Ask a Manager: My Friend is a Bad Employee

[minoanmiss]

My friend has bad judgment about work — and we work for the same company.

The company I work for has over 1,000 employees. I work as a manager and am in my late twenties. My friend, Bella, is a similar age and in a very different field. In the four years I’ve known her, Bella has gone through three jobs. I know she has anxiety and has had a traumatic brain injury in the past two years.

Last year, Bella left her old company, where she complained about a passive aggressive boss and anxiety-inducing workload, to join my company. I didn’t even know she had interviewed or joined until she announced it, as our home offices are on opposite coasts and our departments do not work with each other. I’m in a different department on a different coast with no overlap.

On her private locked Twitter, which I have followed for years, I’ve noticed her complaining more and more about her job and coworkers. Most recently, I saw she posted that she was planning on quitting if she had to work with a passive-aggressive manager again for a project. I don’t know this manager, nor do I know this situation. I do know that when you scroll her Twitter, it’s venting and angry but also appears to reflect some coachable work issues.

She’s complained about coworkers talking to her and wanting her to participate more and said that it triggers her anxiety. It totally could! But the culture at our company is very collaborative, which is stated up-front and in all of the on-boarding documents. We expect people to participate and bring ideas, etc. to meetings. You’re expected to get along with/talk to coworkers. Calling coworkers names, even without naming them, is not okay here.

She also complained that a coworker apparently pointed out she’s on Twitter a lot. The time stamp of the tweet was in the middle of the working day, as are most of her tweets.

We’re friends and if she wants to quit, she can. But I’m concerned that the passive-aggressive manager part is a pattern now, and perhaps it might be a her thing rather than all of her managers in the past few years being passive-aggressive enough for work to be untenable and to the point that she needs to quit, as well as the job-hopping.

Obviously, I need to block/mute/unfollow her Twitter, but I am unsure if I’m supposed to be a sounding board or maybe give a heads-up to her manager. Or let her know that her private, locked Twitter is not super appropriate for venting/ranting about work and I will need to step back from the friendship?

You don’t need to do much of anything here! Definitely don’t mention it to her manager. You saw Bella’s (private, locked) tweets because of your friendship and you don’t work closely with her team; there’s nothing here that requires you to talk to her boss. Do unfollow her, though, and let her know it’s better for your friendship if you don’t see the stuff she posts about work. You might also suggest that she disconnect from anyone else at work if she’s going to tweet about her job (including that person who commented on how often she’s on Twitter; since her account is private, they could only know that if she had accepted their follow request at some point).

If you want to preserve the friendship, you probably need a mental firewall between your job and Bella. If she ever asks for advice, you could give it (or if you think she’d be receptive you could try initiating a one-time conversation about what you’re seeing — although those can be very hard to pull off in an effective way) but it sounds like you and Bella are really different work-wise, and your friendship will be better if you keep work totally separate.

Comments

[heavenscalyx]

Also, it may be that in her field, managers tend to be passive-aggressive assholes, rather than a pattern that's somehow her fault. She may need to decide whether or not to stay in her field! But LW needs to block her twitter and just chill. It's none of their business.

[feldman]

Totally my baggage here, but I'm wondering what kind of support this friend is getting to help her manage existing anxiety and recover from a TBI on top of that? How much hasn't she shared with LW, aside from a social media feed she might be using to vent as she navigates these challenges? LW is coming at this like a management training exercise, and is failing at that.

[minoanmiss]

WORD.

[shirou]

If Bella consistently has the same problem with different teams at different companies, there's a good chance the problem lies with her. But it is not LW's problem to fix.

[heavenscalyx]

While this may be true (and is almost always true of relationships where one hears the same thing about partners over and over despite said partners not being anything alike) -- and this is totally my baggage -- it may also be a more general issue that LW may not either know about or think is important because they don't have a problem with that particular thing.

For example, I had 2 employers turn suddenly passive-aggressive at me after 2 years of extremely positive reviews. The workplace turned toxic and gaslighting, and in no reviews could anyone actually tell me what the issue was, even at the job where I escalated (extremely reluctantly) to HR, or how to remediate it. In retrospect in both cases, the thing that changed was my gender presentation -- I started wearing more masculine clothing and my hair got shorter. (A third workplace actually had documented homophobia/transphobia happening out loud in the open office.) So I suppose in the end, this did come down to being a "problem" with me, but was more of a culture that enabled passive-aggressive managers who couldn't (generally) say out loud that their problem was actually queerphobia but could move the goalposts on me until they could say I was a "bad fit" for jobs I'd been a good fit for for >2 years.

[minoanmiss]

well said.

[azurelunatic]

Uhhhh they could also know she was on Twitter a lot by seeing the app/website, without knowing what she was doing on it.

[azurelunatic]

(and in that case, Bella should take steps to not have her non-work internet activity noticed, whether by cutting it down or having it more stealth.)

[ashbet]

Yes — the woman whose desk was behind mine felt the need to report on my non-work-related internet use, even though it was literally none of her business and didn’t affect my productivity.

(My job had some “hurry up and wait” built into it, and my attorney being on a phone call before returning a draft to me didn’t allow enough time to really dig into another task before getting interrupted.)

Office snoops are everywhere, I wouldn’t make the assumption that Bella had added coworkers to her private Twitter account.

LW needs to mute/unfollow, if she wants to keep this friendship.