Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/10/my-employees-are-defensive-whenever-i-give-feedback.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=33832

A reader writes:

I’m in senior leadership at a mid-sized company. My department has a number of processes and procedures that other departments need to follow and my team also handles compliance issues, so I’m often giving instructions or reminding folks of various steps they need to be taking. No matter how soft I make the feedback, no matter how benign the feedback is, I get defensiveness and over-explanation in return. A classic example is, “Please remember to copy [employee] on these requests because they track these for our department.” I expect “will do!” and, instead I get, “I haven’t done this process before, but when I do X other process, I don’t have to copy anyone. That’s why I didn’t know. I’m so sorry! This will never happen again!”

This is true even if I say, “I know you might be new to this process, and this happens all the time so don’t worry about it, but can you please copy [employee]?” and add a variety of happy emojis. And, honestly, I don’t really have the time or capacity to be spending time trying to come up with the perfect email that will not result in someone being defensive. On the other hand, this response type starts to get wearing after a while. I start to want to not tell people that they need to do things differently.

I get this response close to 100% of the time. Is this something I just need to learn to expect in a (very) senior position? Am I reading too much into it and should just accept that employees are going to behave this way when being corrected?

I have mentioned this issue to HR and asked them to consider if there’s a reason, like company culture, that employees may feel afraid of receiving feedback. In the meantime, can I just send normal emails with politely, professionally worded requests and stop trying to create the perfect email that won’t result in someone feeling the need to over-explain and defend?

You can read my answer to this letter at New York Magazine today. Head over there to read it.

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https://www.askamanager.org/?p=33832

Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/10/my-religious-family-disapproves-of-my-socializing-with-male-colleagues.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=33701

A reader writes:

I’m a happily married woman who works at a company that somewhat blurs the lines between work and friendship. While working at this company, I have learned that I’m a social butterfly. I enjoy socializing with colleagues after hours at trade shows, company events, and informal gatherings, especially when we have out-of-town colleagues visiting from another part of America or another part of the world.

My husband is an introvert through and through, and we’ve had to learn how to navigate our opposite natures when it comes to my work’s social events. Basically, he only attends the events that are very important to me or events that only have a small group of people who he knows well, and I attend the rest solo. This works well for us. I can fill my social battery as I see fit, and he doesn’t feel forced to make small talk with people he’ll likely never see again.

Sometimes, I want to catch up with colleagues of the opposite sex who I don’t see very often. My husband knows he has nothing to worry about, so he’s fine with me grabbing dinner or a drink after work with visiting colleagues. It’s usually a small group of mixed sex people, but occasionally it’s just me and maybe two other men (I’m in a male-dominated industry). My husband does not have a problem with this at all.

However, I come from a very conservative religious family that definitely does not approve of opposite-sex colleagues socializing outside of the office. I think that’s a gross, outdated, and sexist mindset (partially thanks to reading your blog!), but I’m struggling to come up with a script for how to shut down any negative comments. No one has said anything to me directly yet, but I see the sidelong glances when I happen to mention attending a work event and my family discovers that my husband was not there with me. Aside from ignoring their glances, which has been my strategy so far, do you have any suggestions for what to say? I’m not great at quick thinking when I’m suddenly put on the spot, so I should probably have something in my back pocket to use just in case.

And if you have a script for my husband to use, that would be helpful too. Even though he doesn’t mind my social activities, he’s at a loss for how to defend our choices to my family.

If you’re willing to keep ignoring their sidelong glances, do! That’s a perfectly fine way to handle it. If they have something to say, make them say it before you bother to engage. Why borrow trouble, if you can ignore them!

But I can also understand why those sidelong glances might really irritate you. They definitely would me. So if you’re looking for things to say, or if they say something that requires a response:

* “Dealing with men one-on-one has been normal and expected everywhere I’ve ever worked. It’s not 1825.”

* “Mike and I have a great marriage so it’s a non-issue. Would you not trust Bob around female colleagues? That must be really hard.”

* “Mike and I trust each other. Is there something making you concerned about my marriage or my trustworthiness?”

Obviously these last two are a bit more confrontational — but your relatives are the ones making that necessary by implying, essentially, that you’d cheat on your husband (or, I guess, that your male colleagues are waiting to prey on you).

If they respond with something about how they trust you but the men you work with can’t be trusted: “I’ve never known anyone I work with to be less than professional and respectful. If you’ve had different experiences, I’m sorry to hear it.” Or just, “Matilda, please — we’re in public spaces and it’s 2025. This is part of being in the workforce.”

And as for what your husband can say: “Jane and I trust each other. I’d worry if our marriage depended on line-of-sight supervision at all times. Why, does yours?” Okay, he doesn’t need to say “does yours?” But he should be thinking it!

If these are all more aggressive than you want (and I realize they might be), another option is to just laugh and say, “It’s not an issue.” Because it’s not — and you and your husband are the ones who decide that, not anyone else.

The post my religious family disapproves of my socializing with male colleagues appeared first on Ask a Manager.

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https://www.askamanager.org/?p=33701

Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/10/worker-billed-client-for-stinking-up-her-bathroom-my-employee-curses-at-me-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=33774

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

1. Worker stunk up client’s bathroom, then billed her for it

I manage a team of skilled electricians who often work in clients’ homes. A client reached out to express concern that she was billed for 15 minutes during which our electrician was, quite literally, off the clock and stinking up her bathroom. I understand that nature calls, but really? Using her bathroom and charging her for it? Frankly, my personal thought is (barring an absolute emergency) he should have left her home and gone to a gas station. And then he had the nerve to charge her for it? Where do I even begin?

It sounds like you and your employee — and maybe the rest of your employees, too — just need to get better aligned on how to handle those situations. It’s very reasonable to tell them not to bill for time spent in the bathroom or otherwise not working on the job (the same as if they had a personal phone call for 15 minutes — especially in jobs that often bill by the quarter-hour), but you need to tell them that up-front! I suspect you’re thinking they should just know because it seems like common sense to you — but you’ll get better results if you make underlying assumptions explicit, especially once you see there’s a need to.

As for the bathroom use itself, I don’t get people who don’t want workers to use their bathrooms, but if your expectation is that your employees shouldn’t, you should let them know that up-front too, not after they’ve gotten it wrong. (That said, what do you expect someone to do if the need is urgent? Even if you normally expect them to go off-premises, emergencies happen.)

2. My employee curses at me and management doesn’t care

I am a middle manager at a very large, prestigious firm. One of my direct reports, Jane, was on a PIP two years ago for acting rudely to coworkers on a regular basis and excessively micromanaging her teammates. Her work was not at issue.

For the last few months, we have been down one team member. As a result, I have been helping the team out. Likely feeling stressed, Jane has become very anxious and difficult to work with. She feels the need to nag me all day about my “status” on projects. I have asked her to stop micromanaging me, as I am her boss, but she won’t. At the same time, I have seen the quality of her work go down. When I addressed her work (in the kindest way possible), she became angry and responded with a profanity-laced tirade about how she didn’t care what I thought. I immediately reported this to my boss, who responded by saying,”Hmmm, she doesn’t talk to me that way.” To make it worse, my boss suggested that I give Jane a high score in my year-end feedback, although it is “my decision.”

Clearly, the insubordination was considered a nonissue, and I get the feeling that I am viewed as a weak and ineffective manager. I’m not sure how to go forward in this situation. I dread every day knowing I have to deal with Jane, and I get no support from leadership.

Well, wait, you’re her manager! That means you can manage her a lot more assertively than you’ve been doing.

When Jane unleashed her profanity-laced tirade about not caring about what you thought, the right move was to immediately pull her into a private conversation and let her know, in serious terms, that she can’t speak to anyone at work that way, and in fact it does matter what you think because you’re the person managing her work. The fact that it wasn’t your instinct to do that — and instead was your instinct to ask your boss to handle it — makes me think that you’re likely conveying to Jane in all sorts of ways that you don’t believe you have real authority over her, or at least not authority you’re likely to exercise. I think you’re probably right that you’re being viewed as a weak and ineffective manager, but that’s because … well, you’re being a weak and ineffective manager!

Step one is to get confident with your own authority and begin more actively managing Jane (and probably others, as well as the culture on your team more broadly). Some advice on doing that:

I have to manage the office jerk
my employee is combative and rude
my employee has a bad attitude
new managers and authority
how to appear more authoritative at work

3. Can I ask my manager to stop opening my deliveries?

Is it weird for my supervisor to open any deliveries I receive in the mail?

My supervisor oversees our department’s budget, and she and I are the only people in the department with spending cards. She has to approve any charges I make, so she is well aware of anything I order.

We get a number of packages every day and a few weeks ago she opened one addressed to me on accident (I legitimately believe it was an accident). She apologized and explained her mistake, and I told her not to worry. Accidents happen … but since that time she has opened every package that has been addressed to me.

These are all items that were ordered for use in our department and she knows what I’ve ordered from my credit card approvals, but it makes me feel weird that she’s opening things that are specifically addressed to me. For what it’s worth, there has never been any question about me misusing funds. Would I be out of line to ask her not to open mail that is addressed to me?

Yeah, there’s a high risk of it coming across weirdly if these are all things you’ve ordered for your department. If you were having personal mail sent there, it would be different — but it’s hard to justify asking her not to when it’s all work stuff, unless there’s a specific reason you can cite (like “I didn’t realize the conference posters had arrived and I called the printer to complain”).

There are offices where whoever processes the mail opens it all and then distributes it (although that’s admittedly less common with packages than with letters). And legally, mail sent to anyone at a business is “owned” by the business and can be opened by its management (or anyone there, unless the employer itself makes a rule against it).

But since this is a change to what she’d been doing before, you could approach it from that angle: “I noticed that after you accidentally opened that package addressed to me a few weeks ago, you’ve been opening everything that comes to me, and I wanted to make sure I haven’t done something to make you concerned about what I’m ordering.”

4. What’s going to happen now that a great manager quit without notice?

I work in a volatile industry for a large organization (10,000+ employees). My department undergoes frequent organizational changes in the name of efficiency or innovation. Overall, my department is seen as one that costs money but is important to the business, rather than one that generates money, so we have the frequent changes in an attempt to save money. In practice, my day-to-day role doesn’t change much. Instead, we see new leaders rotating in, projects ending and being replaced with others, or the introduction of new KPIs that are essentially rebranded versions of the old ones. After 15 years, I’ve grown jaded about this cycle of “reinvention” that happens roughly every two years, if not sooner.

Recently, however, something unexpected happened: a manager I deeply respected, known for transparent communication and strong leadership, suddenly quit without notice or handover. This was entirely their decision, and it left many people surprised, with no plan for how their responsibilities would be managed. I can only imagine how frustrating recent organizational changes must have been to push them to that point.

What I can’t predict is the fallout of this. Will senior leaders overreact or ignore? In your experience, how do leaders respond to this? After so many years, I’ve learned to anticipate most of the moves at this company, but this situation has caught me off guard.

It’s impossible to say, but if I had to bet money on it, I’d bet the ripples will be relatively small and contained — no freak-outs or significant changes as a result. First, people leave unexpectedly for all kinds of reasons (family emergency, health crisis, better offer fell in their lap). But even if it’s clear that they left as a last-straw kind of thing, the most common reaction from dysfunctional companies in that situation is to shrug and say, “Okay, it wasn’t for them” — not to have a reckoning about how it’s a sign things need to change. And frankly, in some cases that’s reasonable; sometimes the things aggravating the person are things that, while legitimately frustrating, need to happen because the organization’s priorities are (rightly) different than the individual person’s are. In other cases, of course, it’s not reasonable — but then in that situation, the serious problems that led the person to quit can also be what keeps the leadership from responding appropriately.

5. Resigning while my boss is out of the country

I have an offer of employment and need to put in my two-week notice. I’ve been waiting for the background check and reference check to clear so I’ve been unable to resign as of yet.

My boss is leaving for an international vacation tomorrow and I am unsure as to how to proceed. I can give them a heads-up that I will be putting in my notice (prior to getting the background check all-clear) or I can give my resignation to their superior and have them find out when they return. Either way, I risk alienating my boss as they won’t want that info right as they are taking a well-deserved vacay, nor do they want to be blindsided when they get back. What is the best way to handle this while (hopefully) not burning bridges?

Wait for the contingencies to be removed from the offer before you resign. Otherwise, there’s a risk that something could go wrong and the offer could fall through. That’s true even if you’re confident that nothing in your background check or references will pose a problem; things happen that you can’t predict, and you absolutely should not resign a job until you’re 100% sure you’re ready to leave and know what you want your last day to be.

It’s not a big deal that your boss will be away when you resign. It’s not ideal, but it’s a very common thing to happen, and businesses deal with it. When you’re ready to give notice, you’ll give it to their manager and/or HR. Your boss will find out when they’re back, and that’s just how this stuff goes. You can explain that the timing was out of your hands, but it would be incredibly unusual for this to burn a bridge.

The post worker billed client for stinking up her bathroom, my employee curses at me, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/10/worker-billed-client-for-stinking-up-her-bathroom-my-employee-curses-at-me-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=33774