updates: I’m not in the group chat, new manager’s team hates her, and more

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

1. Everyone likes me, so why am I not in the group chat?

Well, I’m still not in the group chat, so I’m sorry to say I can’t report if it’s really about medieval falconry as discussed in the comments :-)

I’m still happy at the job and have not asked to be included or started a new chat or anything like it. You and several commenters suggested I could just leave it be and that’s what I did.

When I started the job, I was a bit apprehensive about being new to (and the only woman in) such a tight-knit long-term team, and then everyone was so nice that it seemed too good to be true, and I was maybe looking a bit too hard for red flags that might mean that I’m not accepted/excluded/people didn’t like me.

Now I know a bit more about my coworkers and their dynamics, and I think it’s just the case that, because they have been working together for so long, they know a lot of things about each other’s private lives. Health issues, trouble with grown kids, stuff like that, which I, by now, have heard about in broad terms, but I assume that the other chat is where they go into more detail about this. Could be totally wrong of course, but they are generally super supportive of one another (which I hadn’t expected from an all-male team, but that’s my own bias I guess). So it’s plausible, that, when the main chat gets “I leave early today for an appointment,” the other one gets “It’s my turn to host the support group for spouses of people with depression, wife is still not doing great” or something along those lines. If that’s the case, I’m totally okay with not being in there because I just don’t have the same history with them. I still haven’t found any other signs that people try to exclude me or are in any way toxic, so even if the chat is about something else, I don’t think me not being in there means anything bad.

However, my one-year anniversary is coming up, so there is still a chance that I will be added with great fanfare (and hopefully not an initiation ritual, as other commenters speculated) on that day, who knows ;)

2. New manager’s team hates her — but she says they’re the problem

I did try your advice, along with some other guard rails — for instance, processes fully documented so that there was no question about team members being given conflicting direction — and, long story short, it became clear that Catelyn wasn’t going to change, and was never going to be able to manage the team effectively. And it became really clear that our HR wasn’t going to back me in addressing her problems, in any sense of the term. My prediction in the comment thread of how that was going to play out was pretty accurate.

I couldn’t fix her and I couldn’t fire her, but I found an opportunity to at least salvage the team. There was another section of the organization which desperately needed help of the kind of work that Catelyn is actually good at (not managing, obviously, but the rest of her job), and I knew that layoffs were in the air and I was going to be told to give up one or more positions. I managed to broker a trade where I “gave up” Catelyn’s position, with her in it, to this other area as an individual contributor — with the asterisk that when (if) finances recover, I will need to refill her previous role, which I wouldn’t be able to do if she’d just been laid off.

The team is now being managed by someone they know and trust and they’re happy, in spite of there being one fewer person to do the work. Catelyn seems to be doing well in her new role, though I understand they’re moving at least one person to report to her and I wouldn’t put money on how that’s going to go. I also hear that even more shuffling is coming, and that she will end up reporting to the person who labeled the team member who’d carefully documented Catelyn’s issues as a “troublemaker.” So all the toxicity is in a single basket, and hopefully it won’t spill far enough to reach us … though when you have to say a thing like that, it does not bode well for the organization as a whole.

Thanks for your response. It really helped me reframe what I was seeing (and not seeing).

3. My “on-site” coworker is never on-site

So first and foremost, I dropped the spreadsheet immediately.

Both you and the (very adamant) comments section made very compelling and correct cases for my mental health. That, on top of pointing out the now obvious fact that my boss cared less about it than I did, was immensely helpful in changing my mindset around the whole thing. I’m only responsible for my own work and business. Worrying about things out of my scope doesn’t do anything except add to my stress levels. So I let all that ish go and focused on getting my stuff done. My day to day improved greatly.

As for my coworker, there’s still the occasional delay or surprise day off, but much less than before. There was a large company-wide return to office initiative earlier this year and there’s a lot more folks around in general. I suspect those two things are related.

I actually took some vacation time in September, and it went swimmingly.

Thanks for the advice, and the folks who took my struggles seriously. This kind of thing can be very difficult when you’re autistic, and the kind voices doing the explaining heavily outweighed the ones calling me a nosy Nelly. It was very much appreciated.

4. I’m ready to retire young but don’t want to burn bridges (#5 at the link)

I’m happy to report that I carried out my plans earlier this year! It was scary timing, as the stock market was in a bit of a free fall and the job market is tough should I need or want to go back, but I’d spent too much time planning for this to not see it through. The first few weeks of the break were filled with administrative tasks, like enrolling in an ACA health plan, but that’s behind me now and I’m enjoying just my time off. It’s still early days, but I can’t imagine myself ever wanting to get back into the corporate grind.

If I have one regret, it’s that I gave more than two weeks’ notice. As I’d been planning for this departure for a long time, I had everything well-organized and prepared, and my likely successor was as ready as they would ever be to step into my role. The notice period was intense, because as I suspected would happen, I was subjected to multiple “what can we do to keep you?” conversations with my boss and grandboss. I’d been transparent over my tenure about the stressors of the job and things that I’d have liked to see changed, but it seems they were only willing to take action when I was on my way out the door. It’s possible I could have gotten them to agree to let me go part-time, remote, or any number of other things, but I had already mentally moved on and wasn’t willing to entertain these conversations. I needed a clean break … and I got it!

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