Posted by Ask a Manager
https://www.askamanager.org/2025/12/nameplate-drama-boss-and-i-keep-wearing-the-same-thing-and-more.html
https://www.askamanager.org/?p=28274
I’m on vacation. Here are some past letters that I’m making new again, rather than leaving them to wilt in the archives.
1. Nameplate drama
I work for a very large company. My department is small and very specialized. The rest of company either doesn’t know we exist or, if they do, doesn’t understand what we do. My department has been the “stepchild” of the company. There have been growth and leadership changes that affected morale for many years. There’s a lack of role clarity, communication, overstepping of management boundaries, no policies or procedures, reactiveness, finger pointing, etc.
We have one long-term employee, Jan, who is known for being rude and sarcastic and trying to pass it all off as a joke. Many of us avoid her. She has been insubordinate with her prior manager and had threatened to go to the CEO so nothing was done. She had worked with the CEO in the past and has some type of continued relationship. Morale is low and people are leaving. Our turnover has been noticed by upper management — five people have left in last eight months. The most recent was everybody’s favorite manager, Jay.
Jan has been collecting all departed employees’ nameplates for years and proudly displayed them. We all have started taking the nameplates of the coworkers who have quit in past months, and Jan isn’t happy. Some had even instructed us to make sure Jan doesn’t get nameplates to display. Jan is mad that she couldn’t find Jay’s nameplate, so she printed his picture and is displaying at her desk. I walked in this morning and everybody is mad. They’re tired of Jan and all the ugliness and rudeness. The whole team is tired in general and feel, due to all the other issues, this has crossed the line. Unfortunately, the head of the department just came by asking about Jay’s picture and Jan loudly complained about not being able to find his nameplate and the reason for the picture. He laughed. The rest of us cringed. Some on my team want to complain. I decided to speak for the team with my director about how this is affecting the team tomorrow. I am somewhat second guessing myself. But I am very aware as team lead of all the issues affecting everybody and the low team morale. This has been an issue for few years. As an FYI, a few of us are looking to post out, including me, and are taking additional training courses to leave our department. Your take on this whole mess?
I originally didn’t understand what Jan was doing with the nameplates, but commenters have pointed out that it sounds like she’s using them as “trophies” of people she’s successfully driven out. Given that, I’m rewriting this answer.
If that is indeed what she’s doing, that’s incredibly messed up, and someone in a position of authority needs tell her “these aren’t appropriate to display and I’m collecting them from you today.” That person might be you, as team lead! But if it’s not, you can indeed cite this to whoever is as evidence of Jan’s toxicity.
It sounds like it’s far from the only problem though, and solving this will still leave you mired in serious issues: team morale is low, communication is bad, you have no systems, and the turnover isn’t likely to stop. Absent any signs of real commitment to change that from above you, I’d focus the bulk of your mental energy on getting out.
– 2018
Read an update to this letter here.
2. How do I resign without destroying my boss’s company and breaking her heart?
For the last year, I have been slowly building a company while continuing to work in a senior management position with my firm. I have been with my current employer for over 10 years and have a close relationship with my boss. We are a very small and close-knit office, but I’m excited about starting something new and moving on. My master plan was to leave once it became clear that I had business to carry me into next year, which I now do.
Simple enough, right? Over the last six months, our business has suffered from a lack of new clients. Two of my former coworkers who I worked closely with recently left because of this. Unfortunately, they both gave notice the week my boss’s spouse died. After this happened, she pulled me aside begging me not to leave and said she’d close the office if I quit. She also told me this is all she has left to look forward to. She gave me a raise because I will be “assuming more responsibility” with my coworkers gone (responsibility I don’t particularly want). She’s offered to pass the business along to me when she retires, which seems generous at face value, but I’m almost certain we have been operating at a loss for years. I’m at the height of my career and I’ve suddenly found myself in a failing company, with a staff entirely over 55. Mostly, I just don’t want this anymore. I want to focus on my own company and move on.
I’m really at a loss on how to quit with the threat of her losing the “only thing she has left” when I go? How do I quit without hurting her deeply in an already fragile time? It feels like I’m crushing someone who’s counting on me and sees me as the future of their company. I don’t want to hurt her, but this isn’t what I want.
Oh no! This is hard. But you definitely don’t need to stay. And even your boss probably wouldn’t want you to stay and be miserable if she had the full context of what you’ve been planning, but since she doesn’t know all that, the comments she’s making are all based on the assumption that you’re reasonably happy there. So yeah, you need to talk to her and let her know what your plans are.
You didn’t say how long it’s been since her spouse died. If it just happened, I’d give it a few weeks before you talk to her. One advantage of your situation is that you’re not leaving for a job with another employer, with a definite start date; you have the flexibility to wait a few weeks. It’s not that a few weeks will be enough time for her to adjust to the death of her spouse; obviously it’s not. This is just about not hitting her with yet another piece of bad news while she’s still reeling in the immediate aftermath of tragedy. But it’s not a really long time (like six months), because you don’t want her making long-term plans that center around you.
I totally get that you don’t want to be responsible for her deciding to the close the office if you leave. But that might in fact be the best decision for her, and that’s okay. Or she might change her mind; it’s possible that her comments to you were made in the initial stages of grief (and perhaps panic about the business) and she’ll decide to handle it differently later. But the best thing you can do is to give her the information about the situation that she currently lacks (i.e., that you are going to be moving on relatively soon), after waiting a respectful amount of time, so that she’s able to make the right decisions for her and for her business.
– 2018
3. My boss and I keep accidentally wearing the same thing
I work in a very small office — just my boss, me, and the maintenance guy who pops in occasionally. I adore my boss, but lately I’ve noticed that we tend to wear the same style of outfits. Like we’ll both have on a blue shirt with black pants and a black cardigan. Yesterday we both wore pink shirts with jeans and grey cardigan, etc. I’m fairly new to office environments, so I’m not sure if this is super weird or if I’m just overthinking it. We don’t wear identical outfits, but they are pretty similar in style and color. Should I go shopping or should I just chill out?
Nah, you’re fine. Sometimes this happens in offices (it’s like the clothes version of women’s menstrual cycles syncing up) and you can make a joke about the matching outfits. You definitely don’t need to buy new clothes.
Related:
is it weird to start dressing like my boss?
– 2019
Read an update to this letter here.
4. My company wants me to impart years of knowledge to someone in my last week on the job
My current role is multi-faceted. We’re a company of fewer than 50 employees, I do all of the marketing, all of the graphic design for our e-learning modules, and 80% of the customer service for online learning (seriously). I have a bachelor’s degree in graphic design, and taught myself the sister software for instructional design after college.
With less than a week left before I leave for a new job, I’ve been tasked to teach our video production intern (turned full-time employee) everything I know about the software. This is an advanced software program that took me years to learn, and even now, I’m nowhere near master level. The intern is fresh out of college and knows video production very well, but has very little graphic design experience (not to mention, he’s arrogant, having once told me he doesn’t need to attend professional development conferences or skills trainings because “he already knows all of that”). First, I just don’t think I can get him up to par before I leave. Second, isn’t this asking a lot for a departing employee? Please correct me if I’m mistaken, but I’m used to passing off tasks and projects upon departure, but not being required to teach a newbie everything about a tool that I use…? Can I ask your thoughts? Furthermore, my superiors are holding this “carrot” of being able to take Thursday and Friday this week as PTO, giving me a couple of days off before I start my new job on Monday, provided I teach him this software.
It’s totally reasonable to say, “I have a degree in graphic design and spent years getting proficient with this software, which is fairly advanced. Even now I’m nowhere near master level or even really equipped to teach it to others. There’s no way I can teach him the software in a week, but I can show him some basics and point him to some tutorials that might be helpful.”
I wouldn’t get too swayed by the promise of getting Thursday and Friday off, if it comes at the price of an unreasonable expectation. I’d rather you be straightforward with them about the limitations of what’s possible, so that they have that context and don’t blame you a few weeks from now when — surprise! — he doesn’t know an advanced program that takes years to master.
– 2018
5. Recruiter says I need a “cover story” to hide that I spent eight months off with my baby
I am 16 years into my impressive (I think) career with experience working in the government in DC and for commercial industry. I also have an MBA, a master’s in Policy and a BA. For the past four years, I worked at a very large aerospace company but was part of a RIF that occurred last September due to a merger. The situation was kind of stinky as I received notice while I was on maternity leave (not illegal, just an a-hole move). I received a package which allowed me to stay with my baby (my first) for several more months before I started actively looking for a new position.
I have been looking for several months now on my own and due to my industry not being strong in the state I live, it’s more difficult for me to find a job. Finding the aerospace position took just over a year last time. I have recently linked up with a recruiter who is very well connected and I think could really help me. He helped me revise my resume and LinkedIn profile and seems to know people at the companies I am interested in applying to.
The recruiter has said that I need to “come up with a story” for why I haven’t been working since last September. He suggests that I tell people I was consulting or doing small projects. I pushed back and said that I am not ashamed that I got to spent time with my daughter and that any person/company I work for should appreciate the value in that. He said that at “my level,” people don’t expect that and it will look negatively for me. My husband feels very uncomfortable with this lie and I am not sure either.
I’d give this recruiter a wide berth. It’s very normal to take parental leave, and there’s nothing wrong with being up-front that that’s what you were doing with that time. If you’d been out of the workforce for a much longer longer time — like years — he’d have a point that it’s better to be able to say you were doing projects of some kind (but not if that’s a lie, which is what he’s suggesting). But eight months of parental leave, particularly when it coincided with a layoff, is just not a big deal.
If you’re concerned that maybe he’s right about the norms in your field, check in with people you know and respect in your industry (ideally at the level you’d be working at or higher). But this guy sounds like a tool.
– 2019
The post nameplate drama, boss and I keep wearing the same thing, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.
https://www.askamanager.org/2025/12/nameplate-drama-boss-and-i-keep-wearing-the-same-thing-and-more.html
https://www.askamanager.org/?p=28274
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