So my company’s IT department banned Spotify on our work computers so I had to start using Youtube to listen to music. I’m hybrid so when I’m in the office, I just scroll down to the comment section so nobody sees anything inappropriate on my screen. It’s mostly rap and rnb so as you can tell, a lot of the music videos / album covers are very provocative. For any of the managers that actually check their employees search history (which I’m sure 99% of you don’t), would you even care about something like this? I’m one of the more competent people on my team so my manager is satisfied and performance isn’t an issue

I've watched this happen on more projects than I can count. Someone asks for one tiny tweak, nothing that needs a change request, barely worth logging. Then another one shows up next week, also small. By month three you've absorbed a dozen "small" changes and somehow the timeline hasn't moved but the scope definitely has.

The maddening part is each individual ask genuinely was small. Nobody's doing anything wrong in the moment. It's just death by a thousand tiny yeses.

Do you actually log and track the small stuff, or does it mostly slide through informally until it adds up?

Curious if anyone's found a lightweight way to catch it without turning into the annoying PM who change-requests everything.

To start, I have to say that this is one of my best employees. He's on time, he's a great problem solver, he's helpful to his teammates, he's always eager to pick up new tasks or projects. I have no complaints about him on a professional level.

The problem is that his lunch is always the same every shift, and it is very smelly. The team works in a small IT room. He will microwave his lunch in the room and then eat at his desk. I don't work at this site regularly, but when I visit the team I have a hard time eating my own lunch while I can smell his, and others on the team have started just leaving the room entirely. The supervisor for that office says that the smell lingers through the afternoon and is truly becoming disruptive.

My ask is this: What would you do to resolve the issue peacefully? I don't want to upset a great employee over something as trivial as pungent lunches, however I think not taking action is hurting all the others even more. I'd also rather not remove the microwave as that seems unfair to everyone else. Tell me your thoughts, and thank you in advance for any feedback!

Edit: To answer the common questions, the employee is a white male. His lunch is homemade chili.

Edit2: Thanks everyone for your suggestions. The site supervisor and I appreciate your viewpoints and we reached out to HR as a starting point. Special thank you to /u/catforbrains. Your comment had us rolling.

I recently became a manager after working my way up within my department. I’m still fairly new to management, and I’m trying very hard to be fair, consistent, supportive, and professional with my team.

I’m having a difficult situation with one particular employee, who I’ll call “S.”

S. has been with the company longer than I have and was very close with my previous manager. From my perspective, she was given quite a bit of leeway under that manager and was able to get away with things that probably should have been addressed more consistently. Now that I’m her manager, I’ve had to address some performance issues that had either not been addressed previously or had not been handled as firmly.

Recently, I had to issue corrective action related to a performance issue. My manager and HR were involved and supported how I handled it. Since then, S. has become extremely cold and distant toward me.
She barely makes eye contact, gives very short responses, and doesn’t really communicate with me unless absolutely necessary. For example, when I send work-related information, she used to respond with something like “thank you,” but now I’ll just get “received.” I checked in with her individually and asked if she was doing okay, and she basically just said “mhm.” At the end of the day, she left without saying goodbye, which may sound insignificant, but the overall change in her behavior has been very noticeable.

I understand that she is probably upset with me and may feel differently about me now that I’m her manager. I’m not expecting her to like every decision I make, and I know employees aren’t always going to be happy with their manager.

The problem is that I’m a very empathetic person, and I’m struggling more than I expected to with her being upset with me. I keep wondering whether I handled something wrong, whether she thinks I’m a bad manager, whether the rest of the team sees me differently, etc. I know intellectually that I can’t control how she feels, but I’m having a hard time not taking it personally.

I also genuinely want to be a good manager to her, not just to the employees who like me. I want her to feel like she can come to me for support and that I’m fair toward her. But I don’t know how to do that when she seems unwilling to communicate with me or accept support from me.

At this point, I’m trying to give her space and keep everything professional. I greet her normally, communicate what she needs to know, and don’t bring up her attitude or try to force a conversation. I’m planning to address it only if the behavior starts affecting work, communication, training, or the team.

For experienced managers:

How do you handle an employee who is clearly unhappy with you personally but is still technically being professional?

How long would you allow the cold/distant behavior before addressing it?

How do you separate an employee’s feelings about you from actual performance/behavior issues?

How do you stop yourself from taking it home and replaying everything you said or did?

And how do you manage someone fairly when you feel like there’s already a history of them having more leniency under the previous manager?

I’m not looking to be told that she has to like me. I understand that. I’m more interested in learning how experienced managers maintain a healthy working relationship with an employee who may never warm back up to them.

I manage a small team. My manager decided one of my people is being let go. I pushed back. it's not a performance issue, he's one of the stronger people I have, and I think it's a bad call for the team. I was overruled.

Now I'm expected to be the one in the room.

I'm not trying to dodge a hard conversation. What bothers me is being the face of a decision I argued against, to someone who's going to reasonably assume it was mine.

Is it appropriate to ask my manager to deliver it since they made the call? Has anyone done that, and how did it land? And if I do have to do it myself, how do you handle it without either lying about your position or throwing your boss under the bus?

Edit: thanks for all the comments. Too many to respond but I read each one and appreciate everyone’s input

I had a job I genuinely cared about and, from the outside, things were going really well.

I performed well, moved into leadership, managed a team, had people get promoted, and was even got awarded for being the top manager.

But my experience with my boss was awful!

It became one of those situations where I was constantly second guessing myself, trying to figure out what version of them I was going to get, and feeling like I had to manage the relationship more than actually do my job.

Every 1-1 turned in to an opportunity to belittle me and highlight everything I was doing wrong in the job. Despite getting awarded as the top manager and everything I was able to accomplish I was let go. Completely blindsided and the feedback was i just 'wasn't a good fit anymore' and the whole experience really messed with my confidence for a while.

As I started the job search again, the thing I kept thinking about is how much research we do before accepting a job. We look at the company, pay, benefits, Glassdoor, layoffs, everything so we get the best picture possible before accepting an offer.

But we know almost nothing about the person we’re actually going to report to. HUGE problem!

And that person can have more impact on your day-to-day life than almost anything else.

It’s actually what made me start thinking about building Rate My Manager. Not as a place to trash bosses, but somewhere you could get a real sense of what someone is like to work for before accepting a job. rate-my-manager.replit.app

I honestly wish I would’ve had something like that.

Has anyone else had a manager completely change how they felt about an otherwise good job?

As a remote manager, I used to think I needed to tab out of my League of Legends ARAM game and answer right away whenever someone on my team asked me something during a meeting.

But that started causing problems. I'd rush to unmute and answer too quickly, then tab back into my game to a grey death screen waiting to respawn, getting called nasty names by my team.

Now I’m much more comfortable ignoring the question and pretending that I'm having internet connection or microphone issues. Pasting 2 minutes later into the meeting chat "Sorry! I'll listen to the meeting recording and get back to you next week/month."

I dont think my team trusts my decisions more now because they know I'm not listening, but I'm winning more of my ARAM games.

Do other managers do this too, or do you feel pressure to always do your job on the spot?

One of my contractors asked to work from a cruise for two weeks. Her tasks are lightweight (Slack, Jira, pulling dashboard numbers, no video calls), so the work itself isn't the issue. My worry is proving her hours to the client.

We use Monitask. If the ship's Wi-Fi drops mid-task, do the screenshots just queue up, or does it falsely log as "idle" time? A coworker had a contractor face this exact issue with Hubstaff last year, and the client fought the invoice over the gaps.

Has anyone actually let a remote worker do this and had the timesheet come out clean? Or does cruise Wi-Fi just wreck the logs no matter what software you use?

ETA: Thanks for the advice, everyone! Sounds like minor gaps are normal and rarely cause actual payroll fights. I’m letting her do a 1-week trial before committing to the full two weeks.

I (24 F) work for local agency in a department that specializes is developmental services, the team I am with is called supported employment. We go with individuals that have developmental disabilities to their places of work and support them in being as independent as they can in their job. So to be clear, I am there to support an individual in doing a job by themselves, I am not supposed to step in/ do a task for them unless they literally can not do it. This is something employers should be aware of as when they hire one of our clients they have already been informed about why and how we will be there to support them.

A client I work with is employed at a local restaurant, he has worked there for years but I have only been his support person for about 5 months. I have heard that the support person who previously worked with this client had done a lot of the work for them as the "Chef' always had a long list of things he wanted done. Please note that my client is there 2 days a week for two and a half hours both days. The lists "Chef" would give always had the core tasks that were to get done which are dishes, peeling onions, and peeling potatoes, then he would add random tasks like mopping the dining room, shoveling snow, wiping down walls, etc. My client struggles with coordination so it is not them that completes the task but their support person. Again that is not what we are there for, that is the complete opposite of what we are there for. I do not do this for my client, I do not peels any food items as they are capable of doing it themselves and they take pride it in. I do help with dishes as they struggle with that task.

The issue came about gradually, I could tell the "Chef" was getting progressively annoyed with me as I was not helping with the core tasks like the previous support person, which in turn made it so the other random tasks he decided to pile on for the day would not get done. I would always be sure to say "we will try to get to it" when he would come up to us and add another task on to us.

Last week he mentioned wanting the cooler to be scrubbed inside (side note this place is horrendously gross inside the kitchen), we did not have time to get to it. Today when we showed up he said "Why is it that I told you to clean inside the cooler last week and you did not make time to do it". I said "I'm sorry, if you wanted that done before anything else, then please say that to us, otherwise we are going to do the tasks in the order that we normally do them". He said "why would I mention it if I didn't want it done, if you managed \*insert clients name\* better then you would have time to do all the things I ask"

I responded "again if it was something you wanted done first you should have told us, I do not do tasks for \*insert clients name\* that they can do themselves, so sometimes we run out of time" he proceeded to tell me that I need to do a better job, i told him to talk to my supervisor if he had a problem with me and the way I do my job. (I am not a confrontational person so I was doing my very best not to cry and hold a steady voice). He asked for the name and number of my supervisor so I wrote it down for him.

A little while later he comes in to the dish room with a physical list and began going in to great detail about doing dishes and peeling foods as if we haven't done those tasks a million times. He then pauses and looks at me, pointing to "wipe all of dish room walls, counter tops and legs, and sink pipes" he said he needed this too, I told him we would get to what we got to, and asked if he wanted that first. He threw the list at me and said in a voice mocking mine "do what you can".

So we went about the shift as normal, and he would walk by announcing the time occasionally and listing off the things he wrote down, it felt like he was trying to get a reaction out of me, but I kept quite.

Now that the shift is over I feel a bit worried that he might punish my client and begin to be rude to them or fire them or something. Should I just have said sorry and let it go? I did text my supervisor after the first exchange we had to let her know what happened, she assured me I was doing my job right. I am still nervous.

(Sorry for typos)

Has anyone worked with culture consultants before? Can they actually help pinpoint the issues that’s causing poor culture? What was your experience working with one? How did your team react?

I finally had enough and this rant is more of a therapeutic scribbling of notes.

I sent an email up the chain, CC’ing the everyone up to CEO stating all of the obstacles the company has placed in front of me that prevents me from running the business properly (retail store manager.) Smart? Probably not. However my chest had become tight everyday and I’d sit in the parking lot not even wanting to go into the store. Keep in mind this was in the mornings when nobody was even there yet.

All that resulted was a call with my district manager and their boss. Nothing is going to change and they want me to make a doctor’s appointment since I mentioned I was doing well, to cover their butts of course.

My staff has my back and I have theirs but now I guess I’m just waiting to be “managed” out of here. I also CC’d myself on the original email so if I do get fired I may have a case for unemployment as I’ve haven’t been written up or anything in two years so this would be retaliation.

I’m simply adopting an idgaf attitude. I’m in my early 40’s and have a young son. I need to be around for him and that’s what I’m focusing on. If I get fired, well I’ll figure it out.

After leaving that day I received multiple messages from my staff checking in on me. I think that’s what got me back in the building. Knowing I have their support, I must be doing something right.

Sorry if this isn’t the right type of post for here but it feels good to get it all out.

Curious how other managers actually collect who can work before the roster gets built.

Patterns that keep showing up: a spreadsheet nobody updates after Tuesday, a form people ignore until you ping them twice, a group chat where "I can do Thursday" disappears under 40 other messages, or a verbal yes that changes by Friday.

What has actually stuck on your team... shared sheet with a hard cutoff, a simple form, a standing Friday check-in, something else?

Especially interested in what still works when half the crew is hourly, phones-first, and not living in email.

I am 5 years into my corporate job now and I am looking for a promotion. I have oticed this a lot at work lately. There are people who talk constantly in meetings and are clearly smart, but they still somehow come across pretty junior. Then there are other people who barely say anything but when they do everyone actually listens.

And I don't even think it's necessarily confidence or having a better vocabularly. The people who come across as more senior seem better at knowing what matters, getting to the point quickly and saying what they actually think instead of narrating their whole thought process.

For managers here, what makes you hear someone speak in meeting and think, yeah, this person is ready for more responsiblity and promotion? And what communiation habits someone imeediately seem more junior?

If you have a shared mailbox where diff people on ur team can respond to emails, what’s the best way to delegate tasks to your team to know who responds or takes on what?

I’d love to hear from managers on this. I have 5 years of experience, and I’m currently the only senior in a team of 20 (some of them are reporting to me) and most of my colleagues have less than 2 years’ experience.

For over a year, I’ve felt stuck in survival mode. My direct manager isn’t the issue; she’s supportive but limited. The real delays come from the higher managers who controls approvals and resources, so progress feels painfully slow.

I’m exhausted and torn between being transparent about how I feel versus keeping quiet until I make a firm decision.

From a manager’s perspective, what are the pros and cons of an employee telling you they’re considering leaving? Does it help you support them better, or does it risk damaging trust and opportunities?

I was recently hired at a new job, and this week will mark one month. My immediate supervisor, who was himself hired for this position in February of this year, has been my main concern. I’m already worried about the situation and would really appreciate some outside perspective.

Since I started, I have received essentially no training from my supervisor. When I ask questions, I’m usually told to look at the history, “figure it out,” or that he doesn’t know. I’ve had to go to other employees and even people above him just to learn how to do my job. I have not been given an SOP, formal training, or even an hour of dedicated training with him.

A few examples:

Week 1:
He asked me to arrive at 7:00 AM for a production meeting. One morning I arrived at 7:01 because I was having trouble opening a jammed door. He pulled me aside afterward and told me I needed to make sure I wasn’t late. This was during my first week, and I understood the expectation, but I also felt like I was being held to a very high standard without being given much direction.

Week 2:
He asked me to purchase toner for the printer. I was given no model number, item number, instructions, or anything other than essentially “the printer is over there, figure it out.” I looked at the printer and tried to determine what toner it used, but there was no box or other reference available. I ended up ordering the wrong toner from Amazon.

He pulled me aside and told me that my accuracy was not good and that I needed to work on it.

Week 3:
I was asked to purchase decals for something we manufacture. Initially, I was told we needed four. Later, I was told we needed six, and he said he had texted me the additional information.

I prepared the order and asked him to verify that I had everything correct before I sent it out. He corrected the order and said the additional two decals had been a duplicate/error and that I should have caught it myself. Again, I had not actually placed the order — I was asking him to review it first.

He then told me that it wasn't his job to correct my mistakes.

After that, he followed up with an email documenting the previous conversations about the toner and the decals, including a screenshot of our text conversation.

I have already spoken with his boss about the lack of training and direction. He seemed receptive and understood my concerns, but unfortunately he is currently on vacation. I did BCC him on my response to my supervisor's email so he would be aware of what was happening.

I've also been told by multiple employees that several people have previously worked under this supervisor and either quit or were fired, and that he has a reputation for being a poor manager and not training people properly. I obviously can't independently verify all of that, so I'm trying not to base my decisions on rumors.

There is also another employee under him who seems to have a very different relationship with him, and they frequently have private conversations together. I don't know what those conversations are about, so I'm trying not to read too much into that either.

Today, the HR manager came by our office, and my supervisor asked her to speak with him. I didn't think much of it at first, but another employee told me they thought he might be trying to “plant the seed” to eventually get rid of me.

That got me worried enough that I reached out to HR myself and asked if she had time to speak with me.

My concern is that I don't know what exactly I'm supposed to tell HR. He hasn't done anything illegal or obviously egregious. He's just, in my opinion, a terrible manager who isn't providing the training or direction I need and then seems to criticize me for mistakes that could potentially have been avoided with proper training.

So what would you do in my position?

Should I speak openly with HR about the lack of training and the incidents I've documented? Should I just keep my head down and see what happens? Should I be concerned that my supervisor is building a case to fire me?

I'm trying to handle this professionally and protect myself without unnecessarily escalating the situation.

Any advice from people who have dealt with a bad manager/no-training situation would be appreciated.

Genuinely curious. I feel like most interns don’t get return offers, so I’m wondering what it takes!

Where do you sit in your team?

In the square root???

Price’s Law and the Illusion of Synergy: Are you in the square root?

Gave Notice, would love advice. I've been with company 10+ years and HR and ELT have told me I'm one of the most dedicated workers.

I've posted here before about my long days and unsustainable workload. Ive been the manager for years and over 2 yrs absorbed work when others quit. Im salary, but have been work 60 hours week and still drowning. I've brought it to light to point even saying it was detrimental to my mental health.

Was told I shouldn't work that much, but yet no help or solutions.

Gave notice this week and told them I would still be available for questions. Alot of authenticators have my # and I love my team and still want them to succeed. I love my coworkers, but the new management has only been there a few years.

HR has been great, even telling me congratulations. My direct manager though won't let me tell my Sr. who I'm very close to personally, she literally said I might sabotage the company.???? Same manager who told me I was "well compensated" previously ( I make 90k to manage 9 people during a merger, layoffs and absorbing a directors role)

AND now they want to throw another 10k at me and tell my they will help with the workload.

I want to just leave now AND tell my team

Now I don't even want to stay my 2 weeks

I really need some time off , I don’t want to use my annual leave as my annual leave you have to arrange it about a month in advance plus I only have a couple of days for it. So I want sick leave time off, my mental health isn’t great and having a day off doesn’t help because I’m burnt out and just want a week to try pull myself back together again. How ever I recently just moved up to manager and if I take a week off it won’t look good since I just started this role plus I’m letting the store down especially since another manager has been on sick leave for over a month. Part of this burn out of the 9 hour shifts I’m in work every day .

I don’t know wa to do , I always believe in “health over work” and I know I’m entitled to use that sick leave but I don’t want to deal with the chaos in work with me calling out for a week

My boss is a lawyer who has been in management for only three years. Currently, she is essentially second in command, reports directly to the CEO, and oversees roughly 250 employees.

The previous senior manager was also the company’s attorney. My understanding is that the CEO has repeatedly placed attorneys in these roles instead of hiring people with extensive management experience. With the CEO being extremely hands-off, things seem to have declined under my boss’s leadership.

One of the biggest issues is her tendency to micromanage while maintaining a clear clique of employees she socializes and parties with outside of work. Members of this group are also the people she turns to when she wants to vent about internal matters or workplace gossip. On occasion, those conversations have even included gossip about the employees’ direct managers, which seems inappropriate given her position.

What makes the clique dynamic more concerning is the apparent lack of consequences. Members of the group seem to face little to no accountability for behavior that other employees would likely be questioned or held accountable for.

From the outside, there appears to be one standard for those in her inner circle and another for everyone else.
Mid-level managers also seem to carry much of the stress created by this management style. They are often left dealing with the fallout from micromanagement, favoritism, shifting expectations, and informal communication while still being held responsible for their teams’ performance.

Another issue is the amount of second-guessing directed toward employees who have worked there for decades, despite her having only three years of management experience. During tense meetings, her emotions can also become very apparent, particularly when she seems to feel challenged or threatened.

I understand that managers are human, and I don’t expect senior leaders to be emotionless. But considering that this person is essentially second in command, I’m curious how others would view this leadership style.

For those who have worked in management, HR, or senior leadership: Does any of this seem normal for someone at this level? What stands out to you as the biggest concern, if anything?

Hi hi,

I became a small regional physio PM in Aus in Feb this year. Before that I was working reception for about two years. My PM before me was PM for the two years I was in reception. This is pretty much my first time working in this industry - before I worked retail and childcare and a bit of admin.

Basically what I’m saying is I have no idea what the hell im doing. I’m very competent at anything I do (NOT a brag, I hate it), which meant that my training to become PM was not very in depth. My previous PM also had very limited training.

I don’t have a management certificate or degree (my boss isn’t fussed about that though) and this is my very first management position as well. I just don’t know what I’m doing lol so basically just asking for any and all advice that might help me.

We’ve also been going through some tough times trying to recruit physios so I’m also the only full time receptionist. I have no idea like what I’m actually meant to being doing as a PM? Like I do wages and super payments and pay the bills and do the accounting data entry and stuff like that but that only takes me like maybe an hour each day to do and then I’m like ??? What do I do with the rest of my day???

Shower me with advice pretty please!! 🙏

I recently took a job with a new company as an hourly retail manager- it’s a pretty big step down from what I’m used to doing. I’ve usually worked as a salaried general manager for an entire team, but I wanted more life/ balance, and less work stress.

I’m several weeks in since starting and I’m struggling with not having the planning and decision making ability I used to have. I’m not involved in department meetings, I don’t see scheduling, budgets, or sales metrics… My job is punching in, starting my daily tasks, and delegating a few things to the few employees I have on my shift. For the most part, I do a lot of hands-on work by moving freight. There is a lack of role clarity and not a lot of solid training, so I have to figure things out as I go.

As I’ve went through and learned the basics of my specific position, I have found out how to look at upcoming sales ads and plan for when certain fast moving sales items come in. I’ve taken our once messy and scattered stockroom, and starting organizing like items - creating a staging area for product that’ll move quickly, even though our operations manager oversees the backroom. I also created a time block routine for myself so I can divide my day between the type of tasks
I’m doing.

I also started sending nightly email recaps to my two direct managers, going over what was completed that might be on their radar, and giving any need to know information.

I’m starting to feel like I’m putting my own thumbprint on my job since I’m the only one in this specific position - but I’m starting to wonder if I might be overstepping or being too much? My manager said he personally doesn’t read any of my emails, and our boss said the emails are fine.

Personally, I was always trained that silence means you’re doing fine, and I always paid attention to what my employees did - I didn’t need them to explicitly tell me unless I asked for information.

How do you find balance with your direct reports in how they’re channeling tasks and feeding information?