It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…
1. Admin is policing my soda consumption
The admin assistant at my job is monitoring and policing my soda intake.
Work provides a selection of free snacks and beverages in the kitchen. I do drink more soda than the average person, probably 2-5 cans when I’m in the office. I’m in the office probably once or twice a week at most.
But this admin has interrogated me multiple times and gone to my boss about how many sodas I’m drinking. I feel her eyes on me when I walk to the kitchen, so I’ve taken to bringing two or three cans back to my desk for the day.
Yesterday I brought back two, and she read me the riot act for taking too many and called me a liar and said I must have taken five cans. I kept calm in the moment, reiterated that I had taken two cans for the day, and let her know I’d take one can only going forward. I burst into tears after she left my office.
I’ve now gone to my boss and let him know this is going on, and that frankly if I’m expected to come into the office regularly I can’t keep putting up with this behavior. He’s run the message up the flagpole, and reassured me I haven’t done anything wrong and that this is frankly a stupid conflict. In the meantime, I’ve brought a 12-pack of soda to keep at my desk to avoid the conflict altogether. Is there anything else I can or should do? Anything else I should say in the moment the next time she confronts me?
What on earth.
First, since your boss has confirmed that this person isn’t in charge of your soda consumption, get really clear in your own head that you do not answer to her about the soda and she doesn’t get to control how many you take. She’s being a busybody and a jerk!
If she comments on it again, say this: “I’ve spoken with Jane about this and she’s confirmed there are no issues with this. You can speak with her about it if you’d like, but it’s not something I’m going to continue to discuss.” If she persists: “This isn’t something I’m going to discuss. You’ll have to take it up with Jane.”
If that doesn’t shut it down, you or your boss should talk to the admin’s manager because this is absurd and I bet they don’t know she’s doing it or want her doing it. In fact, even if this does get her to stop, consider letting her manager know anyway because this probably isn’t the only way she’s going rogue on people.
2. I get possessive over my work
I have a bad habit of getting possessive over my work projects and processes! How do I break this?
Here’s an example: I work with a coworker who’s been here longer and has more authority, but we will work together on complicated projects. One of our clients has a particularly complicated structure and inputting them into our software for tracking is a yearly pain. I built a simple spreadsheet that takes different subsection data and combines it for easier input. Great.
Now, it’s time for round two of this and I’m finding myself feeling stupidly possessive over this worksheet, despite knowing that a) it could easily be improved and b) this is a big enough project that it does require having both of us working on it. My coworker is just as good at spreadsheets and better than me at our software system, so there’s no logical reason for her to not be involved. It’s also not just the spreadsheet — I sometimes feel like Gollum with my work up to and including the parts of the job I really don’t enjoy. If I hand things off, great, if my manager hands them off I feel grumpy.
Mostly what bothers me is the thought of someone else changing things I’ve created. But it can also be just using them instead of me on a project (the way I still want to head up this combining project rather than have someone else use my tools, even if that’s what the tool is used for). How do I get myself out of this habit? Any tips?
For the discomfort with someone changing something you created, it can help to lean into the idea that multiple brains and perspectives are better than one, and by having other people work on it, they may make improvements that you didn’t think of because you have different brains. Of course, if they’re making changes that you think make it worse, not better, that’s harder. The thing that helps most with that is to consciously try to take ego out of it, and to remind yourself that you didn’t build it for you, you built it for the team, and it ultimately is the team’s.
For the part about not liking people using stuff you made even if they’re not changing it, can you reframe it in your head away from “someone is using that and it is Mine” and more toward “I built this great thing that other people get to see and benefit from”? (Ironically, putting ego back into it in a way, after we just took it out in the paragraph above.)
3. Should I stay at my job or join my former coworker’s new firm?
Recently, my department went through a major shakeup due to complaints made against my boss, Denholm, by a colleague, Douglas. After a long investigation, both of them were forced to resign or be fired. Denholm chose to resign and open his own small firm for the type of work we do. He asked me to join him, but I declined because I was pregnant and I did not want to deal with additional stress. My coworkers in my department left with him, so I was left alone. A majority of our clients went with him, as well.
However, my firm has now restructured my department so that we mainly focus on an area that I have less experience with, and hired a new boss, Jen. I went on maternity leave shortly after the restructuring, and didn’t think about anything work related during my 12 weeks of leave. Since my return from leave, I’ve been dissatisfied. There’s no work for me to do since the restructuring. I sit in my office doing next to nothing. Jen is mainly handling everything herself and has not passed on any work to me, which isn’t the norm in our industry.
Denholm has repeatedly offered me a place at his company since I originally declined, so I know I have a standing job offer with him and apparently there have been clients asking for me. However, there are a few issues. Denholm is not a great manager, which I have spoken to him about before, and he has many annoying and sometimes infuriating traits that my coworkers and I tiptoed around. Eventually, I got tired of tiptoeing and just straight up told him that there were things he should not be doing because it was dragging our department down. He did not take offense, thanked me for my honesty, and promised to do better. He has told me many times over the years that he values my expertise, honesty, and my ability to lead and organize. In the past, I had sought and applied for jobs elsewhere because of Denholm but never got interviews. I miss my old coworkers and the work that I was doing.
Company B only does raises once a year and there’s a maximum of 3%, which is supposed to be both merit-based and cost of living combined. Our management is awful at communication and mishandled the Denholm/Douglas situation from the start and left me to pick up the pieces afterwards. Due to other factors, morale here is rather low.
I don’t want to leave right after returning from maternity leave, especially for those who stuck their neck out for me here. But I don’t know how much longer I can sustain myself on doing next to nothing. Do I go take Denholm’s offer? Do I stay at Company B? I just feel very stuck.
How much do you want to work at Denholm’s company and how much do you just want to leave your current job? Because right now you’re framing it as having to pick between those two options, but there’s also a third option of job-searching and going somewhere else entirely.
If you’d be truly happy working for Denholm, then maybe that’s a good option — but just because he values you and your work doesn’t mean that you need to want to work for him, and you mentioned that you’ve previously been driven to job-search to try to get away from him! Has anything changed that would make that less likely this time, either in his style or in the role itself (like that you wouldn’t be working closely with him)?
It sounds like you definitely should leave your current job, but why not look around and see what other options are out there? If the market in your field makes that hard right now, then maybe you’ll ultimately conclude Denholm is the best of the options — but don’t decide that just because he’s offering the easiest escape.
4. Should I have dropped my plans after getting a pile of risk management paperwork?
I am a university professor, and I’m wondering if you have any advice for a situation I might have handled differently. Two years ago, I proposed starting a “math circle.” This is an extracurricular event, where a couple dozen high school students would come to campus on a Saturday morning, and I and/or others would give a brief lecture on some advanced math topic and help the students work through some problems.
Our risk managers saw “involves minors” and presented me with a pile of paperwork that would make Franz Kafka blush. The kind of stuff evidently designed for sports camps, where injuries are a very real threat and the students would be staying in dorms for a week. And where the people actually running the sports camp presumably have subordinates to handle the paperwork for them.
That required much more time and patience than I had, especially given that I don’t well understand how the university operates outside my silo. So I abandoned my plans. Eventually a high school teacher launched something similar, so I joined his efforts. This was a good outcome for the students, but from my point of view the university missed out on a chance to bring some very motivated high school students to campus.
Was giving up the right call? Or was there some chance that this was a miscommunication, which I might have resolved easily?
I don’t know enough about what the university regulations truly require in that situation, but if you really wanted to do it, one option before giving up would have been to reality-check it with someone above that person and ask something like, “Just to confirm, would all this this truly be necessary for eight Saturday morning math lectures? If so, I’ll drop the plan but I wondered if maybe there was a misunderstanding about the scope.”
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