am I too friendly with my employee, avoiding dinner with a boss on a work trip, and more

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

1. I don’t want to have dinner with my boss on a work trip

I am going on a work trip outside the country with a colleague and our boss. Both of us don’t really get along with him (our boss) and want to plan our own activities in the non-working hours (mainly dinners). However, he has asked us what we plan on doing and wants to plan a dinner with all three of us. Is there a way I can say no to him without letting on that we have already made plans? What if he asks what I am doing instead when I decline his offer?

There has recently been friction with him regarding work activities so not really sure how he will feel if either of us say no.

You should just deal with having the dinner.

When you’re traveling out of the country with colleagues, it’s a very normal expectation that on at least one of those nights you’ll be expected to have dinner with your team. If your boss suggests it and you refuse to make yourself available on any of the nights you’re there, it’s going to come across really strangely (and coldly!). It would be different if there were extenuating circumstances (like “I feel like I’m fighting something off so I’m going to rest in my room as much as I can on this trip”) but in normal circumstances, assume that a business trip of more than one night might include dinner with your colleagues. That’s just how it works.

You do not need to hang out with him every night; it’s fine to be “tired and ordering dinner sent up to my room” or “meeting up with a cousin who lives in the area” or so forth. But one dinner? You’ve got to suck it up and go.

2. Am I too friendly with my employee?

I am a middle level manager of a team of four under me, recently expanded from a team of two. That means new hires, and the question concerns one of them. I’m worried about professional boundaries, and whether some things I’ve done may have violated them.

Our workplace is very relaxed, and I also go for an informal management style. We chat a lot, I include people in decisions, but I can also put my foot down if and as I need to. This report, Greg, is a foreigner who moved to the country a year ago, to live with his boyfriend. Shortly after getting hired at my company, the boyfriend situation ended and he needed to find a flat of his own. His new flat ended up a bit of a nightmare. He discovered bedbugs and after talking to the landlady they agreed he would leave the flat the next day. He was extremely stressed about it all, and I offered to let him stay in my and my husband’s spare room. This is where I’m concerned on the boundaries front. However, aside from being a professional person, I also believe in being a decent person, and this was a very stressed guy going through a hard time in a difficult situation. And I was close by and had a free room. Additionally, there cannot be anything inappropriate happening since he is very openly gay, and I am very happily married.

He ended up staying for one night and the flat got sorted out. Ever since then, we’ve kept slightly in touch outside of work, but it’s not like we message each other all the time or anything. On the professional front, there have been a couple situations where he messed up or got in over his head. I gave feedback in my usual way and he took it fine.

This wouldn’t bother me much except recently my boss told me that some other leads he manages are overly familiar with their reports, forming strong friendships, and that keeps them from being objective and seeing the big picture, and he warned me not to fall into that trap. I don’t think it’s like that with Greg, but I want to make sure I keep it at the casual acquaintance/occasional hang level.

An additional complication is that my husband really vibes with Greg and I think they’ve been talking a decent amount. I don’t want to discourage that, because my husband is also a foreigner and doesn’t have many friends here, which is probably part of the reason why they connected. We’ve discussed it and agreed that it may be okay to invite Greg over for board games a few times a year, but otherwise if they want to hang out they should do it at Greg’s and avoid all talk of work.

I would also like to note that I work in Europe, in a country where personal relationships are quite valued, also at work. I believe American work culture has much stronger work-personal life separation than we do. Anyway, this is rather long, so what’s your take on it?

I’m obviously going to give you an American take on it but: Offering someone in a desperate situation a spare room for a night — totally fine. You were being a kind person. But you shouldn’t have him over for board games (not even once!) because that’s highly likely to look like favoritism to your other team members and/or to make them hesitant to approach you if they ever have a problem with Greg because they’ll assume you might be biased in his favor. His blossoming friendship with your husband is a problem for the same reason — meeting up a handful of times for coffee or similar is no big deal, but if it gets around your team that Greg is good friends with your husband / hangs out with him socially, it’s going to create the same favoritism concerns. That sucks for your husband and Greg if they’re clicking, but your husband really needs to look for friends outside the four people in your country who work for you!

For what it’s worth, there’s a decent chance that your boss said what he said because he’s already seeing things that worry him. If you’re not convinced about that, you could go back and ask — but I’d assume it’s likely.

3. Talking to people with huge dreams and no plan

I run a business in an industry that a lot of people find very interesting and has a lot of aspirational content on social media. Let’s say it’s flower farming. I’m also a visible minority. Through a lot of hard work, learning from mistakes, and formal education, I’ve built enough of a reputation that friends have begun referring people interested in the industry to me.

The problem is that these referees come with huge dreams and no planning to back it up. I just talked to someone who wants to start a permaculture flower farm/housing co-op/community toolshed/carpentry education/employment for disabled people/online classes project. Any one of these things is hard!

I feel somewhat insulted when people come to me with ideas in my industry that aren’t based in the reality of how much work it takes. Just because it makes great social media content doesn’t mean I don’t spend thousands of hours a year doing unphotogenic tasks like soil testing, bookkeeping, evaluating pricing and products for the coming season, or just busting my ass pulling weeds.

The people coming to me are all mostly members of my minority group, and so I feel a sense of responsibility to help out. But when they come to me with no business plan and I ask for a business plan, I’m treated like a killjoy dream crusher who “doesn’t believe in them.” I believe that a lot of things are possible with sweat and organization, and that my community is made up of capable people with valuable skills, but I want to see the plan before I believe in you.

I don’t have the time or energy to do a gentle motivational interviewing style correspondence where I help them draw on their strengths, find resources, and develop a plan, which is what I get the sense they want. I could do that if I was paid, but my community is famously underpaid, underskilled, and under-employed.

What suggestions do you have for dealing with requests for my time and expertise that aren’t backed up by equal effort? I’m planning to start asking people for business plan before we get into it, and that might just solve everything.

First, don’t be insulted! It’s incredibly common for people to have no idea what working in a seemingly glamorous industry is really like and to assume it’s just what they see on Instagram or fantasize about in their heads. They’re not minimizing or dismissing your hard work; they literally don’t know about it.

And yes, that is a failure on their part; if they’re genuinely interested in moving into the field, they should do enough research that they’d realize it. It sounds, though, like you might be stop #1 in their research — and you don’t want to be step #1, which is perfectly fine! It sounds like you’d make yourself available as step #4 or #5 for people who have already done some initial research themselves, and that’s a fair position. You’re being asked to do a lot of labor in introducing people to what the work actually entails, and you’re allowed to say that’s not where your energy is best used.

Asking for a business plan is a really good way to convey that, and to screen for people who are further along in their research process. You can be transparent about it: “I get a lot of requests from people who are just at the start of exploring this field, and I’ve found it’s a better use of both our time if we talk once they’re further along in their planning. If you’re at the point where you have a business plan drawn up, I’m happy to take a look at it, whether that’s now or down the road. If you’re not that far along, some good resources are X and Y.”

Related:
how to turn down requests to meet, network, or pick your brain

4. People call me by the legal name I don’t use

I go by a name that is derived from my legal name but isn’t one of the usual nicknames for it — think Jamie for Benjamin. I don’t use Benjamin for anything that isn’t a legal document. I’ve found that people who discover my full name is Benjamin tend to start calling me that — or even Ben or Benji — even if they’ve known me for years as Jamie, so I try to avoid even mentioning it. I can’t get my preferred name on my ID badge, for example, so I keep it turned around so people don’t see it.

While my manager does call me Jamie, when he introduces me to new employees or people from other departments, he says, “This is Benjamin, but we like to call them Jamie.” Sometimes he even starts out introducing me as Jamie, then “corrects” himself and says, “This is Jamie — well, actually, it’s Benjamin, but we call them Jamie.”

This drives me nuts. I feel like I can’t correct him because he does include the right name, but the way he frames it suggests it’s an optional nickname. It primes people from the beginning to think of me as Benjamin. My manager uses his full name and a nickname interchangeably (Douglas or Doug) so this introduction format would probably work for him, but I prefer not to use my full name at all. Can I do anything about this without looking hypercritical?

This is extremely odd! Why are all these people suddenly changing your name after knowing you as Jamie previously? This is a very bizarre level of commitment to someone else’s birth name, and I am admittedly surprised that you are encountering it in multiple people and not just one oddball.

The only way to handle it is to be extremely direct and assertive — which is not at all hypercritical! It’s very normal to want to be called by the name you actually use. So the next time someone calls you Benjamin, immediately say, “I use Jamie, not Benjamin. Please call me Jamie.” If they continue after that (which, again, would be extremely strange): “Hey, I’ve told you I go by Jamie. What’s up with suddenly changing it?”

And to your boss: “You’ve introduced me as Benjamin a few times. Can you please introduce me as Jamie, which is the only name I go by? It’s confusing when you use both so I’d prefer you not mention Benjamin at all. There’s no reason they need it.”

5. A salary negotiation success story

Not really a question but an unconventional salary negotiation success story.

I’ve been at my current position for almost six years. When I accepted the position, it was at the median salary for my experience, certification, and education level. My professional organization puts out a very robust survey on compensation each year so we have very good data regarding this and most employers follow the survey. Many job ads are even posted as compensation to be based on the median numbers in the salary survey.

In August, I put together some numbers and approached my employer about the fact that. due to the ridiculous inflation and not getting cost-of-living adjustments the past two years, my salary was now firmly in the lowest 20% according to the salary survey and effectively 10% less than when I took the job. My employer said they would get back to me.

Two weeks ago, they announced that they are selling off a portion of the business, including my job, and introduced us to our new employer. I collected all the info on the cost of comparable benefits at the new company and the salary they were offering (an 8% increase over current) and crunched the numbers. I found that due to new benefits being more expensive, my take-home pay was only going to change by about $50.

Remembering your advice that it’s easier to ask for more now than once I’m employed by them, I countered by pointing out how much inflation there has been since I took the position, the increase in benefits cost, and the salary survey, and I said that given those factors I was hoping to be a bit closer to $X (an amount that wasn’t unreasonable but also further than I thought they would go). They came back at $Y, meeting me halfway for my first day and with a written guarantee of “getting the rest of the way” in six months. So starting Monday, I get a 12% raise!

The post am I too friendly with my employee, avoiding dinner with a boss on a work trip, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.