My Boss Uses an Offensive Slur

and welcome to the show. Today, I'm going to answer a bunch of shorter questions from people. The first question today is from someone whose boss is using a pretty offensive term. Hi, Alison, I have a tricky situation that I'm not sure how to navigate. My boss keeps using the word retard as a derogatory term. She doesn't use it to describe people, but she does use it to describe things and ideas. We don't work in the same office,

but we often travel to client side together. She did want to say it in front of my client, which is really awkward for everyone but her seemed. She's an otherwise great manager. But I'm not sure how to approach this. Some people think being offended by this word is just being too sensitive. How do I ask or tell her not to use this term tactfully without causing resentment or making things awkward? Or is this just something that I should ask her manager to handle? This is an interesting one.

I do think there is some truth to the idea that the message about how offensive that word is has not reached absolutely everyone yet, at least until recently. I think we are in something of a transition phase with the word. There are people who grew up with it being an acceptable thing to say, and I think it's taken a while for the message to reach all of them that it's not, and that it is now widely

considered a slur. I think we're at the tail end of that transition, though, But you do still run into this situation sometimes where otherwise decent people don't seem to understand that it's hurtful, or they think that the people who will find it hurtful are just a very small, overally sensitive minority, and they truly believe that it's still okay in the mainstream, even though it's not. Um it's odd.

They seem to truly not realize that many people will be shocked by it and maybe hurt by it, especially if they have a developmentally disabled friend or loved one, and we'll think less of them. And then, of course you have the people who have heard the message know that it's considered a slur and just don't really care.

I think the best approach with your boss is to approach her as if you're assuming that the message just hasn't reached her yet, and that you're sure she wouldn't want to inadvertently cas offense or hurt anyone around her, even if you suspect she has heard the message plenty. I think the conversation will be more effective if you approach it from more of a place of giving her the benefit of the doubt. Doesn't mean you have to give her the benefit of the doubt in your head.

It just means that you want your tone to sound that way. So you could say something like, Jane, can I ask you to stop using the word retarded. It's actually a hurtful word to a lot of people, and I know you wouldn't want to has pain to anyone. If she pushes back on that, if she tells you that it's no big deal or that she doesn't mean

anything by it. Then you could say, you know, I'm sure that you don't mean to be hurtful, but it really is widely considered a slur these days, and it can especially be hurtful if you can say it in front of someone who has a developmentally disabled family member, which a lot of people do. Now that assumes, of course,

that you have a pretty decent relationship with her. Frankly, even if you don't, I still might say it anyway, because it is a reasonable thing to point out, especially now that she's saying in front of clients, but especially if you do have a pretty good relationship with her, and I'm betting that you do, since you said that she's a great boss. This shouldn't make things horribly awkward. I mean, she might feel a little bit embarrassed, but

there's no way around that. We all feel embarrassed when we get corrected on this kind of thing, but we learned from it. As long as you keep your tone warm and you make a point of being warm with

her afterwards, I think it should go okay. And actually, before we move on, I want to say something more about what I just said about making a point of being warm with her after the conversation because this is a good tactic for whenever you have to have a slightly awkward conversation with someone and you're worried about things

being tense or feeling weird. As soon as possible after you have the potentially tense conversation, find an opening to have a more normal, better feeling conversation with them, because by being warm and being normal, you can help them return to feeling normal more quickly too. It sort of resets things between you. But if you let things go too long without talking after the awkward conversation, then things

can really start to feel weird. So as soon as you can just reset things with a different interaction so that their most recent interaction with you is one that felt good or at least normal, rather than one that felt weird. Okay, let's do the next letter. Hi, Allison, I started a job search about a month ago and I'm still actively interviewing with about four companies that are

all in the same industry. Most of the companies that I'm speaking with are progressing at a pretty normal pace, so I'm close to wrapping up my interviews, but I'm not quite there. However, one of them has moved really quick, and I think they're pretty close to giving me an offer. I'm insitant to accept and stop my job search because I'm more excited about a couple of the other companies

that I'm interviewing with. But I don't want to accept now and decline later, especially since my industry is pretty small. I would definitely burn a bridge. I've asked the other companies to speed it up, but it might be a few weeks before another offer comes in. I know that we always say that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but do you think that advice supplies here? Any help you can offer would be

much appreciated. I get so many questions about versions of this because no one knows how to handle it, because there really isn't a perfect solution that will guarantee that the timing will work out. Some is the timing, it's just not in your favor. But there are some things that you can do, and it sounds like you have done the first thing that I would recommend, which is to contact the companies that you're interviewing with that you're

more interested in and explain the situation. Ideally, when you do that, you say something like I'm really interested in working with you, but I'm likely to be receiving another offer very soon. I will probably need to give them an answer with you know, X amount of time within a week or whatever you think it's going to be. I don't know if there is a way for you to work within that timeline, but you would definitely be

my first choice. And then if the company is very interested in you, in a lot of cases, they will expedite their timeline so that they don't lose you. Not every company will do that. Some have really rigid hiring practices or timelines that they won't deviate from, or maybe they would like to be flexible, but the scheduling on their side just won't line up. And of course, if they would be just as happy going with one of the other candidates who they have in the mix, they're

probably not going to speed things up for you. But if you've gotten the sense that they like you and they consider you a really starting Canada, it's worth asking. It sounds like you've done that part, so that leaves you with trying to figure out if there's anything that you can do about the first company's timeline, the one that you think is about to make you the offer.

Sometimes you can build in a bit of delay by asking time to look over the benefits package or having questions about the offer, and you can always ask for some time to think it over. But generally speaking, in most cases they're only likely to give you about a week.

There's some industries that are exceptions to that. There are some industries where it's really normal for people to take weeks, but for most fields, probably they only want to give you up to about a week because they want to get their new higher in and also they have other candidates who are waiting to hear back from them, and if you're not going to take the job, they want

to move on and offer it to someone else. Plus, if you ask for more than a week to think it over, in a lot of cases they start questioning if you're really interested. But that said, once you do have the official offer, you could go back to your top choice and update them. At that point, you could say something like, hey, I wanted to let you know that I did receive another offer. I need to give

them a decision within a week. You're still my first choice, so if it's possible for us to work within that timeline, I'd be thrilled, although I understand that might not be possible. The type of response that you get back if you do that should give you some amount of insight into your chances with them. If they don't reply at all, or if you get a kind of formulaic sorry, I can't do it, that might be a sign, but they're not super invested in you as a candidate, and that's

good to know. Ultimately, though, the crappy truth of it is that the timing might just not work out, and you might have to decide if you want the first offer regardless of what happens with the other companies, and you have to decide are you willing to risk being left with no offers if you turn this one down

and the other ones don't come through. That's a really hard calculation to make, and it's going to depend on things like your sense of how many options that you have and how easy you think it will be to get another offer from a totally different company. There's no easy answer here, but definitely because it's a small industry and people know each other. The thing I would not do is except the first offer and then back out

if something else comes through later. That will burn a bridge and in a small field where you're likely to run into people down the road. You don't want to be applying for a job that you want in five years and find out the hiring manager for that job is the person whose job offer you reneged on this time. So if you do accept it, I think it's got to be with the intention of really taking it and

withdrawing from the other companies, which sucks. I know. We'll take a short break here and then come back with more questions. Here is our next question. Hi, Alson, I just received a voicemail for an employer checking references for an employee at my previous job. I was not this person's direct manager, but I did have daily oversight on her work. She didn't get along with our manager, and I was probably due to a personality mismatch on both sides.

This employee was a quick learner, great with customers, and did good work, although there were definitely some attitude issues. I did have some mild concerns, but I do feel a lot of it was due to immaturity and this being her first job. I would have been happy to have given her a positive reference. Then she quite without notice. I think she was trying to send a message to her manager, but all she did was put the rest

of the team in a bind. A few months later, I left for another job, but I do still keep in touch with our manager, who was fantastic. I found out through her that our former employee also quit her new job without notice. I have not been in contact with her, and I didn't expect to be asked for a reference. If she had reached out to me, I would have told her I wouldn't be able to provide one.

I'm planning and just ignoring the reference checker. She's young, and I feel horrible if my reference cost her a job. Then again, she's now quit two jobs without notice. What would you recommend? This is an annoying situation to be in. You want to cut someone a break, which is great, but then they make it really hard for you to do that. It is definitely kind of you that you were willing to give her a positive reference despite having

maybe mild concerns. You're definitely right that when it's someone's first job, there can just be some immaturity due to that, and it doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be carrying those traits with them. Forever. But once she left without notice and put your team in a bind, that does kind of burn the bridge and make it hard to give her a good reference. And then when you heard that she did it a second time, that's not someone who you want to use your own professional reputation

to vouch for. It's annoying that she listed you as a reference without talking with you to make sure that you were willing to give her a good one. I will say sometimes when people get reference calls and they get annoyed that the person didn't give them a heads up first, I will tell them, hey, don't assume that that's what happened, because the person didn't necessarily list you as a reference. Some reference checkers will just call your last few jobs, regardless of whether you put them on

an official reference list or not. But in this case, because you were not her direct man her, and especially because you're no longer at that job anymore, and so they must have reached you through your personal contact information, it does seem like she must have listed you rather

than them just calling up past employers. And it's not great that she listed you without bothering to verify with you that you would give a good reference, especially because she knows that she left that job without notice and that you would know that. So it's a weird assumption on her part, and I suspect it does go to youth and inexperience anyway, when you are not able to give someone a good reference but you kind of want to give them a break, one way to handle that

is to just not return the reference call. Your silence sends a message of its own, and even if that message is not picked up on, at least it gets you off the list of people being asked to vouch

for her work. So I think it's fine that you chose to handle it that way, But what I would recommend is contacting her and letting her know that you're not able to be a reference for her, both so that she stops listing you and so that she gets a sort of reality check on her understanding of how you view what happened, because it sounds like right now she might be thinking that you're fine with how she handled things, and so it'll be helpful to let her

know that that's not really the case. So you could say something like, hey, I received a voicemail from someone who was looking for a reference for you. I don't think I'm a well positioned to be a reference for you, and I wanted to let you know so that you don't include me on future reference lists. And if you want, you could explain that it is because of how she left the job, but you don't need to get into

that if you don't want to. Whether or not to get into it, I think depends on your sense of how she would take it. If she is someone who handles feedback really well and isn't going to argue with you, it would be a kindness to explain it to her. But if you think she'll be argumentative or even a jerk about it, and then you could just stick with hey, letting you know that I can't do this. I hope

you're doing well now. All of that said, I do think that there can be an argument for giving an honest reference if that's something that you would be comfortable with.

I totally get that you don't want to be the reason she's rejected for a job, but if you are the employer about to hire her, you probably would want to know these details about her work history so that you could make an informed decision and maybe decide that you were going to choose a candidate who really wants the job and hasn't left her last two positions with

no notice. I know that can seem harsh, especially to people who don't do a lot of hiring, but I will say that from the hiring side of things, I'm always so grateful for references who will speak candidly. And that doesn't mean that you would get on the phone and slam her. It means that you would give a full, nuanced reference talking about her good points but also the parts that did not go so well. But you definitely don't have to do that. Either. One of these approaches

is reasonable to take. Okay, next letter, Hi Allison. I'm a mid level manager in a male dominated industry in Sydney, Australia. After six months of being manager less, I'm finally getting a boss. When I interviewed from my role a year ago, I was very forward about my expectations in are to my work life balance. I need to work from home when I feel like it. I'm not getting until nine am,

and I prefer transparency. In my annual review with my old boss, who is still with the company, I was told that I'm an excellent performer with an innovation and that I work incredibly hard. I've got four weeks to figure out how to approach my new manager and lay down the law about the way I work, that I don't want to be micromanaged, and that my work life balance is very important to me. It's been in a respectful way. Can you help me? Okay? So this is

an interesting one. It can be really tricky when you negotiate certain things with the boss as conditions of your taking the job, and then they leave and a new manager comes in and they haven't necessarily agreed to those things and might not be as amenable to them as the old person has. So the way that you approach it is important. You definitely don't want to approach it as laying down the law, because the reality is that she does have the ability to say, actually, i'd like

to tell something different. Of course, that happens at that point you might decide that you don't want to stay under those conditions, but ideally you want to handle it in a way where it doesn't get to that point at all. And that said, you also don't want to approach it as asking for her permission, because you're not really doing that either. It's more, this is the arrangement that I have. It's something that I negotiated when he took the job, and I want to let you know

about it. So it's kind of an f y I, but with an opening for her to speak up if it's going to be a problem for her. That's for the schedule of stuff and the working from home. The pieces about transparency and not being micromanaged are a little bit different. No one really wants to be micro managed, especially not after a certain professional level, and it's likely to come across as strangely adversarial if you just announce

that you don't want to be micro managed. And the reality is if your new manager is a micro manager, it's probably not something that you're going to be able to solve in one conversation or one declaration, So that one is something where you're more are going to need to wait and see how things play out. You could say something early on about what kind of structures you've been using with your old boss that have worked well.

For example, you could say, so what I've been doing with Jane, the previous manager, is that I run the X program pretty autonomously, but I meet with her monthly to give her updates on Y and Z, and i'd consult with her about things like A and B, and my goals for the next six months are blah blah blah, and I'm on track to meet all of those, but I'll flag it for you if it ever looks like that might not be the case. So that's sort of a declaration of here's how I work, it's working well,

here's how I'll keep you in the loop. And if your new boss does have micromanaging tendencies, potentially that can head off some of it by making it clear that you're on top of this stuff and laying out a structure for regular communication. A lot of micromanaging happens because the micromanager doesn't have good structures for those sorts of things in place, and because people don't have clear goals

and regular updates on their progress towards those goals. So if you proactively lay that stuff out, that could be really helpful. Not guaranteed, I mean, some people are just terrible micro managers no matter what, but it could help. And if she's not a micro manager, it'll still be really useful to lay that kind of thing out. I mean, I would love it if I came into a job as a new manager and sat down with someone and

they had all of that ready to go. But some of this is going to just be about waiting and seeing if you start getting pushed back on your schedule or you do start to feel micro managed. At that point, you'd sit down with her and have a conversation about it. But I wouldn't start from an aggressive posture on this.

Do the f y I stuff about your schedule and be matter of fact about it, talk about the structures that you use for communication and for keeping her in the loop, and then give it some time to see how it goes. Let's do a short break here and we'll come back with more. Okay, next letter. The Place Unemployed with the as United Way. This is my first year working here. Every employee will have money deducted from

their paycheck over the next year until next September. We have been challenged to bump it up a book and contribute more than a mandatory amount. We have to give minimum for dollars per week. At least it is automatically deducted from our pay with no exceptions. I don't want to give anything, and a pressure to give more than four dollars per week or an extra one time donation has been on. We were all told there was a

condition of working here to support the cause. What do you recommend our do to speak up about not wanting to get anything, even a mandatory donation. Thank you so much. I'm going to rant here for a minute about pressure to donate money at work because I get so many letters from people whose employers put inappropriate pressure on them to donate money. And to be clear, charity is great.

I believe everyone should donate to charity, but that is a private individual decision, and it's not appropriate for your lawyer to pressure you to donate through them. It's one thing to make the opportunity available to people to participate in a workplace giving program. That's great, but this kind of pressure from employers is bs. First of all, not

everyone wants to donate through the United Way. Some people have legitimate concerns with their operating practices, or they prefer to donate directly to the charity of their choice without sending it through United Way. Other people prefer to keep their charitable giving private, which is very much their right to do. And sometimes people have already allocated their charitable budget for the year, don't have the money for more

and shouldn't be forced to defend that. And in the scholar's case, the employer is saying that donating is mandatory, which is just ridiculous. You're at work to earn money, not to have it forcibly taken back from you. That said, your employer is legally allowed to do this as long as the mandatory detection does not take your pay below minimum wage. So the question for you is what to

do about it. If you do really want to push back on it, you could try saying, unfortunately, my budget doesn't allow for this, and it's really not possible for me to contribute. I'm sorry about that, but how do I correct that with payroll so that it's not being automatically deducted from my check. You might get a lot of pushback on that, in part because a lot of companies that do United Way have pressure to get on participation.

If that happens, you could try to compromise. You could say, I'm really not able to afford a regular, ongoing donation, but so that I'm able to participate, I could make a small one time donation at the end of the year. And if you do that, the donation can truly be small, like five or ten dollars. That said, context matters here. If you are in a very well paying job, it's going to come across strangely if you say that you

can't afford four dollars of paycheck. We can argue about whether or not it should, and certainly even people who earn a lot of money can have very high expenses and debt and so forth. But the reality is, in the world that we live in, if you are well paid, you're going to come across oddly if you tell them that you can't afford four dollars. So if that is the case, the better move for you in the long run maybe to suck it up and consider this part

of the price that you pay to work there. Um, I hate giving that advice, but I think it is is very much the reality of the situation. You might look at it as a business expense, like having to buy a suit or a briefcase. It's annoying, it's wrong in principle, but it might be that it's better for your career to do it. The other thing is that at some point it might make sense to consider getting a group of co workers to all push back on

this as a group. Whether or not to do that depends on what kind of standing you have in your company. If you're pretty junior or pretty new, or you just don't have a lot of political capital to spend, this might not be a battle that makes sense for you

to take on. But if you are senior and you do have some capital to spend, you have the option of addressing this from a more big picturing, getting some colleagues together to all push back as a group and say, hey, we're happy to have the company organizing charitable initiatives, but we really object to making it mandatory, and we're asking you to reconsider the amount of pressure that you're putting

on people to participate. But again, that depends on how much standing you have and how much capital you have to burn. It's not going to always make sense for you to be the one who's fighting that battle. And really, companies that truly want to organize something for charity should foot the bill themselves, not stick their employees with it. This is a way of seeming to do something for charity while quite literally taking the money from their employees

to fund it. I know it's really common, but I am not a fan. That is our show for today. If you would like to hear your question answered on a future episode, you can record it on the show voicemail by calling eight five five or two six work That is eighty five nine six seven five, Or if you have a longer question and you want to actually come on the show and talk with me, email it to you podcast at ask a manager dot org. That's it for today and I will be back next time with more questions. M