Performance Tracking and Feedback

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. A reader writes: I am going to be leaving my company soon and starting my own business, and will need to hire support staff. One of the employees at my current company (Taylor) has told me she is looking for a new job. I find Taylor to be an excellent employee and I would be happy to have her working for me. I believe that she enjoys working with me as well. The catch is that Taylor primarily works with Leslie, one of my colleagues here, and has done so for several years. Leslie has been a mentor to me since I started working in this city. She is well liked and well connected in our field, while I’m …

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. A reader writes: Last summer, an old mentor from my past company — who led a couple projects I was on but was not my direct manager — took a new VP role and sent for me. I had applied for a role on her team at our former org and didn’t get it, but was able to create a similar opportunity for me at her new org. I’m absolutely grateful. The tricky thing is I’m actually not happy here. This company is not my jam overall and I only somewhat give a shit because of my mentor and now boss. But as you’ve written about before, going from a friend (albeit a senior friend) to a manager had unexpected growing pa…

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go… 1. Can I suggest that my employee rethink her career path? One of my direct reports, “Mindy,” has worked for my organization since college; she’s now 31. I joined the staff three years ago and enjoy her a lot as a person: she’s smart, has a wonderful attitude, is very diligent and organized, and brings her best to every project. The problem is that I don’t think she’s on the right career path. Right now Mindy does communications work. but the issue is that she’s not a very good writer, which is a fundamental skill for the job. We do a lot of writing a…

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. A reader writes: I work at a barbershop that’s under the booth rent model, so I’m a sole proprietor. How do I professionally tell people to stop coming in sick/bringing in their sick kids? Should I display a sign at my station as well? I don’t understand how a haircut is so important when you’re sick. Not only do I hate how being sick feels, I live with my 86-year-old grandfather and it’s not in my agenda to get him sick. It’s also very inconvenient and puts my job at risk because of having to reschedule clients. I had a parent bring their super sick kid in on Christmas Eve. He sat in the front the …

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. Can I use a wedding photo — with a veil — as my work avatar? My company is fully remote, so they really encourage us to upload a headshot to our company chat service so people can put a face to the name. Would it look out of touch or immature to use a photo from my wedding? It’s probably the best I’ll ever look in any photo because of the professional hair and makeup and because it was taken by a professional photographer. But because of the veil, it’s very obviously a wedding photo. (I’d choose a shot without my husband in it.) I think some of my…

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. I’m off for the holiday, so here’s an older post from the archives. This was originally published in 2019. A reader writes: I have a dark sense of humor. I now realize that my boss does not. During a standard “how was your day off” conversation between my supervisor, manager, and a few peers, my manager mentioned that he was a chaperone for one of his kid’s field trips to Gatorland. Naturally, I asked if any of the kids on the trip got eaten by an alligator. When the response was no, I followed up with a “darn, you should get a refund” joke that everyone laughed at and then the conversation and the m…

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. A reader writes: For some reason — largely due to how bad the job market currently is for replaceable lifelong individual contributors — I’ve been following one of those quasi-influencer recruiter types on LinkedIn for a little while. Some of his advice is decent, and at the very least he pokes fun of all the problems with job-seeking in 2025. But this appeared on my LinkedIn feed just now: “Your job title matters. If your company gave you an internal title that no one understands, tweak it to something more industry-standard. Just keep it accurate…don’t inflate it. Your resume should be clear to an …

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. A reader writes: Recently, my company hired someone who was extremely racist. He worked with me on his first day, where he dropped an awful racial slur six times. I was shocked so did a little social media sleuthing and found his horrifying Twitter page full of xenophobic and racist tweets and posts. We fired him. However, after speaking to a friend who is in HR, she said we couldn’t simply fire him for being racist. Now, obviously our lawyer and HR rep disagreed with that because he was fired. But what say you? Are racist posts and hate speech enough to fire someone? She seems to think we should hav…

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. Canceling a women’s group because of DEI concerns I’m a PhD student and it seems like my university is trying to cancel the Women in Computer Science networking group that I run. They’re going about it in a really weird way: rather than directly saying “this is illegal D.E.I.,” they’re trying to send us on a bureaucratic runaround to maintain the status quo of funding and booking rooms. We’re in New England, so I suspect it would be locally unpopular to bluntly state that they’re cancelling women’s groups due to D.E.I. How do I fight this? Just dela…

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go… 1. CEO shared family trip photos after announcing budget cuts We just had a company-wide town hall, and the CEO — whom I’ve always known to be even-tempered and generally reasonable — kicked things off by sharing a recap and photos of his recent Disney World trip with 20 family members. This comes shortly after we were told about budget cuts, no bonuses, and rising health insurance costs that are eating into our modest merit increases. Needless to say, vacations aren’t exactly top of mind for most of us right now. Was this tone-deaf? Or am I overreacti…

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. At a time when many Americans are struggling with rising costs of living, too many corporate executives are making it clear that they have no idea what life is like for their employees. We regularly hear accounts at AAM of out-of-touch executives who have alienated large portions of their workforce – often via clueless displays of wealth at the exact same time that they’re laying off employees, increasing health insurance costs, or otherwise squeezing their workers. At Slate today, I share some shocking examples of this, and talk about how it hurts both employers and employees. You can read it here. …

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. Coworker asks someone to get him food from the cafeteria every day I work as a consultant for a company and have an older male colleague (in his late 40s) who has mobility issues due to his weight. He sits almost all day and arrives very early before anyone else arrives. He cannot walk more than a few feet without pain and asks me (or another colleague) to grab meals for him at the cafeteria almost daily. He gives people money for his food, which is always junk food, and is very apologetic and appreciative. Most people, including myself, bring pack…

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. My coworker doesn’t want to report our boss for harassment Recently a coworker shared information with me about some pretty egregious sexual comments our mutual boss made. My personal feeling is that she needs to share this with HR and/or our company leadership team (we are a small startup with less than 50 employees, going to leadership would be fine). She has said she’ll consider it but she just needed to tell someone. Then she asked that I tell no one. I want to tell our HR anyway because there should be an investigation and/or consequences. Wha…

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. Coworker keeps giving me praise I don’t deserve When I got my current job a year ago, I filled a specific niche that they really needed. For the first few months, I was making a ton of new content for the organization, and making edits to existing content. Some of this was honestly low-effort, but because no one knew anything about my field, I was getting high praise for just about anything. Then after those months, requests for new content trickled down and I only had to make edits every once in a blue moon, so I shifted to doing more administrati…

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. My coworker is making our friend break-up really weird I have a coworker who I was friends with outside of work for about a year. Due to various issues inside and outside of work (complaining about coworkers over Teams, asking the same basic questions over and over, not doing any bare-minimum problem-solving before asking for help, expecting a lot of emotional support while not providing it back, and just a lot of emotional immaturity), I ended our friendship last July with no possibility of being friends again. We’re in the same department and have…

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. My coworker keeps a wall of embarrassing photos of former coworkers I started a new job at a start-up a few months ago and one of my coworkers, who I work closely with, has a wall next to his desk where he has pinned up half a dozen enlarged photos of everyone who has left the company recently. He finds an old school photo, or them in a costume, or with braces, whatever he thinks is funny. As soon as someone puts in their two weeks, their photo goes up on the wall. He recently got told by HR to take the photos down after someone complained. Everyon…

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. My coworker masturbates in the men’s bathroom There is a guy in my office who will go into one of the stalls in the men’s bathroom for 20-30 minutes at a time. I have had the bad luck of entering a stall next to him and hearing audible masturbation noises. I think he does this every day we work in-office because I swear it’s happened 5-6 times. A coworker I’m close with has confirmed hearing it as well, so I know I am not going crazy. I have also seen this guy come out of the bathroom with headphones on, looking at something on his phone, so after r…

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. A reader writes: My office is next to a person who swears a lot during the work day. I assume it’s frustration with his computer, but a least a couple times an hour I’ll hear an onslaught of expletives coming from his desk. It’s pretty disconcerting to hear and it’s also really distracting. Otherwise, he’s a great person to work with but I’m not sure how to approach this. What should I do? I answer this question — and two others — over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can re…

This post was written by Alison Green and published on 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 ey…

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. People are bouncing on yoga balls during Zoom calls I’m at an all-remote company. Zooms are our go-to. In the Zooms I organize, I prefer videos off and most people know that. (So I don’t have to do my hair or get distracted, and it just drains me so much!) Obviously I make exceptions where called for. But I’m at the mercy of others when I join their meetings, and a lot of them have videos on as a default. And a few of my coworkers have recently started bouncing on yoga balls and walking on walking pads throughout their meetings. This makes me feel …

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. A reader writes: This letter involves a very sensitive topic and some backstory, so bear with me. Would you consider it weird if a coworker brought along an unrelated college-aged girl to a work party where you could invite family? I ask because I was​ that college girl. When I was 19, I was a sexually frustrated lesbian with then-undiagnosed autism. Despite being at an LGBT-friendly university, I had no sex life and didn’t know how to approach women without coming across as some sort of creep. Every LGBT-related extracurricular I was in was centered on networking, political activism, or community, …

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. A reader writes: This is not a current issue, but it’s something that has been eating at me for a long time. I’m trying to figure out if I unwittingly helped someone embezzle money. I believe the statute of limitations has passed for this (potential) crime in the state that it took place in. It has been 15+ years now. My mother has always been a little shady with business her practices. I do not believe she has any qualms about “bending” the law. She is also very charismatic and I suspect would be quite an effective cult leader (i.e., good at talking people into things, frequently nefarious). I’m onl…

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. A reader writes: This is not a current issue, but it’s something that has been eating at me for a long time. I’m trying to figure out if I unwittingly helped someone embezzle money. I believe the statute of limitations has passed for this (potential) crime in the state that it took place in. It has been 15+ years now. My mother has always been a little shady with business her practices. I do not believe she has any qualms about “bending” the law. She is also very charismatic and I suspect would be quite an effective cult leader (i.e., good at talking people into things, frequently nefarious). I’m onl…

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. A reader writes: This isn’t for my job, but it’s for a nonprofit organization related to my career that involves some level of professionalism. I’m afraid that I scared off a new member by coming on too strong to her. I volunteer at a STEM-related organization that mentors children. My position is at the state level, and a new person just joined at the group level. I met her for the first time at a regular group meeting. I’ll admit, I’m really attracted to her, but I still wanted to get to know her regardless of whether or not she’s interested. She’s the only other woman I know who’s in my field wit…

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. A reader writes: I just received an email from my company’s corporate marketing team inviting me to speak on an internal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) panel about my experiences being a woman in a male-dominated industry during the national Women in (Industry) week this spring. I know exactly why they asked me – I am the only woman in my company in my position! Let’s say I work in the auto industry (not what I actually do, but my industry is just as male-dominated). My company has a lot of women in sales, accounts, management, etc. but I am the only female mechanic out of probably 300 mechani…