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Duty to Warn
Dear Work Friend,
After nearly eight years at the same P.R. agency, I accepted what felt like a perfect opportunity: a roster of impressive clients, a significant pay bump and a role that was essentially fully remote.
But by my fifth week, I realized there was no way to succeed at this job. As a publicist I’ve seen my fair share of difficult personalities, but my new boss blew all of that out of the water. She micromanaged everything, contradicted her own instructions, second-guessed every decision and spoke negatively about employees to clients. Former employees have since reached out to tell me they experienced many of the same things.
When I gently raised concerns about her management style, she told me that she would never change and tried to get me to resign. Two weeks later, after having quietly hired a replacement, she terminated my employment.
I’m thrilled to be free of her toxicity, but if someone had told me what they experienced before I accepted the job, I would never have left my previous position. (While I was interviewing, I tried to learn what I could but came up short.) Do I have an obligation to warn other people about this workplace? Is there an ethical way to do so? Part of me worries about retaliation even if what I say is accurate.
— Anonymous
Your main obligation is to be honest with anyone who asks you about jobs at this firm: The workplace was chaotic, the management style was controlling and the boss was insulting. But I’m not sure what — beyond being clear and direct to people seeking your opinion — you might do to productively “warn” other people. Mass email? Ad in the local paper? Sandwich board?
I mean, you’re the publicist, so you probably have some better ideas than I do. (Hire a skywriter?) But you also know that attention cuts both ways. It’s not just that your boss might retaliate, but also that anything intended as a warning might read differently when it travels beyond a circle of trusted friends, colleagues and advice seekers.
You could, for example, leave a negative post on a workplace-review site like Glassdoor. But a single negative review from an angry former employee is as easily dismissed as heeded. You could raise the stakes and write an excoriating blog post with your name attached. But how confident are you that the strangers reading it would trust your account over your former boss’s version? Enough to wager your professional reputation?
This may sound bleak and cynical to some readers, but I’d guess it’s a professionally familiar dilemma to you. Anything beyond privately communicating your toxic experience to people you trust — and who trust you in turn — is just as likely to backfire as it is to accomplish your goals. It’s admirable you want to save your peers from making the same mistake you did, but not at the expense of your career or sanity.
The fact is that in addition to the psychological warfare she committed, this woman also did you a favor. She fired you quickly, saving you from many excruciating months or years trying to make an irredeemable situation work. Don’t waste that favor by expending unnecessary emotional energy on her, or on hypothetical other future employees, when you’re not even getting paid. Your time is better spent applying to new jobs, and enjoying days free of difficult personalities.
The Intern Has Notes
I’m wrapping up a summer internship, and my boss has asked for feedback on his management. I’m the first direct report he’s ever had, and he says it would be helpful to hear my thoughts, since he hopes to oversee more people in the future.
The thing is, if I’m honest, I would have preferred that he acted more like a manager and less like a friend. He frequently brought up personal dramas — economic insecurities, his difficult relationship with his parents, his dating life, grief over deaths of close friends. He’s about twice my age, but he also often vented frustrations about promotions and compensation, relaying both his own complaints and the apparent feelings of team members.
Should I try to give him constructive feedback? Is it worth it, given that I’m just passing through?
— Anonymous
The important question here — which I can’t answer — is whether you think he can receive the feedback and become a good manager.
If you think he has the ability to act on it, and could grow into a managerial role, then I say go for it: The fact that you’re “just passing through” gives you license to be honest with a guy who badly needs some genuine advice.
License for honesty isn’t necessarily license for brutal honesty. I wouldn’t, for example, catalog every single category of boundary-violating complaint he has been engaging in, as you begin to do in your letter. But you can generalize and depersonalize: Tell your supervisor that you do your best work when managers are fair, direct and reserved, and that you think it’s difficult to set boundaries and expectations when managers act too much like friends. You could even ask him if he really wants to be a manager, given that it would obligate him to be less personally close to his co-workers than he’d clearly like to be.
But that’s only if you think he has the capacity to make use of that advice. As you’re describing him, it sounds like he has had a rough go of it lately. I’d worry that a guy who’s so emotionally leaky that he tells an intern about his relationship with his parents is not resilient enough to hear (let alone act upon) difficult feedback, especially from someone half his age. It may be the case that he overshares because he’s a relatively new manager who doesn’t realize he’s violating boundaries. Or it may be that you’re his first-ever direct report because he’s an emotional disaster who can’t be trusted to compartmentalize his feelings at the workplace.
If you think he won’t be able to metabolize even good advice from a summer intern, then you should move on — either with limited, encouraging feedback or none at all. The last thing you want to do is give him another traumatic experience to dump on next summer’s intern.
The Nonstandard Book of Spells
This is a relatively minor issue in the grand scheme of things, but it’s really been bugging me. I have a common name with a slightly unusual spelling. My name is shown clearly in my email address and Microsoft Teams username. Still, colleagues regularly spell it incorrectly when addressing me. This strikes me as hugely disrespectful, and makes me want to passive-aggressively intentionally misspell their names. I don’t, as that would be unprofessional, but what can I do?
— Anonymous
In my capacity as Work Friend, I do encourage a certain level of unprofessionalism for the sake of settling scores, and I think “passive-aggressively misspelling the names of people who don’t spell my name correctly” falls within the allowable boundaries. The problem is that I suspect it won’t satisfy your need for justice, largely because it will be read not as retributive disrespect but as sloppiness.
Which means you’re left with two options. One, create a keyboard macro so you can quickly append to offending emails a line that reads, “Please note: It’s actually spelled [your name]!” This method has the benefit of being professional and honoring your own sense of peevishness, but the drawback of getting tiresome. The second option is deciding not to care. If you can reframe the misspellings as inoffensive inattention rather than disrespect, you may be able to free yourself of irritation. The benefit here is the inner peace and calm of not letting others get to you. The downside, of course, is that your name will keep getting misspelled.
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