1. New employee gets defensive while I’m training her
I’m a lead dental assistant with over 10 years of experience, and I’m struggling with how to manage a newer dental assistant who has been in the field for five months. She’s 42, and I’m 30.
Almost anytime I correct or redirect her, even over normal clinical or workflow issues, she becomes defensive or offended and will sometimes argue with me instead of taking the feedback. She frequently talks over me and other coworkers, and I often have difficulty finishing an explanation before she interrupts.
There are also some significant boundary issues. She follows me from room to room throughout the day, stands extremely close, and seems to need constant interaction or reassurance. She also overshares very personal information at work, which can make conversations uncomfortable and difficult to redirect.
The hardest part is that I’m responsible for helping make sure things are done correctly and safely in a busy dental office. She is still very new and understandably has a lot to learn, but when I try to teach or correct something, it can turn into an argument rather than a training moment.
I don’t want to be unnecessarily harsh, and I understand that different personalities communicate differently. At the same time, I’m becoming exhausted from constantly managing her emotional reaction to routine feedback while also trying to do my own job.
How would you recommend setting firm professional boundaries and giving corrective feedback to someone who consistently reacts this way? At what point does this stop being a communication issue and become a performance issue that management needs to formally address?
It’s already at the point where you need to loop in your manager about what’s going on — particularly her defensiveness and argumentativeness when given feedback or correction, because that’s a serious issue. Her manager needs to be aware.
You also have the standing to say to her directly, “When I give you feedback or correct the way you’re doing something, you often argue with me or push back on what I’m saying. It’s part of my job to make sure our processes are followed correctly, and I need you to be in learning mode when I’m training you.” And then in the moment when it’s happening, you can say, “This is an example of what I was talking about. You’re arguing with me while I’m training you on how you need to do the job.”
With the oversharing, you can say, “This is more personal than I’m comfortable hearing about at work, but let me show you (work-related topic)” … or, depending on the topic, “This is more graphic than I want to hear at work” or “Whoa, that’s too much for me at work, let’s move on!”
But let your boss know what’s happening.
Related:
my employee argues and debates every little assignment and decision
how to manage an employee who’s argumentative when I correct her work
2. Is it normal to form a committee just to appease someone who wants change?
I will be the first to admit I don’t know a great deal about the corporate world, because I have been self-employed for the vast majority of my career. On the side, I also participate in, let’s say, teapot decorating, for the sake of anonymity. I am not a professional teapot decorator; it is a creative outlet that is completely separate from my professional work.
Years ago, I was asked by some people who wanted to start a teapot decorating team if I would join their team as one of their founding members. Lately there have been some problems on the team with disputes between some of the decorators, so I went to the board and suggested we could benefit from guidelines establishing clearer roles. The board told me they liked my ideas and appointed me to a committee, with a couple other people, to draft the guidelines. It is probably worth mentioning here that half of the committee was on the board, and half was not.
The committee’s work seemed to be going well and after the better part of a year we seemed to have arrived at a consensus about what the guidelines should look like. Then out of the blue, we were told our work was done and the board was going to take over from here.
I asked if the committee could attend the meeting at which the board planned to discuss our work, and I was told no. Then when I complained that this was unfair to the committee, I received a phone call from the board president in which I was told that I should stop complaining because she had a lot of experience in high-level management positions at big companies, and that this kind of thing is typical on corporate boards. I was further told that I should be grateful, because the board had set up the whole committee just to appease me, had cajoled a bunch of people who didn’t actually care about the guidelines to go along with it for my sake, and never actually planned to implement anything we came up with.So our question for you is, would this actually fly on a real corporate board? Is this behavior actually typical of what happens at big companies?
It’s not terribly unusual if you consider that the situation is basically: person suggests idea, person is told to explore the idea with a committee, committee comes up with formalized ideas, board (or some other leadership group) considers the proposal from there. That is pretty typical.
Telling you that they only suggested the committee to appease you was rude … but also not an unusual thing to do (only to tell you openly). “You have an idea, great, go formalize it within this specific structure” is a pretty time-honored way of responding to ideas that otherwise would be a lot of work for someone who is not the idea-suggester to implement. It’s a way of saying, “Okay, if you want this thing, do the initial work of thinking through what it would actually entail because otherwise you’re just dumping it on us.”
The fact that it took the committee a year to come up with a proposal is a sign of … well, something. Maybe that it wasn’t a small task and so it made a lot of sense to delegate this stage of the work to a committee. Maybe that this is a group that has a hard time coming to consensus, or just isn’t running efficient meetings — or maybe it’s an excellent illustration of your original point that the group needs clearer roles.
Your board president sounds rude, though.
3. Former employer keeps emailing me and has ignored requests to stop
Nine years ago, I did some freelance work for a company in my field. Whenever there is a national or international event in this field (which can last for weeks), this company is one of the top providers of on-site services. It’s a prestigious and competitive field.
My stint with them was good but short — I was in between jobs and soon found a new full-time position. I am now in a fairly senior role with one of their big competitors.
The problem is that, whenever they are planning for one of these events, they still put me on the mailing list to organize shifts, etc. and I end up getting multiple emails a day during the event. I’m assuming my (private) mail address is still on some list of freelancers they keep, or maybe people randomly recycle old lists. I have asked them a number of times over the years to remove me. Sometimes there’s no reaction, sometimes it works for that one event. But then something new comes up, someone else sets up a mailing list, and there I am again, getting spammed by them day after day for weeks on end.
Any idea on how to stop the spam? Just blocking the sender is not much help because it’s always different people writing. And I’m reluctant to full-out block them as a company because they are a big player in our field, and you never know where the next step in your career might lead.
Also, I’m also a bit worried because these emails contain data that is clearly not meant for people outside their company — team schedules, strategies, etc. Could it ever be held against me (in a legal sense) that I receive these? As I said, I have alerted them lots of times, sometimes even spelling out “I don’t think this is information you want one of your competitors to have.” Do I have to continue doing this every time?
Can you reply to the next person and spell out what you have here? “I have asked multiple times over the years to be removed but I keep getting the emails anyway. Do you know how I can get permanently removed from wherever these email addresses are being pulled from?” And if that doesn’t work with the first person you ask, I’d keep sending that in response to future senders — eventually someone will probably figure out how to remove you. Or just keep deleting.
You don’t need to worry about being held responsible for receiving their private details. You’ve asked repeatedly to be removed! It’s not on you. If you’re worried, hold on to a few of the emails telling them to, but I wouldn’t worry about that aspect.
4. I was promised advancement opportunities 2 years ago, and they haven’t happened
I started at my current company a little over two years ago. When I took the job, it was more or less a lateral move with a slight bump in pay. I had already had over 10 years experience in this position at this level (20 years overall in the industry). I’m in a senior enough role that room for growth is hard to come by, and I had hit that ceiling hard. But I was promised opportunities to pursue passion projects and room for growth — so much so that the hiring manager told me they were planning to make a position above the one I’d applied for, and she would have moved me directly into said higher position right away if not for HR policies. I excitedly took the job and looked forward to these new opportunities I’d been promised.
As it turned out, those advancement opportunities never materialized. No position above mine was ever created. Within a year, that manager left and I was reorged to a new manager who was unaware of any of the promises that had been made to me when I was hired. The new manager had little to no interest in my professional advancement. I was put on new projects, but when I asked about any possible promotion opportunities, I hit a dead end.
Now this second manager is leaving and I’m about to be moved to a third manager in an entirely different division. How should I prepare for this change? I don’t want to be obnoxious and just hit the ground running with “I’m incredibly overdue for promotions I was promised when I was hired over two years ago.” But also … I am incredibly overdue for promotions I was promised when I was hired over two years ago. My career has been stagnating for far too long and I see no end in sight. How do I get off on the right foot with this manager and explain the situation?
They’re not likely to put any real weight on promises made by a manager two managers ago who’s no longer at the company. I know that sucks when you took the job because of those promises! But realistically, a new manager isn’t going to act on that. They’re going to want to form their own assessment of your work and make their own decisions about your advancement.
You can describe the situation in the context of saying that you’re eager to advance and that you’re hoping for their help with that as you get to know each other. But it can’t really be “I’m overdue for this”; it should be more like, “One of the reasons I was excited to come on board was because the manager at the time told me she’d create room for me to pursue projects like X and Y and even create a Z role for me to do ___. There was a reorg about a year after I started and that never came to fruition. But I’m very interested in moving in that direction or finding other ways to advance.”
It’s worth seeing what comes of that as you work together … but also stay open to the possibility that you might need to move on from this company to advance.
5. School nightmares vs. work nightmares
A random question for your readers. I was talking with some friends and the topic of school nightmares came up — the ones where you enter a classroom and there’s a test you didn’t study for or a paper is due that you don’t remember being assigned. Or someone tells you your degree isn’t valid or you can’t graduate because of a required class you never heard of. Some of us also have work nightmares of needing to give a presentation we don’t know the topic of or a project you were supposed to be working on for months is due and you don’t remember receiving the assignment. However, in my friend group, the school nightmares were far more common than the work nightmares, despite all of us having been out of school for decades. I was wondering if most people have more school nightmares or work nightmares.
Oh, this is interesting! I can’t recall ever having a work nightmare, but I’ve had plenty of those school nightmares. (I do randomly have dreams where for some reason I’m back at a job that I had in my early 20s — always the same one — but it’s always perfectly pleasant.)
I wonder if it’s because school happens during our most formative years and so those memories (and panic fuel) are locked in our heads in a more deeply ingrained, emotionally reactive place.