Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/08/my-employee-got-fired-and-i-feel-responsible-risque-photos-of-a-new-coworker-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=32564

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

1. My employee got fired and I feel responsible

My direct report fell behind in her work. Because this put our workplace at risk legally, she was terminated by my boss and grandboss today. I feel responsible because I should have known, and could have easily discovered, that she had fallen behind in her work. Had I known, I could have and would have done something to help her.

I think her termination was a horrible move because we don’t have anyone else with the knowledge/training to catch up her work. I feel this further exposes us to more risk.

I knew my boss was mad upon discovering this issue last week, and he told me it was a fireable offense. I didn’t think her termination would actually happen. Usually we have a graduated disiplinary process, and she had never had any prior disciplinary issues. My boss did not further discuss disciplinary measures after his initial comment last week, and I only found out about the termination upon receiving an automated email informing me that my employee’s account was closed and I now had access to her email, etc.

I feel horrible about this for several reasons, not the least of which is that I feel I failed her by not keeping on top of what she was (or wasn’t) doing. Everyone in my department is overworked and underpaid. We are chronically understaffed. I am hanging on by a thread myself, often doing the work of two people, and this might have just broken me.

Do you have any words of wisdom? I am seriously considering resigning and when my boss asks what he can do to keep me, I will tell him he has to re-hire my employee. I can’t really afford to lose my job, and while I don’t think he’d call my bluff, I’m not sure about anything anymore.

If you can’t afford to lose your job or leave it on the spot, you shouldn’t tell your boss you’re leaving if he doesn’t rehire the employee. It sounds like you don’t actually mean it, and you don’t want to bluff where a job is concerned if you can’t genuinely risk losing it. Moreover, people don’t normally get hired back in a situation like this; it’s not impossible, but it’s unlikely. (There’s also no guarantee your employee would even want to return.)

You’ve got to have a conversation with your boss about the workload and understaffing issues that led this to happen. Explain there’s no realistic way for her or anyone on your team to keep up with all the work, and there’s no way for you to spot what’s not getting done unless you make room for that by doing less yourself. You should explain that going forward, that’s what you’re going to be doing — because as the manager, you’ve got to be aware when things aren’t getting done (always, but especially when there are legal consequences in the mix, and also especially when you have a boss who apparently will fire people without asking questions) — but you’ll need to let him know that means you won’t be able to do as much XYZ in order to create room for that. There’s other advice here about managing an unreasonable workload, including setting clear limits on what you can and cannot do, but the first step is to sit down and talk with your boss about what the whole team is experiencing.

And unless your boss is willing to work with you on the workload issues (whether by increasing staffing or accepting more realistic outputs from your team), start working on getting out.

Related:
do you know what your staff isn’t getting done?

2. Should we say anything to our young male coworker about risqué photos we saw of him online?

In our travel agency we have eight employees — seven middle-aged women and one young man who is new to the travel agency world and is 19 or 20. Most of the women in the office think he’s cute, but of course not in any serious way as he’s way too young for any of us. He’s just cute, according to most. (The friendship among the women is very strong as most of us have been working together for a long time. Otherwise we would never have been talking about this.)

Our male colleague’s college has a tradition of taking an end-of-year skinny dip in the ocean. The news has covered the event with online articles and even pictures in multiple years. Well, recently it was discovered that our young male colleague took part in this year’s festivities. There was apparently a news photographer on the beach, and two of the photos for the online article included our colleague, both snapped when he was leaving the water. In the first picture, he is laughing with friends and his bare bum is on display. In the second, he is leaving the water and there’s full-frontal nudity. The owner of our travel agency, who is one of the seven women, thinks he must be unaware of these pictures and thinks someone should tell him, because then he can try to get them taken off the internet. Most of the rest of us, including me, think that he more than likely knows about the photos. We also assume anyone doing the event probably checks online afterwards. There is also one person who wants to discipline him somehow for doing the event. Everyone else disagrees with that because everyone is entitled to do whatever they want in their personal life.

Long story short, there is a debate about whether to tell him or not. These photos would not cause any issues for the travel agency. More than anything, I think the other women in my office just can’t get over it because they think he’s cute.

Don’t raise it with him, and encourage your coworkers to stop talking about it. If the photos won’t cause any issues for his job, then it’s really no one’s business and it shouldn’t a topic of conversation at work (let alone an ongoing one).

It might become easier to see how inappropriate this is if you reverse the genders and imagine if an office full of older men kept talking about nude photos of a young female coworker who they all found attractive. It’s not okay. Try to shut it down (and the talk of his looks, too).

3. Is there a way to reassure internal candidates that a hiring process wasn’t rigged?

The letter about having to do interviews when you already know who you want to hire got me thinking about an experience I had a few years ago.

I had been mentoring one of my staff (Lily) for a position that then came up on our team when another employee retired. I knew she would do a fantastic job, but also knew that we had to post it both internally and externally per our HR regs. I got a very experienced manager from another team to help me with the interviews (Dave) and he agreed that Lily was a strong number 2 choice, but that an external candidate was stronger. We offered the external candidate the position, but after some back and forth with HR over salary, he ultimately declined. I checked back in with Dave to make sure I wasn’t biased towards Lily, and he agreed that I should offer it to her. She immediately started knocking it out of the park, so was definitely a great choice.

My question is: more than half of the candidates who applied were internal (although not on my team), and I wondered if, at the time, they thought I had made them jump through all the hoops when I knew who I wanted to hire all along. Is there wording that I could have used when I communicated that the position was filled that could have alleviated that belief? I don’t think it was appropriate to tell them that the first guy we offered to declined (Lily didn’t even know that she was second), but is there anything I could have said?

It’s easier to address it early in the process rather than at the end: let all your internal candidates know from the outset that it’s going to be an open hiring process where external candidates will be considered too and there’s not a preferred internal candidate with a leg up. People won’t necessarily believe it, but it’s easier to say it at the start than try to explain it later on. Also, when you announce the hire, it can help to be specific about the person’s qualifications and why you chose them (not to the point of violating anyone’s privacy, but just to lay out what made them your top choice).

4. Can I ask my supervisor about a meeting I saw on his calendar?

My supervisor has a meeting scheduled for next week with the title “Progressive Discipline Confirmation” and no further details. I have not been invited to this meeting and it may or may not be about me. Is it acceptable to ask my supervisor if I should be worried? If so, how do I phrase the question and how should I ask (via chat, email, phone, by stopping by his office)?

For more context: Our boss’s calendar has the same chunk of time blocked off. My same-level colleague (the only other person my supervisor manages) does not have this time blocked off, nor does the other supervisor in our department. Of the three of us in our part of the department, I am the most likely to be censured for something. I don’t think anything is wrong but wouldn’t necessarily know because I am autistic, which means I don’t intrinsically understand social things and/or hierarchies. I have not received any previous disciplinary actions. I have been at this workplace less than a year, but am past the “probationary” stage.

My primary concern is that I don’t want to embarrass my supervisor if he is being disciplined, seem nosy if my same-level colleague is being disciplined, or put my supervisor in a tough spot if I am being disciplined and he’s not allowed to talk about it yet. My secondary concern is that I do not want to worry about this for the next week.

Don’t ask about it. If it’s about you, you’ll almost certainly find out soon. If it’s not about you, you’ll look inappropriately nosy (and if it’s your manager who’s being disciplined, you’ll be putting him in a very awkward position). Assume that if you need to know anything, you’ll find out.

5. How to handle thank-you notes for A LOT of interviewers

I had a first-round job interview via videoconference a couple of weeks ago, with the hiring manager and two other people. After the interview, I emailed a thank-you/follow-up note individually to all three interviewers. I got a nice email back from one of them the next week and a phone call from the hiring manager later that same day acknowledging my note and inviting me to an in-person interview.

I’m driving a couple of hours to attend that early next week, and it’s going to be a four-hour engagement, during which I will be speaking with what sounds like A LOT of people: the hiring manager again and her boss, and then I’ll be in an unknown number of separate meetings with people from two different teams and “divisional directors.” I would imagine the other two people I spoke with in the first interview will also be involved. Doing a little internet sleuthing to check out team size, I’m guessing I’ll be speaking with 10-15 people.

How do I handle sending thank-you/follow-up notes after this second round of interviews? At least one person — and possibly three — will have already received one from me in which I reiterated my interest in the position and my relevant strengths and experiences. On top of that, sending individual notes to 10-15 different people seems like … a lot. What would you recommend?

Yeah, you don’t need to send notes to 10-15 people! You can if you want but it wouldn’t look bad to just send them to the key people — maybe the hiring manager and her boss and anyone else you especially clicked with. For content, ideally you’d build on something you discussed in your conversations with them this time so you’re not just reiterating your strengths, but referencing something specific that you talked about. It doesn’t even have to be talking yourself up; it could be “here’s a link to that book I mentioned that you might like” or “I really enjoyed hearing about the challenges you’ve been having with the monkeys” or so forth. They can also be short since they’re Notes Round Two.

For the record, though, if you did do this with all 10-15 people and personalized them (sending even just a few lines to each person), some people would really, really love it. Others wouldn’t care at all! (And no pressure to do that.)

The post my employee got fired and I feel responsible, risqué photos of a new coworker, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/08/my-employee-got-fired-and-i-feel-responsible-risque-photos-of-a-new-coworker-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=32564