Dear Madeleine,

Ever since the beginning of this work-from-home situation, our entire department feels like it is on hold. The reason? Our seriously old school boss is not at all comfortable with meeting via phone or web conferencing. He was always a stickler for meeting in person, and has just kind of fallen apart. I can’t even get him to return calls or respond to emails.

I have serious questions about how to prioritize work—about 50% of our department has been laid off and the workload is staggering. I have no insight into what is going on in our organization and I am having a hard time concentrating.

On My Own

Dear On My Own,

Things are unsettled enough without your boss going radio silent. That must feel scary. Now is the time for managers to be spending more time with their people, not less! Here are some ideas for you.

• Ask for feedback on your communication style. Maybe you are annoying. Maybe just ask, “Is there something I should know?”

• Make your communications easy to answer, with clear subject lines and questions that can be answered with either yes or no. When people get “wall of words” emails with lots of ideas in them, they sometimes leave them for later because they require focus and time to respond. Relieve your boss of the need to think, and you might just get a response.

• If you really need your boss to think, make your emails super succinct and easy to read. One of my favorite tools is the ABC method from The Hamster Revolution. The ABC method splits your message into three parts: Action, Background and Close. A – Action summarizes exactly what you want. B – Background provides key context; why you want it. C – Close proposes next steps and how/when you expect follow-up.

• In terms of priorities, use your own judgment to lay out what you think they should be. Put your work/task list in priority order and make clear what will not get done in a normal work week. Make your subject line: My Priorities Unless I Hear Otherwise. (Well, that’s what I would say—that might feel aggressive to you. Soften if you must.)

• I have no sense of what your work life was like before the Covid crazy. Did you and your boss have a decent relationship? If so, you might ask him if he is okay and if there is anything you can do for him. Maybe tell him you are worried about him.

• If you don’t hear anything in the next seven days, go to HR or your boss’s boss. Maybe he was fired, or has gone on leave of some sort, and they forgot to tell you. Crazier things have happened—and goodness knows, these are certainly off times.

• It sounds like you are awfully isolated. Get in touch with peers and friends you have in the organization to see what you can find out, and make some connections.

Breathe deeply—and remember, before all of this you were capable, competent, and able to concentrate. Now use your best judgment about how to spend your work time and go to it. Do your best. That’s all you can do.

Love, Madeleine

About the Author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is the co-founder of The Ken Blanchard Companies’ Coaching Services team.  Since 2000, Blanchard’s 150 coaches have worked with over 16,000 individuals in more than 250 companies throughout the world. Learn more at Blanchard Coaching Services.

Dear Madeleine,

I am a 31-year-old female attorney who was recently promoted to manager of an in-house legal team for a giant global not-for-profit organization. One of my direct reports is a man who came to us after having been a partner at a highly respected firm. This is to be his last job, as he is nearing retirement.

We all thought he would bring enormous expertise to the job and add value; but, in fact, he has caused nothing but trouble. His work is shoddy on his best days—I spend far too much time reviewing and correcting it before it goes out. He makes errors that make no sense in light of his experience. He is clearly not paying attention. He leaves work early on a regular basis, which would be OK if his work was done; but he misses deadlines, which ends up as a crisis on my desk at the end of the day.

All of this would be simply annoying, but it is compounded by the fact that he is downright rude to me. He makes no effort to disguise his contempt for my age and gender.

I have made tremendous efforts to be a good manager, making tasks and standards clear, providing ample time for one-on-one meetings to review workload, etc. I would fire him—I have an entire page of documented incidents in which he failed at his task or was disrespectful or hostile to me personally—but, because of the economic squeeze of the pandemic, we are in a hiring freeze. We just don’t have the manpower to cover his work, cruddy as it is. I have gone to HR, but they are overwhelmed with layoffs and furloughs in other parts of the organization. I am at my wits’ end with this situation.

Shoddy Work Making Me Nuts

Dear SWMMN,

This sounds tough. I definitely used to be automatically dismissed by older men—it is a consolation of age that that kind of thing tends to fade. But that doesn’t help you right now. Right now you have a couple of separate issues, so it might help to tease them out and address them one at a time.

The first thing to tackle is the idea that, because of a hiring freeze, you are not allowed to replace an employee who can’t—or won’t—perform. That just makes no sense at all. You might think about taking the case to both your boss and HR. This is serious and will affect your team’s ability to generate required results—so I can’t believe that with enough evidence and a well-prepared argument, you wouldn’t be able to get some support to make a change.

If you absolutely cannot make that happen, you will have to get ready for a hard conversation—probably a couple of them. Start by laying out all three issues at once and setting up times to work through all three separately. My new favorite tool for hard conversations comes from Craig Weber’s work on Conversational Capacity. Craig says that to find the sweet spot in a conversation, you have to start with candor—be ready to state your position and the thinking behind it. Then, you need to practice curiosity by testing your thinking and asking questions.

You will have to decide which issue is most important and start with that. I might suggest the order of priority as competence, commitment, and attitude. The thinking behind this order is the general principle that when people do not feel equipped to do their job, they tend to lose motivation and start lashing out at others. You may see a change if you can help your employee be more successful at his job.

Competence. It seems your supposed experienced expert might be out of practice. It is fairly normal that, as people rise to executive positions, they can forget the myriad details of the job or not stay abreast of changes. That might be the case here. However, that doesn’t excuse the lack of attention to detail he is demonstrating.

Be prepared to point out several examples of errors, and then ask some questions like:

• What is your perspective on this?
• Can you help me understand what might be going on?
• How do you think this situation might be addressed?
• Is there something I can do to help?

(Questions adapted from the book Conversational Capacity by Craig Weber, pg. 97)

Be prepared to continue being curious if your employee takes a position that is different from yours. You can say something like: “I admit my perspective is different from yours; perhaps you can share what you have seen or heard that leads you to see things this way.” The more you are curious and keep him talking, the more likely you are to get to a place where he might be interested in hearing your viewpoint. But you may not be able to get a dialogue going. And if you just can’t, that’s OK. You can always default to making a simple request, such as: “please catch up on proper legal terms and double-check your documents before submitting them.”

Commitment. You can observe to your employee that he often stops work before the agreed-upon time. Make sure you have a couple of examples. If you decide to go the way of curiosity, you can ask: “is there anything in particular that is undermining your motivation or ability to hit agreed-upon deadlines?” It will be interesting to hear what he has to say. At least from that jumping off point, you might be able to renegotiate deadlines moving forward. You can also share how critical it is that he follow through with his commitments—because you also have commitments and need to be able to plan your time. The more you can stay curious and neutral, the better off you will be. Which brings us to the third issue …

Attitude. This one is tricky—and it will color the other two issues. The more you feel attacked, the harder it will be for you to stay curious and open. So anything you can do to not take your employee’s behavior personally will strengthen your position. Remember: this is not about you, no matter how cruddy it may make you feel. I suggest you ask yourself if it is truly personal. There is a good chance he is a jerk to everyone. If you find it is only you, or only women in your office, it is an example of harassment or bullying against a specific class and you really do need to take it to HR. If you are forced to keep an employee who is creating a hostile work environment, you could actually sue the organization.

Obviously you don’t want it to come to that—so start again with your observations. Then ask: “Is there something I am doing that is causing you to treat me with such contempt?” He may claim that he isn’t doing it; he may claim to be unaware of it; or he may actually be unaware of it. You can continue to practice curiosity: “Clearly we don’t agree. Let’s see what our different perspectives have to teach us about this. Can you explain in more detail how you are seeing this?”

Ultimately, if he continues to be rude and hostile, it is your right to set a boundary. But that means you have to give him specific direction on how he needs to address you. You may want to create a list of never and always statements. For example (I am making these up based on my own experience):

• Never: smirk at me, mimic my voice, swear under your breath, or roll your eyes when I speak in meetings.
• Always: keep to commitments you have made, be civil toward me, and tell me when I do or say something you disagree with.

In the future, you will know to start with tight supervision with new people, point out errors or inappropriate behavior the first time you see it, and then, as the new person settles in, you can loosen up. It is almost impossible to go the other direction.

It can be hard to stand up for yourself, but no one can do it for you. There is a good chance your employee is just waiting for you to draw the line and will continue to push to see just how much nonsense you are willing to put up with. Once you call him out on his bad behavior he may straighten up.

This won’t be your last problem employee. Get ready for many more to come. It gets easier. Not much easier, because you will always expect people to do their best and strive to get along with others, in other words, to be like you. Don’t let it make you bitter or cynical that many people aren’t at all like you. But do get comfortable with drawing the line.

Love, Madeleine

About the Author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is the co-founder of The Ken Blanchard Companies’ Coaching Services team.  Since 2000, Blanchard’s 150 coaches have worked with over 16,000 individuals in more than 250 companies throughout the world. Learn more at Blanchard Coaching Services.

Dear Madeleine,

I manage a large team of creative professionals in a US-based advertising firm. My company went to an unlimited PTO plan 18 months ago. Covid-19 weirdness aside, I am finding that my people are not taking time off and seem burnt out. I am confused by this.

I talk to each of my direct reports on a regular basis about how critical it is for them to take time when they are not on the hook for work. Back when PTO was a liability for the company, we would force people to take at least two days around normal holidays to reduce the load. Now when I encourage my people to take time, they make excuses like “it’s so hard to come back from time off,” and “project overload.”

I tried to get all team members to commit to taking time this summer and submit dates so I can manage workload and project flows, but no one is committing. Some say they aren’t comfortable traveling, but still.

Last year, I tried to institute the second Monday of every month as a mental health day with no meetings so that people could use the time to clean up email and task lists, organize, or take a slow morning. Although my group was enthusiastic, no one ended up doing it.

The research shows that people who take time away from work are more creative and productive. I can’t force people, obviously, but I really believe in vacation and downtime. How can I encourage people to take better care of themselves?

All Work

Dear All Work,

I am so accustomed to letters about how to get people to work harder that this is a breath of fresh air! There is a lot of interesting research about the unlimited PTO experiment now that it has been around for about ten years. Here is an article I found that might be helpful to you.

Your concern about your people does you credit, but you must let them be adults and figure this out for themselves. As a manager, the only way you can make proper energy management an issue is if you can objectively call out that an individual’s performance is suffering. In this case, you can request that the person take a couple of days or even a week—but even then, it will be up to them to get their performance back to standard in the best way they see fit.

The other big influencer on this situation is whether you are role modeling the behavior you are seeking. Are you taking time off? And I mean really taking it? Or do you answer emails and take phone calls when you are supposed to be off? My favorite is the email that comes in that says “I know you are on vacation, but I was hoping you might ….” If you actually respond to those, you are literally training your people that there is no such thing as real vacation. You are also sending the message that you don’t trust people to make decisions or to operate without your supervision for a week.

I am not saying it is easy to take time off—of course, the more committed and invested you are, the more challenging it is. Take it from the woman who goes to Mongolia, where cell phones don’t work, to unplug—I know. But I agree with you that getting away is important, so I have made a big effort to make myself do it. You send a strong message about what you expect from your team by setting the example.

Some other ideas might be:

• Talk to other managers in your company. What are they doing? How are they handling the unlimited PTO thing? Counterintuitively, it does seem that the biggest problem with unlimited PTO is that people take less time off because they are worried about peer competition and perception. Possibly there needs to be a cultural message from senior leadership that people are expected to take a certain amount of time.
• Guidelines from HR? Have you received any? Maybe they were sent out and you missed them? There may be some help there.
• Make sure your people know they won’t be punished for taking time off.
• Conversely, don’t reward the martyrs who make a big, heroic show of long work hours. That would send the wrong message. I don’t mean there won’t be the occasional big push for the odd, unusual project. Constant heroics in this area means the team member either is not equipped to do the job or they have too much work. It was all fine and well to boast about all-nighters in college, but that just is not reasonable in real life.
• The two things most employees (especially parents) really want are flexibility and autonomy. They want to know that as long as they get their work done on deadline at quality, they can do what they need to do to take care of themselves and the logistics of life. I recently heard about a manager who requires her people to put on their Out of Office notice when they take a bathroom break and post on their IM exactly what they are working on at any given moment. Who wants to have someone breathing down their necks like that? Not me!
• Is performance suffering? If your people are crushing it in terms of creativity and they seem happy, maybe this isn’t even a problem; it’s just you looking for problems to solve that don’t need solving.
• Do some research on sabbaticals. You may be passionate enough about this topic that you want to propose a sabbatical program for your organization. We provide coaching for individuals who participate in a highly structured but way out of normal work paid sabbatical for a global software company. Each individual who participates reports that it is an exceptionally fun and impactful experience. Many companies provide paid time for sabbaticals. It seems to be a very effective way for employees to refresh and renew.

You are right to care about the personal sustainability of your people—but, ultimately, it isn’t your responsibility. You can only create the safest and most inspiring environment for your people. The rest is going to be up to them.

Love, Madeleine

About the Author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is the co-founder of The Ken Blanchard Companies’ Coaching Services team.  Since 2000, Blanchard’s 150 coaches have worked with over 16,000 individuals in more than 250 companies throughout the world. Learn more at Blanchard Coaching Services.