my boss won’t help with my workload, interviewer made a weird sexist comment about his marriage, and more

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager .
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. I asked my boss for help with my workload, but she didn’t come through
Like a lot of people, I’m drowning at work right now. I have more work than anyone could possibly do and no one who assigns me tasks can accurately tell me their urgency so figuring out how to prioritize is a nightmare. I’m used to being a high performer, and I still am, but I hate feeling like I’m constantly on the backfoot and struggling to keep up.
I have tried talking to my manager about this. I told her my workload is unmanageable and I asked for less work and more structure. She seemed to understand and immediately set up a weekly 1-on-1. In our next team meeting, she told our whole team we would all be getting work plans with specific goals.
That was eight months ago. Our weekly meetings lasted about two weeks and I still don’t have my work plan because my manager is trying to fight the rest of team into accepting theirs first.
My manager supervises half of the known “problem employees” in the department and I know that takes up a lot of her time and energy, and she has her own work on top of that. But I really need some support and I am at a loss to figure out how to get it. This has been a lifelong problem for me, being neglected by teachers and managers and even parents because I seem like I can take care of myself.
Are there specific things I should be asking for that will help me break this cycle or do I just need to abandon this ship and seek a better captain elsewhere?
So, there is a thing that I have watched happen in office after office where someone brings a problem to their manager once, it doesn’t solve the problem, and so they conclude that clearly the manager is unwilling or unable to help. I get why — now she knows about the problem! if she’s declining to help, she must not care to! — but in reality you’ll often need to go back a second time and say, “It’s still a problem and I still need help.” Often that’s because the manager assumed whatever she did after the first conversation solved the problem and so needs to hear that it didn’t … or sometimes (and this is probably your situation) she has her hands full with other things, it slipped down the priority list, and she’s assuming you’ll come back to her if you still need help … and when you don’t, she assumes everything is fine, or at least fine enough .
And yes, your boss should have known that two weeks of weekly meetings wouldn’t have solved the problem. And she should have checked back with you to see how things were going. But she didn’t, and it could help to go back to her and say, “This is still a problem and I still need your help.”
Since her initial suggestion of work plans for everyone has clearly gotten hung up somewhere, you also could suggest a work plan for you . Unlike your coworkers, you want one, and she won’t have to fight you into accepting it. You also could just draft an initial one and then the two of you could refine it together, which will probably make it happen faster than if you leave it all to her. You could also just start  prioritizing your own workload , keeping her in the loop (so for example, telling her each week “I’m going to finish X and Y this week but Z won’t get done” so she has the chance to say “actually push Y back and prioritize Z”).
But the main thing is: keep it on her radar. Don’t give up just because the initial conversation didn’t solve things. Raise it again! And again after that if you need to. There’s a point where you’ll have raised it so often that you can safely conclude nothing will change, but you’re not there after just one conversation.
2. Interviewer made a weird sexist comment about his marriage
I had a great on-site interview yesterday for an executive assistant position for a director in a male-dominated industry. My husband also works at this company and I’ve been very clear about that from the beginning — I mentioned him both in my initial video interview and to one or two of the people I met on site.
I got a tour of the facility and met several people, and all of this went great! I like the environment, I like what I’ve learned, and I have a good sense that I’d be happy there.
There was one weird moment with the director, though. After sharing about his background and career, he transitioned to speaking about his family by saying, and I quote, “I’m married, happily. I just want to emphasize that.” It was weird, so I think I just nodded and said something like, “Okay, same.” He’d heard about my husband a few times by that point, and mentioned him by name to talk about a project the company is doing right now. Like, he knows that I’m married.
In the moment, I felt awkward so I tried to breeze past it, but after reflecting and sharing with a few trusted friends, I can feel how weird and sexist this was. I’m having a difficult time finding some a motivation for this comment besides a sexist belief that all young women are seductresses who must be warded off with assurances of a man’s marital bliss or else she’ll have no choice but to pounce.
I also feel like I can safely assume that he’d never say such a thing to a man interviewing for the position. I’m worried that taking this job would mean subjecting myself to low-level sexism like this all the time, and that by not speaking up in the moment I’ve made him think that comments like this are acceptable.
I do want to accept this job but I don’t want to create the expectation that comments like this are okay with me and not weird. Is there a way for me to bring this up during negotiations before accepting a potential offer? Or am I better off ignoring it for now as a weird interview mishap and committing to speaking up if he makes a comment like this again?
Ooooh. The only way I could see this not being alarming is if he said it in the context of some amusing anecdote about his wife —like,  “I’m married, happily. I just want to emphasize that. But I’m pretty sure she’s trying to give me food poisoning via this sandwich.”
But assuming it was nothing like that … yeah, this is a really weird thing to say to a job candidate, especially if there was anything in the context that made it sound like he was warning you not to look at him as … what, a potential romantic prospect? Or like he was assuring you that you wouldn’t need to worry about him looking at you that way? Agggh.
I don’t think there’s any way to bring this up during negotiations without it being disastrously awkward. However! Your husband works there, which means you have access to a ton of intel on this guy. Can your husband find out what he’s like from women who work closely with him? Or connect you to those women so you can have your own off-the-record conversations about what he’s like to work with? Getting info through your husband’s connections there would be worth doing even if this concerning comment hadn’t happened, but this is additional impetus to do it.
3. I’m getting an unnecessary apology from a colleague
I started a new office job a few months ago and everything seems fine, but I feel like my colleagues are a lot more sensitive than I am in a lot of ways. Anyway. A few weeks ago I was processing orders and having a really difficult time. I’m still fairly new and the job I do is very time-sensitive with daily targets, and my inbox was very backed up.
One order was sent in by a sales rep, a guy who’s known for having difficult orders. It had very obscure information and a lot of cleaning up had to be done behind him to get it all to go through okay. I’d been on the phone with him trying to explain something about his order and he was just being a bit dismissive. I think it had more to do with him not really understanding what I was trying to explain than any bad intention on his part. I was more than a little frustrated and I ended up tearing up a little after he hung up. I don’t usually cry at work, but I can’t understate how minor this was. A few tears popped out and then I carried on.
The problem is one of my more sensitive colleagues saw me and got concerned. I told her I was fine, but she told our manager. Apparently saying you’re fine means nothing because our manager insisted on talking to his boss, who came to my desk to apologize and assured me he was going to talk to the rep. I would just rather have forgotten the whole thing.
This morning my manager came over to me and said the rep was “mortified” and that he’s passed on an apology and is probably going to come and say sorry to me in person. Which I just feel so guilty about because I just think this is so unnecessary. And it’s going to be really awkward as well.
Is there a professional sounding way to get out of this? I don’t know if there’s something I’m not getting about office culture, but I don’t think this guy is really any worse than any other of the reps and I think my colleague might have overplayed my initial reaction.
Your coworker and manager probably think you’re saying you’re fine because you don’t want to make a big deal about it, but that since you were crying, it was bad and the rep was a jerk. They’re probably not accounting for the fact that sometimes it’s not the specific incident that triggers an emotional reaction, but some larger context (or a bad day, or stress in general, or something totally unrelated to work).
You could try preempting the apology by messaging the rep with something like, “I think signals got crossed somewhere — there’s no need to apologize to me! I was a little stressed the other day, but you didn’t do anything that warrants an apology. Please don’t worry about it for another minute.” Or if he does come by in person to apologize, you could say something similar then.
4. How should I use recommendation letters from my professors?
I am a college student looking for internships and jobs as I get closer to graduating, and I’m getting some letters of recommendation from my professors who I have worked well with, which I’m excited about. As I look at internships, how should I incorporate these letters into my resume and/or job prospects? Is there a tactful approach to including them that might help my prospects, aside from emailing potential employers with them alongside the traditional resume and cover letter?
Well … those letters aren’t going to be very useful, and it doesn’t make sense to continue putting effort into collecting them.
In the vast majority of fields, letters of recommendation don’t carry any real weight with employers because (a) no one expects to find critical information in them, since the person they’re written about will read them, (b) when things get to the point that a hiring manager wants to talk to your references, they’ll want to ask their own questions about the specific areas they care about — and generally will want a phone conversation, because hearing things like tone, hesitations, and enthusiasm level can convey a lot that most letters can’t.
(Academia and law can be exceptions to this, as they continue to use recommendation letters — but they’re the exceptions, and they’ll explicitly ask for letters if they want them.)
5. Only one person has seen our employee handbook
The owner of the small local flower shop I work for hired someone to create employee handbooks. The owner gave one to a new driver upon hiring her. The new driver read it, as instructed, and then gave the owner the signed acknowledgement. Although the owner has had copies for every employee for over five months, she’s never distributed them to the rest of the employees.
Is it legal for the owner to distribute the handbook to one person only? It feels discriminatory to me. Technically, she can hold that one person accountable to the policies while no one else is even aware of the policies.
Yes, it’s legal (as long as she’s not basing who gets to the see the handbook on race, sex, religion, or another protected class) but it’s weird! There’s no point in having a handbook if no one is allowed to know what’s in it. I’m guessing this is just disorganization or incompetence on your boss’s part.
Have the rest of you asked for your own copies of the handbook? If not, do that. But after that, if you still don’t get them … well, that’s a problem of your boss’s own making and you don’t need to solve it for her. (If she starts penalizing you for not following policies you don’t know about, that’s a problem, of course — but it doesn’t sound like that’s happening.)
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