Ask a Manager: Two Questions From The Same Post

[minoanmiss]

https://www.askamanager.org/2022/03/my-boss-jokes-about-firing-people-my-awful-ex-coworker-works-at-the-company-im-interviewing-with-and-more.html



I moved from corporate to nonprofit about eight months ago and currently am a newer member (not the newest) of a good team. My boss is very touchy-feely and I am very not, but we have not had any conflicts and I have felt supported in ways I never did in the corporate world.

However, I need advice on whether I can or should say something that is really bothering me. In the last eight months, she has made almost identical jokes to four people on our team. We have a weekly group meeting and if someone is late (totally acceptable for this setting), when they do enter the virtual meeting she always says, “Hey Jane, we have spent the first part of the meeting talking about you and your performance and we will need to let you go.” She immediately laughs, no one thinks she is serious for a single second, and she is a very sweet woman. But it makes me crazy! Can I say something or do I need to just chuckle and bear it?

It’s baffling when people in positions of power don’t understand that their ability to yank someone’s livelihood out from under them is not a funny joke. And yet, this happens way more often than you’d think it would. Sometimes it’s people who are uncomfortable with their authority, sometimes it’s people who are fascinated by their own authority, and sometimes it’s people who are just thoughtless.

In any case, there’s room to say something! The light-touch approach, if you want to try it first, is to react in the moment. The next time she does it, you could just let yourself have a natural reaction — like looking stricken and saying, “That’s really mean” or “That’s awful.”

That might be enough to jog her into reconsidering how the “joke” is going over. But if she keeps doing it, you could say something to her in a one-on-one like, “You’ve joked a few times about firing people in meetings. It gives me a pit in my stomach every time. I don’t think we should joke about people’s ability to support themselves and their families.” If she’s a generally decent person who just didn’t think this through, that’ll likely get her to re-think it.



I was impacted by a restructuring last year and have been actively looking for a new role. It has been taking longer than expected and a company I am very interested in called me regarding a position they thought I would be a good fit for.

My concern is that I know a previous colleague, who I had a terrible experience with, recently starting working there. I believe they are in the same department but different team. My experience with this person was they were a bully and extremely difficult to work with. My old company acknowledged to me that they were aware that this person was a problem but did nothing about it. I would be very concerned about working around them again.

I took the first interview to learn more, regardless of my concern. At my interview, the department head mentioned they recently hired this person from my old company. I did not react or respond in the moment. The company has called me to set up another interview and have stated they want to move quickly with me and said, “We are very keen on you. We see you as a great fit.” I am interested in the role and have indicated I would be interested in continuing the conversation.

Any suggestions for how I can raise my concerns without it looking bad on me or is it better to bow out gracefully and state another reason? I am concerned that if I don’t raise it proactively, they might hear about “a challenging dynamic” between us from one of my references.

I don’t see myself being able to accept the role without setting some expectation that I will not tolerate being bullied in the future and express my concern. I think they would want to know as well as it could impact the broader team dynamic if not managed.

I’d bow out of the interview process. It’s very tricky to tell a prospective employer that you don’t get along with one of their current employees or try to address bullying before you’re even working there. They don’t know you, so they’re not equipped to judge which of you is the problem and it’s likely to sound like drama they’d rather just avoid. It’s also such an unusual thing to raise as a candidate that there’s a risk, however unfairly, that you’ll end up looking high maintenance (again, they don’t know you and are going on very limited data). There’s also no guarantee that you wouldn’t have a terrible experience with this person again (and same department, even if a different team, is too close for comfort).

Comments

[minoanmiss]

1) I think someone who makes jokes about summarily firing their underlings knows full well what they're doing and has disqualified themself from being considered rational.

2) TANJ, LW. I'm sorry.

[heavenscalyx]

I really feel for #2. One reason I've decided to stay in the niche that I'm in is that the Toxic Torpedo from my last company is still milling around IT circles in my region, and in my current niche, she's never going to be at the same company as I am. (I've also spread the word about her via what channels I have in IT, because she's not just a missing stair, she's a whole damn staircase to nowhere.)

[cereta]

TANJ?

[minoanmiss]

There Ain't No Justice.

[xenacryst]

I wonder if (1) is a slight work culture difference? Having been in corp for a decade, I would be very twitchy about firing jokes, because corp here is completely at-will, and someone up the food chain really doesn't have to have any reason or warning to tell you to pack your bags (even if my immediate team is quite good on that front). My current immediate manager I would take that joke from, but feel very awkward about it - anyone else, I would prolly consider my reporting options if I felt they meant it as a joke. I mean, mass layoffs are a thing, and any all-hands meeting that gets called at short notice or at an unusual time or otherwise smells off makes a good portion of us get jumpy.

However, before that I was in higher ed, and while staff are still at-will, there's a lot more structure around firing someone. Most schools I was at had a really tough set of procedures to go through to show that you need to let someone go. Taking a fired joke in that context would have been a lot more comfortable because I'd know - even outside of my own reasonably good managers - that even if it was real they'd still have a good bit of work ahead of them to make it happen. It's still not a good joke, but there's a bit more of a shared context that it just wouldn't happen.

[castiron]

Staff in a state university, and yes, if someone made a firing joke in my office, it wouldn't have the same gut-punch that it would in a corporate setting. (You *can* fire someone for cause; I've seen it happen. But it takes a ton of documentation and warnings first, and most managers aren't willing to do it unless the person is extremely egregious.) That said, even in my office, the only place I've seen a manager make a firing joke is when the manager and employee have a casual teasing relationship and the employee said something mildly snarky first. I can't see any of the managers making firing jokes to employees at random.

[ysobel]

For the first ... my mom and I both have a sense of humor where deadpan stating something that clearly isn't true. Like "gosh, it's too bad I hate ice cream" as I serve myself a bowl of my favorite flavor of ice cream. It requires common knowledge (i.e. X is true, everyone involved knows X is true, and everyone knows everyone knows X is true, so me saying X is false has to be a joke) and can break down if any of the common-knowledge levels fall apart. (e.g. one time my mom was serving me buffet food and was spooning something casserole-y onto my plate that had black olives, which I love; my mom made a joking deadpan comment about me hating olives; and someone overheard and flailed (appropriately, given not knowing my preferences) over how that particular dish actually had olives and so maybe don't serve me; and we had to reassure her that I did actually like olives so that was ok. On one level I'm glad the person said something -- if I didn't like olives and mistakenly thought it was a safe dish, I'd want to know I was wrong! -- but that's the danger of that genre of humor.)

My mom will also do things like fake-worry at servers when e.g. she and I order the exact same thing, they bring the food, and my mom deadpans that they might have mixed up the plates, and I have to reassure the server that she's joking and everything's good, because while my mom thinks it's obvious that they can't mess up like that, the server doesn't, so at best they think she forgot what she ordered and at worst they think they messed up and argh mom don't be mean to servers!

...so I find myself wondering if boss 1 has that kind of humor and that level of unawareness and thinks jokes about being fired are ~obviously joking~ because Of Course, without realizing the impact.

[minoanmiss]

All servers everywhere bless you. I know your mom means to be funny but I am so glad you are paying attention to the power differential she's not seeing.