It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. Husband has issues with my dedication to my job and 1-2 work trips a year
I am the manager at a small association, and I have the opportunity to fill the vacant CEO position soon. This promotion would significantly improve our financial situation, allowing us to afford more for our eight-year-old daughter and possibly retire by 55. We have been struggling financially a bit, which is a strain on our relationship.
My job requires travel, including one annual trade show abroad and now a potential second trip for an important convention. The first trip is 11 days long, and the second would be 4 days. However, my husband has mixed feelings about my work and travel. While he says he is proud of me, he also feels I spend too much time working. I do check my emails after hours and participate in board discussions on WhatsApp, but before that, I would just be doom scrolling or watching YouTube.
He is uncomfortable with me being away for what he calls “two weeks” and thinks it is bad for the family. He also worries about my safety in a foreign city. Recently, while he was watching videos with headphones on, I was designing a digital membership card on Canva. He later brought it up as an example of me not wanting to spend time with him, which I found confusing.
I take our daughter to school and pick her up every day. I make dinner 3-4 times a week and handle my share of household chores. We also have a cleaning lady who comes once a week. Despite these efforts, he often invites friends over on weekends when we could spend time together.
He is a great man—loving, hard-working, and a devoted dad who makes our daughter’s school breakfast and lunch every day. However, he recently lost his father and cut ties with the rest of his family, which has made him more clingy. He does not talk about it unless he is drunk, but the issue with my traveling started before this.
I am struggling to understand why my work and travel cause such tension between us. I love him, and I know he loves me, but I feel trapped and exhausted. I am starting to wonder if I would be better off divorced, even though the thought brings me to tears.
Marriage counseling, right away. You’re both coming at this from different perspectives and with different concerns but not understanding the other, and you’re at the point where you’re questioning the marriage. Marriage counseling was made for this. I wish it were a work problem because that would be easier to solve, but it’s a communication and relationship problem, and a pro will be able to help you navigate it.
Also, if the drunkenness is more than a rare occurrence, there’s an additional problem to tackle too — but marriage counseling could be a place where you look at that as well.
2. A C-suite exec recklessly exposed us to Covid
Yesterday, a C-suite leader in a people-facing role came to an in-person, hour-long meeting with me and a few others while visibly sick and coughing, claiming it was “just a summer cold.” She also mentioned that her Covid tests were negative but also that the tests she used were quite old and unreliable. This morning, of course, she tested positive for Covid.
I’ve been trying to be careful lately because I do not want to get Covid again and we are facing a summer surge. Also, when I have been infected in the past, Covid messes up my menstrual cycle for a while. This is particularly concerning because my partner and I are trying to conceive, which no one at my work knows, of course. I mask in crowded public places but I haven’t been masking in our office.
I realize now that I probably should have left the room right away, but I felt enormous pressure to stay, due to the nature of my professional relationship with this leader, her lack of suggesting those uncomfortable leave, and the fact that no one else did. I feel so stupid and cowardly now. I discussed my frustration with a more senior member of my team, but I’m still very upset.
What should I do now? How can I handle similar situations in the future without feeling pressured to stay in a potentially unsafe environment? Do we live in a world where I just need to get over this or I might jeopardize my professional relationships and career?
One thing that became clear early on in the pandemic was that you couldn’t rely on other people to take measures to protect you — you’d have to do it yourself. That remains true. If it’s important to to you to avoid Covid, the only real way to do it is to be willing to assert yourself, even when it feels a little awkward and even where there’s built-in pressure to defer (like meetings with C-suite leaders). What that means in practice: carry masks, put them on in situations like this one, and be willing to say things like:
- “I can’t risk getting sick right now so I’m going duck out to my office and call in from there.”
- “I’m going to run out and grab a mask because I need to be extra safe right now.”
- “Would you mind wearing a mask since it’s such a small space?”
Say these things cheerfully and matter-of-factly, and then do what you need to do. If you’re working with reasonable people and you put effort into maintaining warm relationships generally, it shouldn’t be a big deal.
Also: I wrote this column at a different point in Covid, but the principles still apply about asserting yourself in ways that feel a little uncomfortable in service of a larger good.
3. Which employee is lying?
I manage a customer-facing team that answers questions and provides supplies to clients. Two team members (Taylor and Blake) are not excited about their jobs and are not invested in ensuring clients receive the best service possible. They have both participated in training and discussions about expectations. Taylor has a written warning that the next poor customer service interaction will result in termination. Blake would most likely receive a written warning.
Last week a customer complained about the service they received. The customer refused to identify the staff member since they did not want to get them into trouble. Taylor and Blake were the only two working at the desk during the incident. They both said the other one was who interacted with the customer. I don’t think either will admit to the interaction, so how do I address the poor service the client received? And is there a way to escalate discipline for Taylor or Blake?
If you don’t know who was responsible and have no way of finding out, you can’t hold one of them accountable for it — although you can certainly it generally with both of them by revisiting how you want similar situations handled and asking them to confirm their understanding of that.
But also, given that one of them is lying about what happened, take it as impetus to supervise both of them more closely: find opportunities to observe more often, spot-check work, check in with clients about whether they’re getting what they need and to take their temperature generally, and ask their colleagues for feedback.
After all the retraining and expectation-setting you’ve already done, if you’re not seeing a significant and sustained change you should move things toward a resolution with both as swiftly as you can. And it sounds like the sort of situation where the closer you look, the more problems you’re likely to find, so significantly increasing how much attention you’re paying should speed it all along.
Also, if you can avoid scheduling them together, do that too.
4. “Strong personality”
Years ago, when I was in lower management, a coworker who was entry-level and I clashed. It was a mutual clash of styles and personalities. She complained to our boss, and during a meeting with the three of us, she defended herself by saying, “I have a strong personality.” I didn’t respond to this, but it felt like a cheap excuse to behave like an ass. Is this something people can say to avoid accountability? Or is this a non-excuse?
In contexts like this, it’s often something people say to try to avoid looking more deeply at how they might be contributing to the problem. Without more details about exactly what the issues were with your colleague, I can’t say for sure — but often it’s part of the “that’s just who I am!” school of excusing one’s own behavior.
I’ve always liked this article by Marshall Goldmith called “An Excessive Need to Be Me,” where he points out that a rigid allegiance to “being yourself” can sometimes be pointless vanity, and at odds with actually improving your dynamics with other people.
Related:
my employee identifies proudly as a grump
5. Who can know about discipline meetings?
When an employee is undergoing discipline or a performance improvement plan, what can an employer tell other employees? If the employer has a “need-to-know-only” policy, does the EA scheduling the meetings “need to know” that those meetings are related to discipline?
It’s really up to the employer’s own internal policies. No law prevents them from sharing info with other employees. If their policy restricts the info on a “need to know” basis, it’s still possible the EA scheduling the meetings would fall in that category; depending on how that particular EA manages people’s calendars, they might have access to agendas, or know basic topic in order to prioritize the meeting relative to others, etc.
