Send questions about the office, money, careers and work-life balance to [email protected]. Include your name and location, or a request to remain anonymous. Letters may be edited.
The Introvert’s Dilemma
I’m an introvert who manages a small team of remote workers, all people I knew prior to taking a manager position. I did not work closely with any of my team prior to taking this position, and we rarely interacted. Now, of course, we interact much more often, but I find that one of them, a very nice woman, is my social opposite — she’s an extrovert who needs a lot of interaction and attention.
Her communication is also frequently unprofessional in either tone (starting emails with “Yo, cool chick” or describing a mistake as “pooping her pants”) or substance (gossip about co-workers or stories about her mother-in-law). A normal day with her looks like receiving at least three to four emails, 10 to 12 Zoom chat messages and at least one phone call, almost none of it about work.
I’ve felt obligated to accommodate some of this, both to maintain a good working relationship with her and because I know I need to grow to be a good manager. Growth involves being uncomfortable. But I find these interactions draining and, when the content is juvenile or about office politics, irritating.
How do I set boundaries that allow us to maintain a good rapport but also respect my time and desire to keep it professional?
— Anonymous
Draining? I can certainly imagine. Irritating? No doubt.
But first I want to say I’m impressed by your acknowledgment that part of being a manager is encouraging the growth of not just your direct reports but yourself. It’s admirable, this impulse to pay attention to what employees need for success while also taking steps to improve yourself as a professional and as a human being.
I get the feeling that your employee’s problem may be not her extroversion but her lack of boundaries. Many of us joke around and say revealing things about ourselves to our co-workers — sometimes even our managers. (As a manager of editorial teams in multiple jobs, I’ve been guilty of doing the same thing.) We all need to feel connected, and human, and understood. Even (or especially!) in work environments.
My feeling is that you should not feed the beast. As in: You should not respond to the contents of her emails, chat messages and phone calls that have nothing to do with work.
You might also, when you are confronted by these messages, issue direct responses to her along the lines of “I have a lot on my plate and need to keep us focused on work today.” A friend recently told me about the concept of “gray rocking,” in which someone who is being subjected to another person’s unwanted behavior reacts to the offending individual’s attempts to provoke by simply going silent or responding in the most tepid, “boring” — that is, “gray” — way possible. The idea is that the offending individual will eventually give up his or her search for validation and go elsewhere.
This might be too extreme a measure to take, but I do think that remaining relatively quiet in response to her provocations might make your employee more conscious of them, and help her delineate what is work-related or -appropriate and what isn’t. Perhaps she just needs a little nudge to understand the meaning of professionally pertinent.
I ran your question by Susan Cain, author of the best-selling 2012 book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.” She told me that over the years she had heard from many, many extroverts who felt sensitive to the idea that their enthusiasm for lots of interaction suggested a certain superficiality. Her point, she continued, is that she doesn’t necessarily associate your colleague’s behavior with extroversion, and that it could be due to bad boundaries.
Navigating how personality styles mesh — or don’t — is a common challenge in the workplace, Ms. Cain said. “An introvert might rather be interested in putting their head down and focusing and getting in a state of deep flow,” she said. “An extrovert, on the other hand, might feel like they really want to be interacting through the day and feel that they’re not like at their most productive if they’re not getting feedback and interaction.”
In that case, Ms. Cain suggested, a manager and her team can sit down and talk through what their temperamental preferences are: how much interaction is appropriate, how frequent it should be and how everyone can respect one another’s needs. This depersonalizes the issue and doesn’t pin it on one person. For what it’s worth, I think this approach would work, but it would be out of the ordinary, and thus potentially uncomfortable for everyone involved.
And if you aren’t comfortable having these conversations in a group setting? Ms. Cain gave me the example of a former chief executive of Campbell’s, Doug Conant, himself an introvert, who undertook an exercise called “Declare Yourself.” Whenever he brought new members onto his team, he would schedule a meeting with them and, among other things, discuss his introversion and what that meant in terms of his preferred modes of interaction.
“The theme of both these exercises is basically giving people permission to talk about something that’s otherwise socially awkward to discuss,” Ms. Cain said.
As for the gray rock method, Ms. Cain said that it might be effective in the case of someone — co-worker or otherwise — with difficult personality traits, but that you might also want to consider that your employee’s, ahem, enthusiasm is coming from a place of anxiety.
“So I would go with either of those two exercises,” she said, “or just have an open conversation in terms of open and curious questions to ask how the person is feeling in general and to establish where she’s coming from.”
The Fallout From a Racist Remark
I’m employed as a maintenance technician at a light manufacturing facility, where about a third of the employees are of Hispanic heritage, the vast majority of whom work on the production lines. The remainder of the employees are of European descent. There are roughly 250 employees.
Since I came on board a year ago, many of the production line workers have come to know me as someone who makes their workplace safer and fixes problems quickly and correctly. I have recently been voted employee of the month by a very large margin, according to our H.R. manager. I felt really good about the recognition and, more important, the expression of gratitude.
I got a call one day for a machine down in an area where Hispanic women and men work in close proximity to each other. I have fixed machines for them in the past and had a cordial working relationship, until my white co-worker Ed came along. The machine that had gone down has a design flaw making heating elements vulnerable to damage from physical contact with the parts being made. Without adequate guards added to protect the elements, failure is inevitable and even hazardous to the operators. While I was replacing the heating element Ed walked up and asked me what the problem was, and when I told him, he exclaimed, “[Expletive] Mexicans!” then stormed off.
My jaw dropped. Two women looked at me with disgust, then turned away. I didn’t know what to say. After making the repair I found Ed and told him: “You can’t say [expletive] like that! I gotta work with these people, and if they report you, you can be fired!” He just blew me off.
I’ve been getting the cold shoulder in that area ever since. If I report Ed to H.R., he could be disciplined, even fired, and I’ll be labeled a snitch, harming my relationship with others in my department and beyond. And that won’t undo the damage he’s done with the line workers. I didn’t say those despicable words, Ed did. But I’m being painted with the same racist brush. I don’t know how to fix this problem. What do you suggest?
— Anonymous
This is one of the tougher questions I’ve received during my tenure as Work Friend, and the charged political environment we’re in right now, particularly with regard to race and the workplace, makes this extra challenging for me (and, no doubt, you).
My first impulse is to advise you to report Ed to H.R. and ask it to keep your involvement quiet. (In other words, have the H.R. manager talk to Ed directly without identifying you as the source of the information about his behavior.) But that didn’t sit quite right with me. Neither did the idea of having one of the Hispanic co-workers go to H.R. My concern is that an appeal to the human resources department could redound negatively on him or her. And you.
I reached out to Roman Palomares, President of LULAC (the League of United Latin American Citizens), a longtime advocacy group and civil rights organization.
Mr. Palomares thinks you have a couple of options, and they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive. Option 1 is that you tell your Hispanic colleagues that you’re aware of what Ed said and that you don’t agree with it. By doing so, you are making it clear to your colleagues that you’re sensitive to and aware of the idea that everyone should feel safe at work, regardless of nationality or ethnic background.
Option 2 is that you go to H.R. and, without naming names, relay information about the incident and ask the people there to address the situation in a way that doesn’t assign specific blame — or refer to the specific incident — but communicates what the company will and will not tolerate.
Those company reps “could just say we understand that this is happening” — in various environments — “and we don’t want it to happen here,” Mr. Palomares said. “That way, the other gentleman is not going to know anybody’s pointing a finger at him, but the company is saying: ‘Here’s what’s going on in the marketplace. We will not tolerate it.’”
Are there other options? I’m not sure that there are, at least not others that keep Ed’s identity under wraps so that tensions in the workplace aren’t further inflamed. (I hate that Ed gets to be protected from the repercussions of his own words, but here we are.) I mean, it’s not as if you need go up to the two Hispanic women who overheard Ed’s outburst and apologize on his behalf. You didn’t do anything wrong. But you’ve been put in the unenviable position of having to clean up his mess.
The post Worn Out by an Extrovert? You Can Go ‘Gray.’ appeared first on New York Times.
