Ask A Manager

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. My boss runs hot and cold

I work in a mid-size non-profit as a fundraiser. I’ve been in this field for 20+ years and am used to the pressure that comes with this job. I joined this organization a year ago and have been successful. I’ve met my fundraising goals, implemented a few new projects, and built strong relationships with donors. That said, I’ve never been more stressed or anxious in a job and I don’t know if I can stay here.

My boss is combative and very hot and cold. One day she will yell at me, tell me that she “hates my work,” and tell me that I waste her time. Other days she will tell me that I am doing great and is very friendly. She has said things like, “I am combative because I care.” When I first started, she told me that her last team complained to HR about her, HR told her who said what, and everyone who spoke up is no longer working here. She implies that she fired them because of what they said. She also has told me that “they couldn’t hack it here.”

I attend a lot of events with donors as part of my job and when we were working on seating for a small dinner, she told me that I shouldn’t be seated next to a donor because “you aren’t fun.” She made this comment multiple times in front of a colleague. It was embarrassing. The purpose of the dinner was to cultivate and fundraise for the organization. I need to sit next to people to do my job.

Part of my job is to plan events to cultivate and steward new donors. I came up with a new type of event, got it approved by her, and invited people to attend. After the invitations went out, my boss told me the CEO “is very mad at you. You should have gotten this approved.” She had approved the event, and she got angry at me when I voiced my confusion. I don’t have meetings with the CEO and never get anything approved directly from him.

These are just a few examples from this month.

I feel like I am constantly failing even though I am meeting my goals. Am I being too sensitive? My spouse suggested that I talk to HR, but I worry that I will be fired because of what she has told me about the last team. Do you have any advice?

Find a new job and get out of there. Talking to HR about a bad manager is risky under the best of circumstances: at best, their power to do anything is often limited, and at worst, it can get back to your manager and cause tension in that relationship with. In this case, HR already has a track record of disclosing complaints to her and not preventing her from retaliating against the complainers. HR isn’t an option when you know that history.

Your boss is a jerk who is never going to support you, and as long as you stay in this job you’re going to feel stressed and insecure. The best thing you can do is to get out.

2. I’m not trying to blame anyone, I just want to fix mistakes

I’m having a strange recurring issue at work that I don’t know how to approach. Let’s say members on my team build teacups. The teacups have to be built to exact specifications or they don’t work right.

I am the subject matter expert on building teacups, but my boss assigns builds to people randomly. Some people make the same mistake on the builds over and over, which causes problems when customers try to use the teacups. I’m not tasked with reviewing builds, which in itself is a problem. I do try to catch problems if I can, but I don’t have the bandwidth to catch them all.

When a build is found to have a problem, my first question is, who built the teacup? If the same mistakes are being made repeatedly, I want to look at retraining or going over our guides to see if they need to be clarified.

My boss has started to get angry at me for asking who built the teacup. A serious problem with a teacup build came to light yesterday, and in response to my question of who built it, she snapped that it didn’t matter who built it.

I think it does matter, especially if the same person is making the same build mistakes, because I would like to retrain or go back through the steps with that person. Relying on me to find errors is not sustainable; I’m covering several jobs at the moment and everyone else on the team is new.

I’m not looking for someone to blame; I want to fix the process so we can cut down the error rate. I also don’t want to keep fixing the same mistakes over and over again, when the person doing the build should not be making the same mistake over and over again.

I don’t know how to approach this with my boss. I had the same problem at a previous job. I don’t know how to communicate that I’m not looking for someone to blame, I want to fix whatever in our process is leading to the same errors.

Have you said to your boss explicitly, “I’m not looking for anyone to blame or get in trouble. I’m asking so that I know if we need to retrain so we have fewer errors in the long run”? If not, say that.

But if you’ve said that and it hasn’t changed anything, then combined with the fact that you got this same feedback at a previous job, I suspect there’s something about the way you’re communicating that is coming across as blamey, even though you don’t intend it to. For what it’s worth, “who built this?” both is a reasonable question to ask and can easily sound like, “I’m asking because they need to know this is unacceptable.” So you might try softening your wording — for example, “I’d like to give whoever built this some tips on how to avoid it — do we know who I should talk to?” That’s less efficient to say, but it’ll probably land differently.

3. Collecting cash to give to staff

I work as a staff member in an academic department at a large state university. We have 10 staff members, including fiscal specialists, advisors, communications specialists, etc. We eliminated receptionists, secretaries, and other more traditional positions years ago. But, dating back to when we had a department secretary and office assistant, there is a tradition of the faculty passing the hat to collect money to give in cash as a Christmas present to us staff (and the sum can be fairly significant, especially because two of us have always opted out, which means more money goes to the others). Of the staff, four of the us have PhDs; a couple make more money than the lowest-paid faculty members who are chipping in for these gifts.

I’m always fighting to have staff seen as equals with faculty. I find this variation on tipping to be demeaning, and I’m frustrated that it continues (because some of the staff just want the money). Am I being oversensitive?

I don’t think you’re being oversensitive, but I also think you’re probably fighting a losing battle as long as the other staff members want to continue the tradition.

4. Recruiter said candidates lie about needing visa sponsorship

I am hiring for a new member of my team working within a small department in a very large university. I’ve done hiring in this role before and this is my first time using our university’s recruiters to help lighten my workload in the process.

We receive a lot of applications from people who are students in a masters program at our school, who have only worked outside of the U.S. in the past. This is very common for this role as it is classified as a STEM role by the government (it’s not) which means it does technically qualify for an O-1 visa. However, we do not sponsor visas within our department.

We have questions in our application system that ask if an applicant will need sponsorship now or in the future. As long as they answer no, I accept them as a viable candidate and I’ve never thought twice about it. When I was speaking with a recruiter about our role, he remarked that we had many international candidates. When I brushed that off because I don’t really care, he reiterated that “we do not sponsor” and then followed up with “people lie on those questions all the time.” That part made me uncomfortable. I was in a meeting with my boss and a more senior recruiter and no one else reacted.

I made a joke about how candidates could technically lie about anything, but I’m still thinking about his comment and if I should have said something then or should say something now. For what it’s worth, I’ve ignored his advice completely and am interviewing some great candidates.

People lie on all sorts of questions, which is why you verify the things that matter. As it happens, this one is easily solvable because employers are required by law to verify new hires’ ability to work legally in the U.S. before they start work, so if someone is lying about not needing a sponsor, you’ll find that out pretty quickly.

In your shoes, I’d sure as hell be wondering if that recruiter is rejecting all international applicants on the grounds that they might need sponsorship even if they don’t — and if that’s the case, he’s violating federal law, which prohibits discriminating based on national origin. It might be interesting to ask him — or his boss — if he is in fact doing that.

5. I think our doctor’s note policy is illegal

My company is mostly remote, but has recently begun a policy where employees in cities with enough employee density come into a coworking space once a month. I have no problem with the policy — it’s great to see people, while still working mostly remotely! However, our HR team, in an attempt to stamp out any possible edge cases where an employee might not be able to come in for coworking on this day, has implemented a bunch of rules that are annoying in some cases (for example, if your childcare falls through and you need to stay home, you must use one of your PTO days, even if you can work with your kids around), and possibly not legal in the one I’m writing about.

Specifically, if you’re sick and need to stay home on the coworking day, you’re required to send a doctor’s note to HR. In my city and the city where the company is headquartered (San Francisco and New York City), there are laws stating you can’t require a doctor’s note unless an employee is out sick for more than three days. These laws are pretty easy to find with a simple Google search. Our regular sick time policy in fact states that a doctor’s note is only required if you’re out more than three days, but the policy for the coworking days states that if you’re out just that day you must provide a note. I’ve heard of at least one employee who needed to stay home sick on a coworking day, and was pinged by multiple people in HR (including the head of HR) saying they must submit a doctor’s note, and generally giving them a hard time about needing to stay home.

Is there a (tactful) way to bring up that we may be running afoul of local employment laws with this policy? Am I missing something?

I’d say it this way: “I’m concerned that requiring a doctor’s note if someone is sick on a coworking day violates the law in San Francisco and New York City, both of which prohibit requiring doctor’s notes unless the person is out three days or more.” You could add, “I don’t want us to run afoul of the law, and I think we likely need to change that to comply.”

This is the same matter-of-fact “whoops, we might be getting this wrong” framing that you’d use for a concern that felt less fraught (like if you needed to point out that you were using the wrong deadline for a city tax filing or something else similarly boring).