high school career counseling is using ChatGPT, giving 360 feedback to a clueless coworker, and more

[ResidentialBusiness]

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. How do I give 360 feedback to my clueless coworker?

I have been asked to complete a 360 review for the junior staffer on my team. In general, I would like to only be positive in these, as that’s what I want in return! And I have never expressed these feelings to this coworker.

But he is like a little baby in the outfit of a 26-year-old man. He doesn’t have the general sense at work you’d like someone four years into their career to have — as an example, he scheduled our boss to meet with board members, assigning them a meeting time without asking them for input on their schedules. The problem is just basically that all the time — he is not supposed to be so entry-level but his work problem-solving skills are like me at 20, in my first internship. He’ll also do things like answer questions in a group setting that were clearly directed to someone with authority/experience,

What is a nice way to put this? I’d love to just say “Bob is eager and kind, but could really benefit from more training in X” but I don’t know what X is, because it’s not project management or tone or anything, it’s just having a clue.

The complicating factor here is that I am only one year older than him and not a supervisor, though my role is more senior, and my tenure with the organization is longer. But I am worried about overstepping by correcting his behavior in the moment. And I’m worried I may have bitch-eating-crackers syndrome with him, because I’m annoyed that he constantly says “Thank you” instead of “sorry” as we’re all taught to do — but sometimes, his incompetence has resulted in hours of extra work for me and he thanks me “for my leadership”! It probably doesn’t help that when I held his role, I was paid two-thirds of what he earns now.

What should I say in the review? Is there a succinct, kind way to describe the problem?

“Bob is eager to lean and kind, but could benefit from more coaching in problem-solving and political awareness (for example, checking board members’ schedules rather than simply assigning them a meeting time, or recognizing when questions in a group are being directed to someone with more authority or experience).”

That said, is there more to it than just problem-solving and political awareness? If his incompetence is causing hours of extra work for you, that sounds like there might be an issue with basic skills as well — so whatever that issue is, make sure you name it and provide a couple of examples to illustrate it too.

If you’re uncomfortable putting this in writing, another option is to talk to Bob’s boss and say, “Here are the things I’d like to give feedback on. I’m not sure how to put this in writing without being more blunt than I’m comfortable with since I don’t have any supervisory authority over him, so I hoped to get your advice on how to frame it / wondered whether I could share the feedback with you informally as areas for you to watch / wondered whether you could synthesize this into the overall feedback you share with him.”

2. High school career counseling is using ChatGPT

My high school student received an email from an employee of the school district advertising “ChatGPT Interview Prep” and “NLP for Interview Confidence,” supposedly teaching them how to craft strong interview answers from ChatGPT.

I’m surprised by this. I do think kids should learn interview prep, but maybe not this way. When I interview people, we can tell if they are only good at giving pre-planned answers that don’t go in depth; typically when we debrief, we’ve all noted they had the right answers but lacked depth/examples, didn’t get deeper on a line of questioning…

My high school kid also had to create a LinkedIn profile (not sure what why) and it is clear she used ChatGPT. I feel like it’s a lot of the same buzz words on LinkedIn, but using the words “reinforcing client relationship” in a job description for babysitter is funny.

What are your thoughts on a high school “career office” offering an interview prep workshop that teaches kids how to use ChatGPT to craft answers? Would you ask the school about this or weigh in with your professional opinion as a person who interviews job candidates? Should I be concerned about my district’s standards?

I assumed ChatGPT would be crap at interview prep, but to test that out I asked it to generate likely interview questions for a couple of jobs, and it actually did a decent job both of suggesting questions you might receive for those positions and of describing the sorts of things you should build your answers around. It would be terrible at suggesting actual answers (since those need to be based on your own experiences and expertise) but it was pretty good at explaining the types of things your answers should cover. So, depending on how the school is using it, it’s not the worst idea in the world, as long as they’re stressing that sometimes it ends up being wildly off-base.

However, the LinkedIn thing — no. I’m skeptical that most high school kids need LinkedIn profiles at all, and anything that results in describing babysitting as “reinforcing client relationships” is teaching them the absolute wrong lessons. And that’s of course part of the problem with ChatGPT; the person using it needs to have enough expertise to know if what it’s suggesting is good or not. A high school student won’t know what a good LInkedIn profile looks like, so might not spot it when ChatGPT suggests something insane.

Frankly, I’m not a huge fan of high schools teaching “interview prep” at all; they’re often bad at it, or the lessons center around the types of interviews kids aren’t likely to have until years down the road. But you’d need to know more about exactly what they’re doing to know if there’s something complaint-worthy here or not.

3. My boss keeps giving me conflicting instructions

My job involves compiling information into a short, standardized document. My manager reviews every document I turn in and frequently gives me feedback that contradicts previous feedback he has given me. For example, today he told me “when you describe Regulation 1, always include parts A, B, C, and D,” when in the past he has said “only include the part of Regulation 1 that pertains to this document, Part A.” The circumstances are exactly the same for the two cases, and this happens constantly. My instinct is that constantly redoing things to different standards is just part of my job and I should say nothing. Am I right?

With a decent boss, the right thing would be to say, “I want to make sure I’m handling these correctly. When I turned in the X document, you’d said I should only include the relevant part of Regulation 1, which was Part A. How do I know when I should include A, B, C, and D even if only one part is relevant, and when I should only include the relevant part?” It’s possible there’s some piece to this that would make it make sense — like that the first document had a different audience than the second, or some other reason that you’re not currently spotting — and so he’ll be able to give you helpful guidance on spotting that yourself in the future. Or maybe he just changes his mind every other day, who knows. But a reasonable boss would want you to ask.

If he’s a terrible boss — if he’s a tyrant whose whims of the day determine what’s correct more than reality does, or someone who reacts poorly to having it pointed out that he’s giving you conflicting instructions — that would change things. But otherwise, start by assuming you should ask.

4. I’ve been getting all my colleague’s meeting invites … for 10 years

I’m hoping you can help me on something that has been plaguing me for years. When I started at this large company, I was an admin assistant and my duties included managing the calendar of our director, so he added me as a delegate to his calendar in Outlook. Eventually I got another job at the same company, but I continued to receive all of his meeting requests. I reached out to IT many times and to the director, who always shrugged and said he’d ask IT.

No one ever resolved this, so I made an Outlook rule and sent all the meeting invites to a folder that I would occasionally mass delete. Over the years, twice I have tried to reach out to IT (but I was in a different department at this point) saying, “Hey, this started happening again.” They’d respond to say they would look into it and I’d check back but they hadn’t spoken to the director, and eventually they just stopped responding. I’ve just lived with this, thinking the director will retire long before I do.

Now there has been some reorganization and the director is in my department! I’ve also grown in my career a bit, and my circle and his has more overlap than before. This is a regular reminder that I have a folder of his meeting invites, and I’m starting to feel weird about it. Do I try to reach out to our joint IT person about it and pester it until it’s fixed? I’m worried that I’ll get in trouble for having had access to these invites for so long, but I truly don’t pour over the details or have any context for any of it. I was just an entry-level employee and it was an annoyance that I lived with, but now I’ve been here almost a decade and it’s starting to gnaw at me that I could get in trouble for this. What should I do?

You’re not likely to get in trouble for it; you asked them to fix it many times! But yes, reach out to IT now and say, “This is still happening, I really do need it fixed, how do we make that happen?” This time, follow up every few weeks until it’s dealt with. It’s ridiculous that it’s still happening.

5. Should federal workers state the obvious when writing cover letters?

Should federal employees applying for jobs in the private sector mention that they’re applying due to the decimation of government jobs, or would that be gauche?

I’m finding myself applying to jobs at a company I worked at for years and years that I had just left recently for the stability of a fed role. Clearly that did not work out! Should I address that elephant in the room in my cover letters, or assume the hiring manager can figure it out and just write a normal letter?

Just write a normal letter. They know what’s going on, and if for some reason they don’t and are curious about why you’re leaving, they’ll ask.

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