coworker’s anxiety becomes my problem, complimenting a colleague’s name, and more — Ask a Manager

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. My coworker’s anxiety becomes my problem

I have a coworker, “Lily,” who reports to my manager and has been at the company for two years, with our team for four months. She and I are both pretty new to the workforce (we are 25 years old), so I would appreciate some advice on handling this situation in a mature and sensitive way.

Lily does great work — she’s diligent, detail-oriented, and on top of all our tasks. However, she seems very anxious all the time, and her anxiety can feel overwhelming. She has a tendency to talk very fast without making eye contact, and as soon as she’s spoken for a while and I open my mouth to respond, she’ll cut in and tell me even more. When she runs into work-related problems, she will run to me and just tell me what the problem is, and then wait expectantly for me to say or do … something. If I ask questions in response, she’ll jump in the second I finish my sentence and blurt even more about the problem, with a great sense of desperation. She has seemed on the verge of tears because of very small things and she will insist with urgency that I need to help her solve the problem immediately, even though I know from my experience it is not a big deal at all.

I’m really struggling not to let her anxiety make me anxious. I try very hard to respond to her panic with calm, but no amount of reassurance, explanations of what’s important and what’s not, or positive feedback (even specific notes on what she is doing well) seems to sate the fire-hose of urgency.

I don’t manage Lily. When I asked our manager for advice, he told me that he had seen this in junior employees before, and it would naturally go away as Lily became more experienced. That advice is not helpful for my day-to-day interactions with Lily. Is there anything that can be done here, or do you think I just need to do a better job of riding the wave of Lily’s anxiety?

To what extent is it your job to be fielding so many questions from Lily in the first place? Obviously you want to be collegial and that means some amount of willingness to help troubleshoot things … but that’s only true up to a point. If a lot of that is going on — and it sound like it is — Lily should normally be seeking help from her manager, not a peer.

So the first thing is to be less available for these anxiety spirals! Say you’re busy and can’t help and she should check with your mutual manager … or skip the declaration of busyness and just say, “Oh, you should talk with Manager about that.”

Right now it sounds like Lily is treating you as a manager stand-in (probably because it’s less intimidating to go to you than to her boss) and you should stop serving in that role. You’re not her manager, you’re not being paid as her manager, and by soaking up all her anxious questions, you’re keeping your boss from seeing the extent of the issue, as well as taking on an emotional burden that you don’t need to take on.

Related:
how should I deal with an anxious and needy coworker?

2. Micromanager is now checking everyone’s version histories — hourly

My supervisor has always been a micromanager to our five-person unit. He literally rewrites everyone’s work to suit how he is feeling that day, and this includes emails to upper management, stakeholders, etc. We are all nearly at our wit’s end, but unfortunately there are no other openings to apply to or request transfer to without taking pay cuts.

Over the past two weeks, he expanded his micromanagement toolbox to include demanding editing access to everyone’s assignments via OneDrive, where he monitors our version histories to see what we accomplished each hour and calls us out if we didn’t get what he considers enough done. It now just outright feels like he has created a toxic waste dump of an environment to work in. Are there any next steps you can suggest? We have no idea what to do.

Good lord. He’s monitoring version histories? By the hour? Does he have no work of his own?

Is the team up for pushing back as a group and saying, “This is interfering with our ability do our work and making us feel you don’t trust us to act with integrity and in the company’s interests”? It’s possible that if you speak up about it as a group rather than individually, it’ll create enough pressure to get him to stop. If that doesn’t work, in some companies it would be the sort of thing you could speak with either HR or his own boss about, framed as, “This is demoralizing the team and harming everyone’s productivity and he needs more support on how manage properly.” But in other companies, that would get you nowhere at all, so it depends on what you know about his boss and the abilities of your HR people and their willingness to intervene. (It’s worth noting HR doesn’t typically have the power to curtail this kind of thing on their own, but in some companies they’d respond by coaching him on how to manage more effectively, especially if they hear it from the whole team.)

3. How to handle a GoFundMe for laid-off employees

I work at a large nonprofit, and we went through a massive layoff yesterday. Most of the staff is reeling.

The staff quickly put together a GoFundMe for the laid-off employees and raised thousands of dollars in the past day. It’s generous, but something about it doesn’t sit right with me. It’s coming from a good place — people are shocked, frustrated, and want to help — but it feels misguided.

If people were serious about showing some kind of solidarity, I can’t help but feel that we’d be talking about a different kind of organizing (a work stoppage with a set of demands about getting rid of the overpriced, mostly empty office building or inflated executive pay before we lay off staff, for example). Instead, this feels kind of like condescending/poorly designed severance. Am I being unreasonable here? Should I just kick in some cash and hope it helps?

I don’t think you’re entirely off-base. I don’t think it’s condescending and anyone who doesn’t want the help can turn it down, but it doesn’t sit right to have coworkers, who might be in precarious financial positions themselves, take on the responsibility of providing financial support to laid-off employees rather than the organization to provide severance.

However, the impulse is a very kind and understandable one! The GoFundMe is something people can do now and which provides immediate help for people who might need it urgently, which can’t be said of a hypothetical campaign that might or might not succeed (and which, even if it does succeed in some ways, could easily not result in people getting their jobs back).

Ultimately I’d judge the GoFundMe on its own merits: do you want to contribute? You don’t have to! But I wouldn’t reject it solely because you’d rather see the staff organizing. Also, though, if you want to see the staff organizing … are you willing to explore what it would look like to lead it yourself? If not, I wouldn’t judge the thing people are willing to organize.

Also, what it’s worth, responding to staff cuts at a nonprofit through a lens of solidarity is likely not the right lens; you need to look at what the organization can actually do with its budget, at a time when many nonprofits are seeing their funding dramatically cut. Maybe in your org’s case there are smarter trade-offs they should have made, ones that would avoid layoffs; if so, that’s a more realistic framing than one of general staff solidarity, since a nonprofit’s loyalty needs to be to its mission above individual jobs, as rough as that can be to live through.

4. Telling a coworker she has a beautiful name

Can I tell a female worker that she has a beautiful name when we are introduced or will I get in trouble? I’m a man.

Would you ever tell a male coworker that? I’m guessing no, which is a good litmus test indicating you shouldn’t say it to a female colleague either.

Most women really don’t want male colleagues commenting on their face/hair/clothing/smile/name/other things they don’t have any control over; even if your intentions are wholesome, it’s going to feel rooted in relating to them as a woman, rather than as a professional person who’s at work. Interact with us the same way you would interact with male colleagues, please.

5. Should I explain the termination of federal probationary employees in my cover letter?

I’m one of the many federal probationary employees who recently received a termination letter. Can I assume that potential employers will know that I was swept up in mass layoffs of questionable legality, or is it safer to provide an explanation in my cover letter as to why I worked for less than five months at my old job? I was thinking that at the end of the cover letter, after discussing my old position, I could say something like, “Unfortunately, my time at X was cut short by blanket layoffs of probationary employees (anyone with less than one year of service) across the federal government. However, I am excited by the opportunity to bring my experience to…”

I imagine the answer to this question differs by industry. For context, I’m a social scientist with a PhD who worked in a federal statistical agency. I’ll be looking for research positions both remotely and in the greater D.C. area.

Most people will know without you spelling it out, but there’s also nothing wrong with explaining it — just use as few words as possible on it so that the focus of your letter can stay on your qualifications. I’d edit your proposed language down to: “Unfortunately, my time at X was cut short by blanket layoffs of probationary employees anyone with less than one year of service across the federal government. However, I am excited by the opportunity to bring my experience to…”

Mostly that’s to use fewer words, but it’s also true some people have been misunderstanding the term “probationary” and thinking it means “on probation because of your performance,” rather than because you were new. While it should be clear from the context, it’s better to leave no doubt.