It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My boss is being weird about me taking my birthday off
I know not everyone loves celebrating their birthday, but I really get into mine! I’ve always taken my birthday off each year since I’ve been working, and my family and friends know I like to do something special. I’m not someone who pushes birthday fun on people who don’t enjoy celebrating theirs, but damn it I like my birthday and I’m not ashamed of that!
My team has a new boss this year and when I asked him for my birthday off, he said, “Aren’t you a grown adult?” He didn’t say I couldn’t take the time but he definitely seemed to think it was an immature thing to do. I’ve never had a boss take issue with me having my birthday off. Am I being weird in treating this like a normal thing to do or is he the one who is off-base?
He’s off-base and was a jerk about it. There are people who don’t understand adults making a big deal about their birthdays, but when you’re a manager that’s something you keep to yourself (unless the person is completely over-the-top about it in a way that’s truly disruptive to the office, which isn’t generally the case). You don’t make judgmental comments about it to employees who find joy in it.
If he’s still your boss when future birthdays roll around, just ask for the day off without mentioning what it’s for. But you’re not the weird one; plenty of adults like to celebrate their birthdays, including taking the day off when that happens to work out.
2. My employee doesn’t take any ownership for her work
I’m managing a direct report who rushes through tasks and then hands them off to me for checking. She’ll do about 10% and then ask if she’s doing it right. While I’m here to supervise, I’m seeing incomplete understanding, rushing, or possibly a mindset that it’s my responsibility to ensure her work is correct. She’s been with us four months and is only two years out of grad school, so she may still be in a student mindset.
After meetings where project managers assign her work, she asks me if I need help completing it, as if she’s my assistant. I’ve explained her role is to own her work. There have been other situations where she is assigned work, I will identify a few components of it to help her understand the bigger picture of why this is being done and what needs to be done, and then she will only do those items that I used for examples.
I’ve had several conversations with her about the issue. Recently, I caught errors and asked her to reflect; she couldn’t identify what went wrong. I’m unsure if this is a skill gap, maybe distractions or lack of understanding, or a will issue. I need help identifying which it is. Her job is a junior version of mine, so the work she is not completing ultimately falls on my to-do list. My already packed workload has been doubled since she was hired. I need to address this before things get worse. How do I distinguish skill vs. will, and could you advise on coaching if it’s skill, or next steps if it’s not a fit? (Side note, I was voluntold to be a supervisor and it was sold to me as additional support for our area and it surely is not. Please help!)
If you and she have had multiple conversations about it with no improvement and she can’t identify where she’s going wrong, she’s likely not the right person for the job — but before you conclude that, it makes sense to sit down together, name the patterns you’re seeing and what needs to change (including being clear about what it means to fully own her work), and ask what help she needs to meet those requirements. It’s possible she needs more training or coaching, but see how that conversation goes.
Ultimately, if she’s not doing the work you need done even after you’ve clearly laid out what needs to change and ensured she’s been trained in how to do it, then it doesn’t really matter if it’s a skill or will issue — what matters at that point is that she’s not doing the job and you’d need to move her out of the role.
But while you’re sorting through this, you should talk to your own boss about what’s going on. Be clear that hiring this employee has doubled your workload rather than relieving some of it, and that you’re actively trying to help her improve but are at the point of considering that she simply might not be able to do the work, and ask about next steps in your organization if that turns out to be the case.
Related:
how to deal with employee performance problems
what to do when an employee makes a serious mistake
how to give better feedback
3. Should I send a thank-you after an AI screening interview?
I had my first AI screening interview this past weekend.
It was surprisingly not as creepy as I thought it would be, mainly because while I was on video, there was no attempt to make a human-shaped AI “interviewer” on the other end of the call, just a voice. “She” asked questions — and in-depth questions, not the kind I would expect from an initial HR screen — and I answered. “She” would then summarize my answers and move on.
Normally after an interview I would send a follow-up email/thank-you note reiterating my interest, thanking the interviewer for their time, and maybe punching up some of my answers or highlighting how my experience related to the points brought up in the interview. You know, as you do.
But with my “speaking” with an AI agent … to whom would I address the thank-you? Is it okay not to thank anyone? I like having the chance to do a follow-up, and there was a line in the initial email from the company saying responses would be reviewed by humans, but with no indication of what humans would be doing the review.
Help? This is a brave new world and I am finding myself stymied.
Yes, you should still send a follow-up note, because it still presents the same opportunity to you as it would if you’d interviewed with a person: it’s an opportunity to affirm that you remain interested and to build on the conversation (“conversation”?) in a way that can strengthen your candidacy. You’d just send it to the recruiter or whichever human set up the AI screening.
Related:
thank-you notes: they’re not about thanking anyone
4. Interviewer only focused on a small piece of the job
I interviewed for a job this week that I’m very interested in doing what sounds like a really wide variety of tasks (which is exactly what I’m looking for). But the interviewer focused almost all of their questions on one specific part of the job. Imagine a job description that listed 10 things, most of which sound like they carry equal importance, but an interview that only focused on one of them. I feel like I didn’t have an opportunity to show why I’d be good at the rest of the job and in retrospect I’m wondering if there was some way I could have taken more control of the interview to show I could do the other tasks too.
It’s possible that they feel confident from your resume that you’d do well at the work they didn’t delve into and focused on the parts that they had more questions about. But you could certainly say something like, “I know X and Y are also a big part of the job, and I’d love to tell you about my experience doing those if that would be useful to hear.”
However, it’s also possible that the job is really heavily based on this one thing and the other tasks don’t come up very often — which is definitely something you’d want to know if part of the draw is the variety of work. It’s okay to ask something like, “I noticed most of our conversation has been focused on X, although the job description listed a wide variety of work. Is X the main focus of the job, and what portion of the work do the other tasks generally account for?”
5. How much bereavement leave is typical?
I work in the U.S. for a medium-sized tech startup. My mom recently passed away, and I missed eight days of work total: three days between when she suddenly fell ill and when she passed away, and another five days for sitting shiva. When I got back to work and went to file for bereavement leave, I discovered that the company offers only two paid days of leave, and I have to use sick time or PTO or take unpaid leave to cover the rest.
I know there’s no federal law regarding bereavement leave and I believe that in the few states that require it, it’s allowed to be unpaid. I know that there is therefore a wide range of what companies offer in terms of bereavement leave.
I’m curious, though, about what’s “typical” and whether two days of paid leave is on the low end or the high end for a company like mine. Do you have any insight into that?
Most commonly it’s three to five days for immediate family members. Two days for a parent isn’t unheard of but it’s very much on the low side. The idea isn’t that you can’t take more time off, just that those are the extra days on top of your existing PTO that the company offers.
Some big companies offer significantly more — Google and Adobe both offer up to 20 bereavement days per year — although that’s well above the average.
I’m sorry about your mom.
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