Dear Madeleine,

I am hoping you might have some insight for me. The problem isn’t mine but my wife’s.  

She has a great job with a company where she has been promoted several times. During Covid, when everyone went to virtual work, we took the opportunity to move closer to her family. Her parents were eager to help out with our kids.

When things went back to normal, my wife started going into the office twice a week. The commute was a bear but it was working.

Now her company is demanding that everyone be in the office five days a week. Commuting every day is just not sustainable. We could move back closer to her office but it would mean uprooting the kids and losing the extra help from her family. Still, that’s what I think we should do.

However, another company has been pursuing her rather aggressively. They have promised that she can work from anywhere, which is the deal I have. They are offering a huge bump in salary and an amazing benefits package.

Despite everything my wife has told me, I have a bad feeling about it. I can’t really explain why, but it all just seems a little too good to be true. Every time I point this out, my wife accuses me of not believing in her and not thinking she is worth the kind of salary they are promising her, which is not the case at all.

How can I find out if the company and the offer is on the up and up? I would much prefer to stay put, and it would be great if my wife didn’t have to commute anymore, not to mention the big salary increase. I can’t put my finger on what feels off to me. The whole debate has turned emotional and I feel at a loss as to how to get to the right decision.

Big Decision

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Dear Big Decision,

You and your wife are a functioning unit where both parties have to work together to grow both careers and children. So make no mistake—this is indeed your problem, not just your wife’s.

It seems that you have two big issues here. The first is that your wife doesn’t seem to trust that you have her best interests at heart, and the second is that the job offer seems too good to be true.

I am no marriage counselor, but it seems odd that your wife is getting defensive about your doubts instead of taking them at face value. It could be that her judgment is clouded by her desire to stay put, eliminate her commute, and make more money. But if she is doubting your motives, there could be some repair work that needs to be done. Perhaps she feels undermined by you or has the impression that you don’t think she is very smart. The two of you are going to have to have some frank conversations to get to the bottom of this. If you want to enlist some help, I am a huge fan of John Gottman. The Gottman Institute offers a ton of resources to help couples improve their relationships. It can’t hurt to check it out, and it might help—not just in this instance, but for the long haul.

The second issue is that the job offer seems suspect to you. Right now it is just a feeling, so the next step is to get all the facts. Here are some ideas to get your research started. Maybe one of them will help you to pin down what feels off to you.

Research the company.

• Company website: Does it look professional and up to date? Are the contact details legit (email with a company domain, physical address, phone)?
• LinkedIn presence: Is the company listed on LinkedIn? Are employees with real profiles working there? Might your wife be willing to contact a few of them and talk to them about what it is like to work there?
• Online reviews: Check Glassdoor, Indeed, or Google Reviews for employee feedback.
• Business registration: For U.S. companies, you can check the secretary of state’s business search. Other countries have similar registries.
• Talk to people you trust and get other opinions.

Inspect the communication—if your wife will allow it, of course. Or you can share these recommendations with her.

• Email domain: Legit companies don’t usually use Gmail/Yahoo/etc. for hiring. Look for an email like recruiter@companyname.com.
• Grammar and tone: Scams often have poor grammar, generic greetings (“Dear Applicant”), and overenthusiastic language (“You’ve been specially chosen!!!”).
• Urgency or pressure: Be wary if they’re pushing you to act fast or not ask questions.

Examine the job offer and contract.

• Is the job description detailed and specific to the role? Real job postings usually include tasks, skills required, and expectations.

The principle here is that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. If you truly believe that your wife is wearing rose-colored glasses, you must approach it delicately. Ask good questions and remind her at every turn that you think any company would be lucky to have her.

Changing jobs is tricky and stressful. It really does make sense to do all due diligence before making the leap. Worst case, your research yields some real concerns and you avoid a disaster. Best case, this opportunity could be a stroke of luck for the whole family! I sure hope so!

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services as well as a key facilitator of Blanchard’s Leadership Coach Certification course. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Dear Madeleine,

I work on a team where I am the only member who is remote. Pre-Covid we all worked together at the office, but during the shutdown I took advantage of my company’s remote-work option and moved back to my hometown to be closer to my parents who need help.

Many of our meetings are still on Zoom because several team members still work from home a couple of days a week. But other times, everyone is together in a room and I am the only one on Zoom. There are often several side conversations going on at once, as happens when people are together in person. I have trouble hearing everything, and the group often forgets I am there. This past week, two people left the room and had a conversation about a situation that I should have been a part of. I know it wasn’t intentional, but it still doesn’t feel good.

What can I do about this? I am worried I am going to start missing more important things and my contribution may start to seem less important as time goes on.

Feeling Left Out

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Feeling Left Out,

Well, this sounds like no fun. You are suffering a bit from a collection of natural human unconscious biases. Primacy or recency bias, in-group favoritism, and others can easily add up to an effect that might be summed up as “out of sight, out of mind”. It isn’t personal, so the first thing you can do is try to not take it personally.

There are two specific avenues for you to consider. The first is to discuss your experience with your manager and enroll them in helping you to change this dynamic. It is incumbent on your manager to arrange things so that you feel included; but of course, they may not see it that way. So you may need to make it easy for them to help you.

To do that, you need to let your manager know that you frequently feel excluded during the meetings where everyone is face to face except you. You will want to be prepared with ideas about how the manager, the team, and you can all navigate these meetings differently. Any changes will require discipline—and your manager will need to role model any behaviors that will make a difference. If it is feasible given the situation with your parents, you might also propose coming to the office for a few days every month or every six weeks. The company may be willing to pay the cost of travel or split the cost with you.

The other thought is that it wouldn’t hurt if you could engage in regular one-on-ones with everyone on the team. The thing that happens when people are together in person is a natural water cooler-type informal connection. All the human stuff: “How are you doing? How are the kids? Is the puppy house-trained yet? Did you complete the marathon? Hey, is that a new car I saw you getting out of?” You know—just the small talk that results in people bonding. Even a 15-minute coffee break with each of your team members on a regular basis would make a difference. This practice helped virtual teams get through Covid and was naturally dropped when people felt the one-on-ones were no longer needed. But you do still need that connection, so you will need to be proactive to nurture your relationships in this “new normal” time.

You might consider asking someone on your team to be your in-room partner, who can take responsibility for actively including you in the meeting. Having an active advocate for you will always help. If that isn’t feasible, you will have to do it yourself. Don’t be shy about reminding people that you are still in the meeting when it becomes apparent that they have forgotten. This used to happen back in the days before video meetings, when there was one lone person on the speaker phone.

I can’t imagine you are alone in dealing with this situation. There are more hybrid teams today than ever before—and managers need to up their game to make sure everyone feels like part of the team. But you can also rise to the challenge by getting help, making requests, and piping up even when it might be uncomfortable.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Dear Madeleine,

I manage the US Eastern region for a global manufacturing company. Our new CEO, who is in Europe, is very frustrated at our US employees’ resistance to return to the office.

He has decreed that everyone who wants to keep their job should be in the office five days a week, and that if people want to work remotely, they need special permission to do so—even for one day. He claims that employees in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East are much more compliant with the return-to-office mandates.

My Midwest and Western counterparts are doing a little better with the mandate than I am, but we are all in the same boat.

The managers who report to me are up against it. We had a remote work culture before the pandemic where many of our people were already coming to the office only one or two days a week. Several people on the East Coast gave up their city apartments during the pandemic and moved to rural areas. Some moved to other parts of the country, having been given permission to work remotely. They are now taking care of elderly parents. Their kids are going to new schools. And the people who live within a reasonable distance are thrilled not to have to spend hours every day commuting—and I know for a fact that they work longer hours because they don’t commute.

Our productivity and numbers are exactly where they need to be and our hybrid culture works very well for us. Our former CEO didn’t focus on that kind of thing; he focused only on performance and results.

To comply with our new CEO’s unreasonable demands, we are probably going to have let go of 25% of our workforce and hire new people who live in cities that have headquarters or who are at least within commuting distance. That is going to create a laundry list of problems. First of all, we don’t have the recruiting and onboarding staff to manage that kind of volume—it’s an absolute HR nightmare to let so many people go. It also will be distracting and will cause a significant drop in productivity. And the emotional impact will be, well, awful. It just seems so willfully wrongheaded and wasteful.

I have had a long career and have a lot of experience, but this one has me stumped.

Any thoughts?

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

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Dear Between a Rock and a Hard Place,

This seems to be a common problem these days.

I wonder where your CHRO or HR regional partner is with all of this. Your CEO might be getting terrible advice.

 It sounds like you are the kind of person who has already tried using facts and evidence to make the case for maintaining your hybrid culture. If you haven’t, that would be a good place to start. The cost of letting people go will be massive. It is hard to understand why anyone would want to let go of loyal, competent employees. You will want to read the fine print on the employment contracts of anyone you might have to fire as well, because if the job was originally classified as hybrid or remote, you could risk a lawsuit. And the cost of recruiting, hiring, and onboarding new people will definitely set you back productivity-wise. If you were to create a clear picture of the costs of enforcing a back to the office mandate, that might make a difference.

If your CEO refuses to be swayed by facts and evidence (which is predictable), your only next option is to try to influence by simply asking questions and getting to the root of what is driving the demands. In a very interesting book titled How Minds Change, author David McRaney postulates that the only reliable way to get someone to change their mind is, first, to create rapport. Listen to their thinking on the topic. Ask open-ended questions until they essentially persuade themselves that their thinking isn’t logical and, in fact, is inconsistent with their true values. You can find a summary here that will lay out the steps to take.

See if you can get your CEO to consider all the angles by asking questions and thinking through the issue on his own. There is a chance that he might talk himself out of his dug-in position. Here are some questions to get you started:

• What is so important about having everyone in the office every day?
• How will having everyone in the office every day change things for the better?
• What bothers you so much about people working remotely?
• What impact do you think forcing a change like this will have on our culture?
• Are you prepared to see the US workforce turn over by (at least) 25%?
• What is your level of confidence that the benefits of forcing people to come back to the office will outweigh the costs? (If it isn’t 100%, you can ask why not. This opens the door to doubt.)
• Is there a compromise you might consider, if it meant retaining our best people?

The key is to never argue or challenge your CEO’s claims. Just keep asking questions and keep him talking.

I stumbled over this method accidentally about twenty years ago by simply asking one question. I was shocked at how quickly someone changed a long-held position as a result of one simple, emotionally neutral question. I didn’t really understand the science behind it until I read McRaney’s book.

If using a strong persuasion method like this still doesn’t move the needle, you will have to consider if working in this new dogmatic culture is for you. Do you even want to work for a CEO who is so demanding and willing to sacrifice common sense to be right? I hate to suggest this, because it would cause any number of big life decisions. Of course, it is up to you. Maybe this will be a one-time thing for your CEO, but I doubt it.

You are indeed between a rock and a hard place, my friend, in more ways than you may have admitted to yourself. You have a new persuasion technique to try—and then you will have some choices to make.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.