my employee keeps insisting he looks much younger than he is (but he doesn’t)

A reader writes:

In February, I changed companies and took on a manager position for the first time as the current manager was being promoted. While the exiting manager introduced me to the different people I would be supervising I was taken aback when “Benjamin” immediately assured me that despite looking like he was 21 or 22, he had worked there for years. If you had asked me to guess his age, I would have said 41 or 42. In the moment I was stunned, not sure if it was a joke, and just said I looked forward to working with him.

Later the exiting manager told me that he’s been doing that for years. The first time at a lunch meeting with a potential client, Benjamin made a big deal of having his ID ready and despite the best efforts of the others would not let the conversation move on until he had thoroughly discussed how often he gets carded and how no one believes his actual age. During a presentation, he started by talking about how he was qualified despite his youthful appearance while everyone waited uncomfortably for him to finish and begin the actual presentation. The exiting manager claimed he talked with Benjamin several times, but Benjamin insisted it was necessary to inform people of his true age because everyone would assume he was younger and not treat him as an equal. Finally Benjamin threatened to complain to HR, who in turn told the manager to leave it alone. The manager said Ben’s usual work is good, so he just kept him away from in-person and Zoom meetings with people outside the team and hoped that when Ben turns 40 this year he’ll finally drop it.

Since I officially took on the manager role, I’ve noticed Ben will try to bring up his supposed youthful looks at every opportunity. If someone went to their kid’s school, he insists that when he went to his nephew’s high school winter concert a few months ago he was mistaken for a student. If someone goes on vacation, he talks about how hard it is to get a rental car when everyone thinks he’s too young to be the person on the paperwork. You get the idea. He is good at what he does and always volunteers to help others, so I was willing to chalk this up as a harmless if annoying quirk.

Recently, however, when Ben took a long lunch for a doctor’s appointment, I was walking by the break room and overheard his colleagues making fun of him. They were talking about how he would be in tomorrow with nothing but stories about how the doctor actually claimed he was aging backwards, how the nurses couldn’t believe his birthday, etc. in a frankly mean-spirited way. And the “jokes” and impressions of him got worse from there. I chose to eavesdrop and confirmed this isn’t a one-off conversation; Ben is the office joke. From what I heard, the consensus from the older workers was that he is competent but needs therapy, while the younger ones called him “delulu” and said he is the last person they would ask for help with anything considering how “obviously detached” from reality he is.

I don’t want to have a culture of bullying, so I tried talking to a few of Ben’s colleagues privately. Their sentiments can be summed up as: we’re always nice to his face and if he stopped talking about it we would too, but his lies are so obvious and outrageous that people are going to inevitably talk.

I’m not sure what to do. Do I frankly tell him how badly him professional reputation is being damaged and hope the whole team doesn’t implode? Do I pray this is a joke that has gone on too long and telling him so will get him to drop it? Do I try to stop people from talking about him? Do I ignore it and try to maintain the current status quo? Do I wait until I am more established to do something? Do I escalate it to someone? Do I find a picture of him when he was 20 and a picture of him now and tell him, “Corporate wants you to find the difference” a la The Office?

What on earth.

This fixation would be weird even if he did look a lot younger than he is, but it’s especially bizarre since he doesn’t (and in fact, you actually originally guessed his age to be slightly older than he actually is). Is there such a thing as age dysmorphia?

If you didn’t know the history about Ben complaining to HR when the previous manager tried to address this, I’d say to definitely just talk to him. You wouldn’t need to frame it as “no one thinks you’re that young”; you could frame it as, “Talking so frequently about your age is becoming disruptive, derailing meetings, and distracting from the good work you otherwise do. None of us here are focused on age, and I expect we’ll treat everyone respectfully regardless of what age anyone guesses they are.”

In other words, it’s not your job to correct whatever age dysmorphia he has going on, but it is your job to say this has become disruptive and he needs to stop making it such a focus.

But since there’s already an HR history with it, you’d likely benefit from touching base with them first. Explain that it has affected Ben’s relationships with others and the way he’s perceived, and that you believe it’s a disservice to him not to let him know. Who knows, maybe you’ll find out that the previous manager addressed it differently and there’s more room for you to try the approach above. Or maybe HR will tell you to leave it alone.

If you’re told to leave it alone, then I tend to agree with Ben’s colleague that people are inevitably going to talk. That said, you don’t need to accept mean-spiritedness on your team and you overhear anything like that again, you should shut it down with something along the lines of, “Regardless of what he’s doing, I want us to speak respectfully about each other.” People will still talk about it — because what he’s doing is really weird, and it’s not realistic to expect his coworkers not to be bursting to reality-check it with others — but you can at least make it clear that they need to be discreet about it / you’re going to call it out if you hear it.

The post my employee keeps insisting he looks much younger than he is (but he doesn’t) appeared first on Ask a Manager.

View the full article