Ask a Manager: our boss is demanding a gift with an accounting of names and how much each person con

[minoanmiss]

Our boss informed us that she’s leaving for a new position at another company. Hooray for the boss, and hooray for us because the boss was truly awful.

Here’s where things get icky: the company is throwing her a farewell party. Everyone has been invited to make a financial contribution to a farewell gift for her. She forces her assistant to organize the gift and share with her the names of those who gave money and the amounts they gave. (Her assistant can’t afford to lose her job.) This has happened before (think major happy life events) and each time everyone has given increasing/outrageous sums of money towards gifts for her, realizing that she received an accounting of who has given what amount.

For many, our generosity is driven by fear because she is an unpredictable, chaotic, and vindictive human being who has inflicted unnecessary suffering upon all below her. She also happens to be in an extremely high ranking position at our teapot company. Her yearly salary is 10 or 15 times higher than most of ours.

The farewell party is six weeks before her planned last day on the job. What happens during those six weeks? She does our performance reviews! This seems like the last in a long string of unfair setups and indignities we’ve been subjected to under her reign. We’ve already given money toward gifts for all the other life events she’s celebrated in the past. Asking us to pay more money for a going away gift seems gauche, especially since a) she is a terrible boss who did nothing but make everyone miserable, and b) compared to her obvious wealth, our monetary “donations” to her come at a substantial cost to our pocketbooks that far outpaces the difference in our pay. The idea of her parting shot being unfair performance reviews deflated or inflated depending on how much we pony up for her gift makes me ill.

We do have HR but it functions purely to protect the company, not the workers. Because this is a high ranking person, we expect HR will shield her and exact retribution on anyone who asks for their assistance with this matter. What should we do?

Well, this is profoundly messed up. There should never be pressure on employees to donate money to anything and especially not upward to a manager. When someone controls your paycheck and whether you continue to have a job, it ranges from tacky to outright abusive for them to expect gifts from you.

But your boss takes this to a new level. Requiring her assistant to collect money from people, and to share with her the names and amounts people contributed?! Your boss is a cartoon villain.

Normally in a situation like this I’d recommend tipping off HR, but it sounds like HR is off the table. I do want to nudge you to make sure that’s really the case, though; HR’s function generally is to protect the company, but that doesn’t mean siding with managers every time. In fact, in a case like this at a decent organization, “protecting the company” would mean putting a stop to what your manager is doing — not because it’s illegal (it’s not) but because it’s a terrible practice that will demoralize people and is a flag that there’s likely a ton of other questionable stuff going on.

But if your experience with HR at your company is that they’re not going to be of help (and nor will your boss’s boss, I’m guessing?), then your basic options are:

1. Everyone bands together and agrees not to donate money to a gift for the boss. Maybe you all sign a card instead, if that. If none of you contribute, it’ll be harder for her to penalize you. Not impossible — she could certainly decide to give you all awful performance reviews because she didn’t get to leave the job with a pricey new handbag or whatever she’s hoping for, but it could work.

2. Everyone bands together and agrees to donate money to a charity in the boss’s name, and then it’s presented to her as “we knew this would be so meaningful to you” because sometimes that approach can work with problem people — when you say, essentially, “I know you care so much about being a good person,” sometimes they feel obligated to try to live up to it in this one narrow situation.

3. Everyone bands together and agrees to donate some low amount, like $5 each. Yes, it’s money you shouldn’t have to spend. But it might be the most expedient solution; you’d basically be paying $5 to make this problem go away. You’d need everyone or nearly everyone on board with this though.

I considered including an option #4 where a group of you pushes back more directly, telling your boss openly that your team doesn’t want to do gifts this way, that people feel pressured to contribute money they can’t afford, and the accounting of names and amounts makes people worry that what they give will be factored into how they’re managed. And that’s an option if enough of you feel comfortable with it. But if she’s truly the cartoon villain that she seems, options #1-3 are likely going to be a lot less drama.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

Everyone is so shocked by this. Why wouldn't someone with power do this to their underlings? It's not actually illegal. And why wouldn't HR protect the person with power over the cogs? This seems like exactly the horror that American business has been trying to become.

All that said I can't imagine how they can possibly push back. People seem to like the donation to charity angle but I think they'll just get punished for it.

[lilysea]

I think the main reason managers usually don't do this
(apart from the ones who have a conscience/ethics)

is that they know that people talk, and it can bite them in the bum...

I once had a TERRIBLE manager who made everyone's life a living hell.

Then a few years later, a friend said "Oh hi, [terrible manager] has applied for a job here, my boss asked me to ask you what she was like"

I told friend the unvarnished truth - that she was so bad that 80% of the staff she supervised quit within 12 months.

Terrible manager did not get the job she was applying for...

[green_grrl]

I loved the first comment, suggesting asking the manager’s supervisor how much they recommend as a bribe amount—though sarcasm not coming through printed media would look bad on the sender. I do agree with commenters farther down that it would be good to document the appearance of impropriety and unreliability of subsequent appraisals to HR, the manager’s supervisor, general counsel, the board, etc.

[serriadh]

A version of this but playing dumb might work. "This is the first time a boss has left and we're not sure what's appropriate? Could you advise what sort of gift other leavers usually receive, or what might be an appropriate amount? We'd hate for Boss to think we weren't being sufficiently generous." If they come back deadpan and say oh about $x then you're not really any worse off than before.

[torachan]

It's shocking because it's really over the top Evil Boss territory. I have never had a boss who did something like this. It's not that I can't imagine anyone ever doing this, but I don't think it's common.

I don't even participate in my store's secret santa because I don't want anyone to feel awkward about having to get a gift for the manager.

[jadelennox]

• find a friend with good tech knowledge to verify my opsec
• make a throwaway twitter account from the library
• tweet the details, making sure to leave in the boss's name but leave out anything that identified me
• get a bunch of people from other companies to signal boost
• hope it embarrasses the company