Ask a Manager: How to Navigate Clueless Colleagues, Lunch-Stealing Bosses, and the Rest of Your Life at Work

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Much has changed in the job market since 2007 – the unemployment rate went up, then down. Co-working spaces became trendy and the threat of robots taking over our jobs became slightly more real. Yet at the core of it, people still worry about the same stuff, says Green.

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There’s also an issue of passivity vs proactiveness. In the first example Dale is actively looking for work, and making himself available should something come up. In the second, Dale is a passive recipient of work. In my experience (yours may differ) folks who do this are also going to be the ones that if there’s no work will sit around on their phone the whole time and still expect to get paid. They’re not willing to put in more effort than merely putting the responsibility for filling their workload onto someone else’s plate. In his blog, John sheds light on a number of various project management and team building facets in a short but fun manner that definitely intrigues the reader not only to stay on the article but to have a glance at more resources. Instead of throwing around a strong, formal list of vocabulary suited to experienced professionals, each article is written in an informal, conversational tone that leaves the reader comfortable no matter a novice at project management or a veteran solution provider. my employee was excluded from a team-building event because of their weight — how do I make this right?John Good Pasture has over two decades of experience including program management and project coaching. PM Column is an online magazine for digital project managers. It aims to inspire project managers in the first place and supports them in their endeavors. The magazine is full of insights into the profession that goes together with original artwork you can’t find elsewhere. If you just tell a new person, “Jane is going to scream at you, but it’ll be better if you do X,” then yes, you’re risking training junior people that this is normal / acceptable / not something they should find problematic. You can avoid that if you instead say, “There’s a lot of yelling in this office. That’s not okay, it’s really toxic, and it’s not something any of us should have to put up with, but since it’s happening, what we’ve found is most effective to deal with it is X.”

my new office has a no-humor policy — Ask a Manager my new office has a no-humor policy — Ask a Manager

For a few years after college, I worked at a coffee shop located inside a grocery store. One morning a week, a nearby assisted living facility would bring about a half dozen residents to do their grocery shopping. Most of them would come in and head right for the coffee shop for a drink to sip as they did their shopping. Covid doesn’t care about the economy, or your politics. It doesn’t care if you previously were young, able-bodied and healthy. It’s a virus. It’s only purpose is to infect and replicate, mutate, and infect more. Some of the drama is very soap opera-ish. I have a real taste for the weird and so if I get a crazy letter, it goes straight to the top of my list. I love the crazy letters. I always wonder: ‘Am I pushing the balance too far in that direction?’ But people really like it. It makes it so much more interesting. I have people say to me all the time that reading the column makes them appreciate their own workplace and their own boss.” In my experience, the best solution is to assign the intern an ongoing task they can work on whenever they have spare time, so they don’t have to keep bothering people for busywork. Very good point – the intern doesn’t know what they should or shouldn’t be doing, and really doesn’t have any perspective on what would or wouldn’t be useful to the company. Odds are they would “improve” something that is working just fine, or that needs to work in a particular way because of something the intern is not aware of, and so would cause a lot of hassle and cost the company time/money.

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They probably are making an effort! If they have been having downtime and haven’t been taught that when that happens, they should shop themselves around to their team to see who needs help, they’re probably thinking that OP needs “more time” to come up with their tasks, which is a reasonable (albeit wrong) assumption based on OP having assigned them tasks before. However, is there any chance your friend is older (and especially older and coupled)? You say a lot of people in the company have partners and families. Or if your friend is your age, is it possible that the sales team has more young and/or single people in it? In general I don’t recommend sharing mental health struggles with managers unless you’re asking for a specific accommodation — because otherwise there’s a risk that they’ll assume you’re telling them because you want them to do something differently and if they’re not hearing a specific request from you, they may decide on their own what they think would help (and those won’t necessarily be things you would ever want).

cover letters — Ask a Manager cover letters — Ask a Manager

I did a decent amount of prep work for that next one, some of which I admit should have done for the first interview. But I felt much more confident going into this one. Written by Kiron Bondale, who is a proud owner of multiple accolades and years of experience in the project management arena, this blog is a resource documented straight from his vast experience of working with various projects. Kiron understands first-hand the ease of project management practices in theory and equal difficulty in implementation. But that’s not what Dale said. He said “…you have to find tasks for me” or at least something so similiar that that’s what the LW heard. That’s different. This phrasing is a demand; the LW MUST do X for Dale. Dale is putting stuff on the LW’s plate, rather than providing an opportunity to take stuff off it. the aggressive brownie recipe, the bad math and other times you mortified yourself in job interviewsJohn Carroll is the author of The Way of the Project Manager. His book focuses on a Taoist approach to surviving in the project management industry. The articles in this blog are based on this book and are great resources for anything you need to know about project management. 12. Easy in Theory, Difficult in Practice