you about the history of the team … it really sounds like them, not you, and if your company won’t support you in dealing with them decisively, you’re almost certainly better off getting out.
Before you decide that, though, talk to your boss about what you’re encountering and what you’d like to do to fix it (presumably, holding people accountable for professional behavior and making it clear that they need to meet reasonable expectations if they want to stay — ideally similarly to this). It’s possible that if your boss realizes they’re about to lose a second manager over this, they might be more amenable to changes than they were the last time around.
2. Microwaving eggs at work
After the microwaving fish at work question, I have to know, is it okay to reheat egg-based dishes such as quiche in a microwave at work? There is no ventilation in the kitchen.
Fish is the notoriously bad one (in the U.S., at least; it’s heavily based on culture). Burned popcorn and cruciferous vegetables seem to be tied for second place.
I think you’d be fine reheating quiche. The goal isn’t to never heat up anything that someone somewhere might object to, but to avoid the really high-profile “don’t do it” category of (most) fish.
3. My new job told me skip a family funeral or convince a coworker to change their own plans
My question is about the role of a manager in a small office. This happened several years ago, and I’ve been wondering about how a situation could have been better resolved.
I had just begun working for a small nonprofit office — a manager(Rowan) and three employees. (Jamie, Robin, and me). Before I’d been hired, a series of weekend events had been planned. These were fun events and I was quite happy to be involved. Running occasional 2 -3 hour events on weekends was part of the job, and there was flexibility about taking time off before or after the event. In general, it was a great system. Jamie and I ran all in-person events. Robin was non-vaccinated (tail end of Covid times) so could not attend public events. Rowan, the manager was not directly involved.
Within my first month on the job, we had a scheduling conflict. Jamie had a long-planned special outing with their family for a day on the weekend, and I would run the activity on my own. Then I unexpectedly had a significant family funeral on the same day as our program (not parent or sibling but still a big deal). I went to Rowan, expecting them to offer a solution, possibly to cover for me or to cancel the event. Their point of view was, Why Are You Bothering Me with This? Rowan, who also had plans for the weekend, told me to either not go to the funeral, or to convince Jamie to cancel their plans.
Rowan was visibly very frustrated, not with the situation but with me personally. I did not ask Jamie about changing plans. I hardly knew them yet, and it all felt very awkward. I was just politely assertive with both that I would not be able to work that day. I would have quit (or been fired) over this. I was in the fortunate position of not needing the job.
Poor Jamie very reluctantly, and quite sadly, rescheduled their family outing. I felt quite guilty. Jamie and I developed a positive working relationship in spite of an awkward beginning.
How could the manager have handled this in a better way? What could I have done differently?
Rowan sucks here. I don’t know how cancelable the event was or how important Rowan’s own plans were, but telling an employee “skip a family funeral or convince your coworker to cover for you” is not a reasonable stance. If Jamie were a potential option, Rowen should have talked to Jamie themselves, not left it to you.
As for you, it sounds like you handled as well as you could: you made your boundaries clear (you wouldn’t be working that day) and were clear in your own mind that you were willing to leave over it if you had to. I understand why you felt guilty when Jamie ended up having to cancel their own plans, but that’s on the organization for not having a better system in place, not on you.
4. Employer is hinting I owe them money for used PTO now that I’ve resigned
I’m salaried exempt. According to my employee manual (which disclaims that it is not a contract or comprehensive document and can be changed at any time at my employer’s discretion without notice), I get five sick days (40 hours) a year, and three weeks (120 hours) of vacation time.
Technically speaking, the vacation time is accrued at a rate of 10 hours per month, and my employer just chooses to front the time. When you put in your notice, the vacation time is recalculated based on the accrual rate and any remaining time is paid out. There is no indication in the employee manual that this is also true of sick time.
I gave my bosses a heads-up that I might be leaving last month and formally put in a month of notice last week. This extra notice was not in any way required; I just knew they wouldn’t push me out and thought it would be courteous since they’d had trouble filling the position back when they hired me. I took a two-week vacation well before I put in my notice and I have continued to use sick time as normal.
One of my bosses has just hinted that I might get my pay docked because by their calculations I owe the company 10 hours of vacation time and 20 hours of sick time. I know the answer is probably yes, but I have to ask: Can they really do this to me retroactively?
It depends on the exact wording of their policy. In general, employers can require you to pay back any PTO they advanced to you before you had accrued it. It’s considered akin to a loan or a cash advance. But it depends on whether their written policy indicates that they advanced the leave to you, in which case they can make you pay it back, or whether it was considered earned as of the first of the year, in which case you already earned it and they can’t. Also, federal law says they can only deduct it from your paycheck if they informed you that was their policy before they advanced the leave — so look at your handbook to see if it’s spelled out in there.
It’s also worth checking your state law, because some states prohibit paycheck deductions for PTO repayments without your written consent. (That wouldn’t mean the debt disappears; they could take legal action to get it if they wanted to, although the odds of them doing that are fairly small.)
5. Has Ask a Manager become more anti-corporate?
I’m a very long-time reader and fan. Recently, I’ve noticed a subtle tone change in your responses to be more … not pro-worker, you’ve always been pro-worker … maybe anti-corporate? For examples, on a response to a question about AI, you recently called this a “dystopian hellhole,” which is kind of more blanket negative than I’ve come to expect. You are more blunt about the things that suck widely in the world of work and less … measured? in your responses.
This is by no means criticism. I too have gone from “there are good companies you can work at, you just need to find them” to “yeah, this is a corporato-crazy nightmare and it’s all falling apart and any place you work might get eaten by the system at any moment.” I’m currently at a place that, until recently, I was happily planning on retiring from and had invested nearly 15 years in … now I’m glancing around nervously and leaning into side hustles because I just can’t see anything good coming out of the current chaos. And I’m far enough in my career, that I’ve been through three mass layoff / economic downturns (the dotcom bubble, ’08, and Covid) and it never felt like this before.
You might not feel comfortable answering this, and if so I get it! I was just curious about the change I sensed and the impact that your role has had on you.
There’s been a definite evolution in my perspective over the years! Watching the choices a lot of companies made during the pandemic was a major turning point for me, but I’d probably been moving in that direction for a while. You can’t read years of the mail I get with unending stories of people being harmed by their employers and not be influenced by it.
The other factor, and it’s a big one, is that when I started writing the site I was writing from the perspective of someone for whom the system had worked pretty well, and I didn’t have enough appreciation of the fact that while my approach had worked well for me, it wasn’t going to work well for everyone … or enough appreciation for all the reasons behind that. Over time, I’ve become a lot more aware of that, and that hopefully comes across in my writing here.
Beyond that, our culture as a whole has become much more clear-eyed about the systemic injustices built into our labor system as it’s currently practiced (along with a whole bunch of other things, like growing income inequality, stagnant wages, soaring costs, and the absolute catastrophe that is our health care system) and I’m no exception to that.