#ask a manager

[thekenobee]

TURN + Text Post (Part 31) : Ask A Manager Edition

[scyllas-revenge]

LOTR + Ask A Manager: Part 2

Part 1, Part 3 and Part 4 here!

[savouryduck]

Happy awkward workplace party season

the best office holiday party date story of all time

A couple of years ago, someone shared what I consider to be the best holiday date story of all time, and it must be shared here again. Enjoy

[abigailspinach]

how much money do you make?

It’s hard to get real-world information about what jobs pay. Online salary websites are often inaccurate, and people can get weird when you

It's that magical time of the year. The "Ask A Manager Salary Survey" is up. The Ask a Manager readership skews US, female, and white collar.

Go, Tumblr Denizens, share some of our salary data. Let's make the data set better.

Blurb:

It’s hard to get real-world information about what jobs pay. Online salary websites are often inaccurate, and people can get weird when you ask them directly. So to take some of the mystery out of salaries, it’s the annual Ask a Manager salary survey. Fill out the form below to anonymously share your salary and other relevant info. (Do not leave your info in the comments section! If you can’t see the survey questions, try this link instead.) When you’re done, you can view all the responses in a sortable spreadsheet.

[sable-pigeon]

Nirvana in Fire and Ask a Manager (Part 2)

[earlgraytay]

Dear Allison:

I manage a small team of professionals in a niche public safety field. As a metaphor, you could call us the llama cops (though we're not actually police of any kind.)

We recently had to confiscate some clothes (long story) from a group of suspects. Unfortunately, my team is... let's call them a group of misfit toys. They're great subject matter experts and fantastic at their jobs, but their soft skills leave something to be desired. One member in particular- let's call him 'Yellow' - isn't great at professional communication. He kind of beats around the bush and speaks in riddles.

Yellow decided to phrase our request for those clothes in a way that made it sound like an innuendo. Of course, this did not make it any easier to deal with the suspects at all.

Even worse- well, I'm kind of on a PIP right now thanks to an unrelated incident. Thanks to the PIP, and to a complicated interdepartmental project, I'm having to interface with some higher-level managers from corporate. They can see the very visible problems with my team, and I get the sense that this might have been the last straw.

Alison, I'm mortified. Is there any way I can salvage this? How do I discipline my team so that this doesn't happen again?

Thanks,

Manager In Hell

[tinsnip]

Loyalty to work friends doesn’t mean you have to pretend not to see serious issues with how they operate at work or get tarnished by association with a label you don’t deserve. As for green flags for potential friends at work, here are a few: --integrity — you don’t see them lying or looking for ways to game the system --respected by people you respect --when you’re new, they go out of their way to be warm and welcoming to you, while simultaneously preserving appropriate boundaries with someone they don’t yet know well (so for example, they don’t unload all their complaints about the company on you during your first week) --not mired in negativity (this doesn’t mean they don’t acknowledge real issues or ever do normal work venting, but they don’t get bogged down in complaining to the point it impacts your or their quality of life in significant ways; they don’t seem to take pleasure in criticizing others; and, where possible, they look for ways to make things better) --realistic — they know not every job will be ideal, and they have a decent understanding of office politics and what is and isn’t realistic to expect or ask for --supportive — they recognize and applaud your successes rather than resenting them --honest but kind — they’ll tell you when you’re wrong but in a way that doesn’t make you feel bad about it --an aversion to gossip — this doesn’t necessarily mean they never gossip, but it’s not a major focus and they have some discretion and sensitivity --they understand and respect your boundaries and that you’re there to work — which means everything from understanding when you can’t talk because you need to focus to not expecting you to fight their battles as your own --they don’t use you to push their own agenda ([such as] wanting you to quit just so your office would “take the hit”)

Ask a Manager

[writing-relatedactivities]

A Very Ask A Manager Thanksgiving

So I love advice blogs (I maintain that comment sections on advice blogs are the best free tool for writers to explore different viewpoints, which really enriches your characterization), and for a few years now, I have had this idea that I want to do a do an Ask A Manager themed dinner, purely to delight myself. Meant to do it as a cookout this summer, but timing never worked out, so I broached the idea of doing it for Thanksgiving. My partner, who is also a nerd and therefore very supportive of my advice blog love even though it is not one of their interests, was down, with their only condition being that I should still make my cider bread with maple butter.

The menu:

Appetizers

Chips with:

Guacamole in honor of Guacamole Bob, of "ordering extra guacamole is wasteful of member dues” fame. (This being on the menu may also have been a factor in Partner being willing to have our holiday take on an Ask A Manager theme, as I once took a community education course on grilling that taught me nothing about its ostensible subject matter but did teach me to make a bomb-ass guacamole. The secret is that your first step should be to pulverize an entire head of garlic into a paste in your mocajete.)

Three store bought salsas, where the trick is to "fold" the salsa to get the best flavor

A bottle of hot sauce so we can get fired after a coworker steals our spicy food

Main Course

"Duck club" sandwiches in honor of the secret office sex club where you get points for sex in different locations, and quacking is involved. (These were very decadent and if anyone's interested in a great duck recipe, I used the Duck with Lemon recipe from A Feast of Ice and Fire.)

Sides

Cheap-ass rolls that I definitely deliberately brought to upstage you, yes you, the person who signed up to bring Hawaiian rolls! It's definitely not an overreaction on your part to declare that "they can all take Santa and stick it up their ass!" You're definitely not getting fired for being wildly hostile! (These are actually homemade rolls, but I weighed "buy actually cheap rolls and be done" or "spend a couple hours adapting a corgi butt roll recipe to a human butt roll," and chose in favor of the pun.)

Dessert

Bribery cupcakes, from that time a letter writer brought some cupcakes over to chat with her neighbor, the son of the Chief of Police, about a disruptive noise issue in her workplace and some commenters decided this constituted bribing a public servant. (The recipe is in the comments on that link; I made the carrot cake version. However, I realized halfway through that I was somehow low on vanilla despite obsessively buying fancy vanilla extract every time I am in a spice shop, along with a bunch of other things I don't need because buying cool spices makes me feel like a wizard. Anyway, half of these had vanilla in the filling/icing, and the other half had cardamom extract.)

A birthday cake that somehow crosses boundaries by...being too fancy? Being paid for a staff person? Not involving the wife in the planning? Anyway, the real answer to the letter writer's question is, "Eh, I don't think it's a big deal" because different offices have different norms around birthdays and it's whatever, but sometimes a low-stakes office norms question hits just right and you get 630 comments of people debating The One True Way to Do Office Birthdays, and whether or not buying a cake means you're angling for an affair. (Okay, not all the comments are about that particular letter. Anyway, I picked up this fancy-ass cake at Marc Heu Patisserie, and appropriately enough, the guy ahead of me in line was picking up a cake for his boss.)

And of course, what Ask A Manager column would be complete without chocolate teapots?

Beverages

Mudslides, because "girls love chocolate." And magic tricks. And being played "You're So Vain" on the piano with a mournful stare. Partner and I are both notorious lightweights but I had been snacking all day as I cooked so I was mostly immune. Partner took one sip of this drink and immediately began loudly telling me how their one colleague doesn't sing enough to his Pre-K students, and "this classroom will do anything if you sing to them!" After dinner, they lay down on the floor and sang the Slippery Fish song.

The full spread: