Ask A Manager: I manage my daughter and someone complained about her

[minoanmiss]

I am the director of operations for our practice. I have a daughter who is one of our employees, and I am her manager. She has a seven-month old baby and works part-time from home for our publicly traded company, doing administrative work.

She brought her baby to work recently while she ran by to get some supplies and send an email. A coworker – unbeknownst to us – took a picture of my daughter’s baby playing on the floor at work during this short time and sent it to the HR director at corporate – telling HR that my daughter was bringing her baby to work in the office and that she was afraid to say anything because she feared retribution.

First of all, this was completely untrue – she works from home and does not work in the office. Secondly, no one here has ever experienced retribution. The HR director would not tell me who sent the picture and told this story.

I am concerned on two levels – first of all, what gives this employee any right to take pictures of another coworker’s child and share them with anyone? Is there recourse here? Secondly, without know who has done this, my level of trust for all of our employees has been diminished, as I must now suspect all five of the people in this particular office location of having done such a petty thing. Where are my rights to access of this information?

Well, first, you should not be managing your daughter.

You should not be managing your daughter!

I have to repeat it a second time, because it’s a huge conflict of interest. At a minimum, it will create an appearance with other employees of favoritism and unfair treatment; people are unlikely to believe that you’re able to fairly and objectively assess her and her work and to deal with her in an unbiased way when it comes to everything from assignments to raises to feedback to who ends up on a layoff list if cuts are needed. Or, uh, who you believe if there’s a complaint about her. And frankly, it’s pretty likely that at least some of that is true. There’s a reason that most companies don’t allow people to manage close relatives.

You can see it playing out in this situation, where you can’t take a stance on the situation without it sounding like you’re acting as an employee’s mom, rather than as her manager.

If you weren’t her mom, it might be easier to look at the situation this way: An employee says another employee has been bringing her baby to work in the office and she’s afraid of retribution if she speaks up about it. If you weren’t her mom, you’d probably not instantly assume that the complaint was false; you’d consider that it was possible that it was true and that you just didn’t know the full story. You wouldn’t jump to conclusions but would gather more information, and you’d also be concerned about why one of your employees was fearful of retribution, and you’d take that as a flag that something was going on that needed to be fixed.

Now, is it possible that the complaining employee is acting in bad faith and just trying to cause trouble for a coworker? Yes, it’s possible. But frankly, it’s a lot more likely that there’s something to it — because while people do occasionally make groundless complaints because of ill will, it’s a lot more common for complaints to be sincere. That’s especially true when someone fears retribution! (And in this case, we can understand where the fear is coming from — she’s complaining about the daughter of the person who runs the office.)

So: could your daughter be bringing her baby in when you don’t realize it? Could it have happened just a couple of times, and this employee inadvertently thought it was going to be a regular thing? Could have just been the one time you know about but she’s seen your daughter get away with other stuff and assumed this would be happening more in the future? I don’t know what’s going on, but it sounds like at a minimum you need to talk with your daughter (as her manager, not as her mom) about whether she’s brought the baby in at other times; seek out some information from other employees too, since they may be aware of things that you’re not; and do some soul searching about whether employees might feel you treat your daughter differently than the rest of them.

Don’t get sidetracked by focusing on whether the person who complained was in the right to take a picture of the baby and send it to HR. That’s not the big issue here, and if you focus on that, you’re going to look like your relationship with your daughter is clouding your judgment.

You also can’t dismiss the person’s fear of retribution by just flatly stating “no one here has ever experienced retribution.” If you’re going to manage a family member (and you shouldn’t!), you need to be very aware that people will fear that and that you need to actively work to counteract it. And trying to hunt down the person who made this complaint isn’t exactly going to help you do that.

In fact, don’t try to figure out who complained at all. That doesn’t matter. (And no, your company is not obligated to share that with you, and again, pushing for it will make you look bad.)

What matters is that someone on your staff has raised a complaint that would be legitimate if it’s true, and that you cannot assume without any investigation that you know it’s false. Handle this the way you’d handle it if your daughter wasn’t working there.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

I'm a terrible person, because my response to this was to cackle in bitter amusement. NO retribution, RIIIIIIIIIGHT. You don't sound vindictive at all, lady. No rageful, partisian Mama Bearitude evinced WHATSOEVER.

In the comments there are a couple intriguingly fervent discussions of the ethics of photographing someone else's child without permission. Apparently the LW shows up to comment as well, but I decided not to read her additions lest I laugh so hard I hurt myself.

[torachan]

Seriously! Even if the daughter had never brought in the baby before, the way the mom reacted here shows that the other employees are 100% right to mistrust her objectivity.

As for the photo, it's not like they were posting it to the internet or something. They took the photo as proof to show HR, which I think is a legitimate reason to have taken a photo.

[cimorene]

Exactly. As a principle, sure, it makes sense to get up in arms about strangers photographing one's children, but here they were clearly genuinely bothered by the situation and evidence was required.

[vass]

If you're a terrible person, so am I.

[xenacryst]

I guess I'm not as terrible a person, since I'm not cackling. But I am trying to chase down my eyes, because they've rolled to the other side of the house.

The part I don't get is that this is happening at a publicly traded company. I ... thought that a lot of public companies had rules about this sort of thing?

[redbird]

The fact that HR is looking into this suggests that there are rules about this kind of thing, but the letter writer either isn't aware of them, or thinks they don't apply here because it's her daughter it was only for a little while, and it only happened once, and her daughter normally works at home. (This is someone who thinks that "nobody here has ever suffered retribution" means it's absurd for them to fear it, while trying to figure out who talked to HR because them doing that means she doesn't trust them.)