My Team is Overworked - and I'm the Boss

at the company party. Let's get started. I hear from a lot of people who feel overworked, that they're expected to work unreasonable hours and their workload is just unmanageable. Today's guest is approaching this issue from the other side. She's a manager whose team seems to be working too much, and she's wondering how she can help them get it under control and work fewer hours. Hi, and welcome to

the show. Hi, thanks for having me. So you wrote to me and you said you're a somewhat new manager at a nonprofit and you've found that the dominant culture on your team is why where people work all the time. Despite your attempts to help people manage their workloads, you're seeing people routinely working during vacations even when someone else has been assigned to take care of their email for them, and you see other people just never taking any time

off at all. Is that basically the situation. That's pretty much it. And you mentioned that you're new to the job. When did you come on board? So now I've been here a year, I still feel new. Is the strange part. I think because my team as a team predates me, and our colleagues who work at our work site abroad all predate me by many years. And so I still I think feel like I've walked into a situation that

exists outside of my control. That makes perfect sense, Okay, And in your email to me, you wrote, I'd like to help change the culture, but I can't figure out if I'm being ineffective, if I'm battling personalities that overwork feeds like workaholics, people pleaser and over committers, if they really are too overwork to define balance, or if I am somehow creating an environment that reinforces the tendency to overwork while paying lip service to wanting balance. I will

add one more possibility to that list. It could be that the broader culture of your organization puts pressure on people to work crazy hours, or that the last manager on this team before you came in did, and so people don't really believe that they can and should shift gears. I think that's a big problem. Tell me a little bit about the broader culture of the organization beyond just your team. Are you seeing that kind of behavior on

other teams as well? I am. So we're the only team in this country and everyone else is six hours ahead of us. Um, we're a small group, and the people abroad are a very big group, and they work all the time. They work at our work site with our clients, so and some of them live there, so they don't have a break. Um. I mean they get time off, but in the regular twenty for our cycle,

they're working or in that space all the time. The other thing that I think we see is that because we're all very mission driven people and our mission feels urgent, there is this sense that if you can do something, you will do something because you care about the mission and you want to better the lives of our clients as much as you can. Um. In addition, I think the broader culture is also impacted by the time difference that because so many of our working hours don't overlap.

There is kind of an impulse to want to be available when your colleagues are, so I think the thing that you're identifying about mission driven nonprofits is probably a huge part of this. I spent my whole career in nonprofits,

and I know exactly what you're talking about. When you feel like you're doing very important, crucial, urgent work, it's hard to say, well, it's five o'clock, I'm going to stop working for today When you know that if you did put in more work, you could have a real impact on people's lives or on an issue that you care deeply about. It it's hard to work with other people would consider regular hours in that context, and especially I mean nonprofits fall prey to this all the time.

It can very quickly become that that is the culture there, and people can start to feel like if they don't work those sorts of hours that they either are less committed or that look less committed, and they'll be judged for it. Whether or not they really would be judged for it. I mean, in many organizations they would be, but but I think there are also ones where they

wouldn't be. But it's hard to know which one you're in. Yes, I agree with you, And I think that that's also the it's it becomes a way of of proving it to yourself, you know. And I think that's part of it, to the thing that we tell our yourselves about working in a nonprofit and being paid less. Because you work in a nonprofit, you make up for it and meaning, and so you want that meaning to be as big as it can be, you know. It drives itself somehow

that way too. Yeah, And it really I think working on an important issue day in and day out can take over your life in some ways. Like it's really I don't know. I always found especially when I was working like I used to work for an animal protection charity where we were dealing with animal suffering and animal abuse, and that gets into your head and it stays there

all the time. And it's that's a thing that it's hard to not think, I don't know, it's hard to get the balance right and and feel like you're fulfilling your moral obligations, even though if you had a regular job, you wouldn't question if you were fulfilling your moral obligations by going to work at a bank and then coming home at six o'clock. Yes, yeah, I think it's really

it's difficult. You know, you get so much meaning from it, you get so much worth, um, and then you always know you can see the gaps, or you can see if I had done this better, we would have gotten this money, If I had done this better, the clients would have felt this. And those are those are tangible and they can haunt you in a way, and I

think that drives it. Yes, absolutely well. Let me ask you this, do you have a sense from your own boss and from management of the organization above you in general? Is there room if you were able to get through to your team members and actually succeed in getting them to work more reasonable hours. Is there room for that for the organization to be okay with it, or is your sense that maybe that would make waves. That's a great question. Um. I think for some of my staff

there could be room for that, you know. UM. I mentioned my letter that we recently grew our team and part of the reason we did that is that we had work that needed to be done, new work. And I said to my board essentially that our existing sort of person who gets everything dumped on them couldn't get anything else dumped on them and that if we were going to take on this project, we needed to hire for it. And they heard me and they hired for it, and so I was able to make space and get

the organization to make space in that way. But I mean, I do think there are limits to that. Um. And you know, in sort of a dated day way, do I think that our colleagues overseas are going to stop having needs at five AMR time? No, Like, that's just the nature of the beast. Um. And I don't know if I could convince my staff that it's okay not to wake up at six am to check your phone

when you don't need to be getting up until seven. Yeah. Well, the fact that they did respond with more staffing is a really good sign, because a lot of organizations wouldn't have So that's good. That indicates there's some degree of reasonable airness at least. But I'm sure you're right that there are limits to that. I mean, just that's like the financial reality for most organizations that there will be

limits to that. UM. Let me ask you this. I mean, you're talking about people needing things at five am here time? Do they? I mean, is it urgent that they get a response, then what what would happen if they didn't? So this is something I think about a lot um. So sometimes they do need a response then, and sometimes they're writing it because they have the moment in their work day to write it. And we have to be

able to triage right. We have to be able to say this is urgent and you need me to do this now, or I know something is urgent is going on, I'm going to make sure I check my phone at thirty before I go to bed, or wake up early to check my phone because of this specific time sensitive need. But most of the time it's not those things. And

I think recognizing that is is really important. And I also kind of want to encourage a little bit of self reliance on the part of some of my colleagues overseas um that we don't always have the answer here, and if it's the middle of the night, unless it's a truly urgent matter, they shouldn't expect to get an answer from us. And that's not because I, you know, I don't want to be available when they need me.

It's more because I don't always know that it's a need, um that there's somehow been a culture of learning to rely on us for certain certain kinds of information as opposed to feeling secure in your knowledge base. Yourself were the fundraisers and they're the program people, but you know

they know about both sides. That makes perfect sense. Let me ask you this, do you trust your colleagues overseas if you were to kind of explain to them, hey, we have people who aren't getting sleep because they're getting up at five am our time because they're worried it needs something. Would you trust them to hear that context and to say, well, let me actually back up and

tell you what I'm thinking. I wonder in this case, if there is a way for you to have them channel urgent stuff differently, Like if there could be a particular phone number or a particular email address that is for middle of the night urgent stuff. And I wonder if you would trust them to have the right judgment to decide what needs to go there and what doesn't. Because if you could trust them to do that, you could set up a channel that is just for truly

urgent stuff. And you could even have that set to like a wake someone up if it needed to, or you could have like one person who was charged with checking it for everyone who may be agreed to work a different those hours, like a different sort of shift almost. But to make that work, you would have to trust that your overseas colleagues would use it appropriately. So I

think this is a really great question. Um. What I think I would love to do, just listening to what you're saying, is to say, essentially, when it's urgent, what's app me, and I'll make sure my what's up notifications are always on. The qualm I would have about doing that is that my boss is one of our overseas colleagues.

Our executive director is based overseas, and while he doesn't think I should do what he does, he only sleeps a handful of hours per night, And so I'm even hesitant to say to him, you know, what, do you mind not emailing me from these hours to these hours? Because I want to sleep to sleep, But when I know he doesn't, when I know he works himself way too hard, and he doesn't want me to do to myself what he does to himself. But you know, I

understand how overwork happens, right. I see the tendencies in myself to not want to make waves there too. Let's pass here for a quick break and we'll be right back. I mean, it might be that you actually need someone on your staff who works a weird schedule who can handle those nighttime things. I don't know enough about the context to know, but I don't want the solution to be that we just move the whole burden over to you.

But I do think there's probably something there that if you just have a specific emergency channel and people know to use that, then they can go on emailing you just like normal. But then then the other piece of this is that you have to convince your staff to stop waking up at five am to check their email. But part of that will be that they know that

emergencies are getting handled through this other channel. Right, No, I think you're I think you're definitely onto something there that if we said, you know, WhatsApp is going to be our emergency content means of contact, that we would turn our notifiers off on our email or turn the ding off on our email and and trusted after a period of time. And I do think some of my staff would respond to that and would trust it. You know, I had one of my new staff was getting emails

on the weekend and was it was really nice. Was new enough to this world that she said to me, what do you want me to do when I get emails from this person on the weekend? And I said, don't respond to them until Monday. She said, okay, So you know, she trusted that. I think some of my older staff, my existing team from when I came in, would I would have a little more trouble trusting the limitations. Yeah, and sometimes it takes seeing it working for people to

begin trusting it. So it might mean that you have to do a lot of coaching and reinforcing on the system for the first few weeks, and also that you have to really talk explicitly to people about why this is okay. And also don't assume they'll just believe you.

They might be thinking, like you say, it's okay, but I can think of all these times that it wouldn't have been okay, And so it might really help to walk through a bunch of concrete situations, like to say to them, think back to the last three months, what sorts of things came up that would have been a problem if we were handling our workflow this way, and then talk those through and if you can talk those concrete worries through with them and say, okay, well, in

that situation, here's how we would handle that. Now, that might be really key in putting some of their fears to rest. I think that's a great idea. And I think that also might be how I try to handle the checking email on vacation behavior, you know, which, Look, if person wants to check in their email once a day on vacation, I'm not really going to fight that.

That's in some ways their decision. Um. But I've had more sort of egregious problems with that where I had a staff member who has gone for a few weeks on kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I was checking that staff member's email while they were gone, and this was the agreed upon response. And I was in the mailbox and I saw emails moving around around me and going red and unread, and I knew they were in there. Um. And on the one hand, I thought,

you have a really special opportunity. I really wish as a person in your life that you would have this opportunity to enjoy it. But also, I'm spending my work time trying to do some of your work and you doing it as well is not actually a good use of anybody's time. Yeah. Did you ever have any version of that conversation with them when they got back? Yeah? So when they got back, I focused more on the

first one. I was very new at this point. I've been the manager six weeks, um, and I really focused on the you know, this is not I'm hoping to build some kind of work life balance in here. And it's really important to me that when you're gone, you

have the ability to be gone. And it's important for all these reasons, including burnout and including your mental health and the fact that you know you're a very valued staff member and I want to keep you as long as I can, and I can't do that if you know you're going to end up feeling burnt out or overburdened by work. But I think the second part about staff time didn't really occur to me until I've been working with them longer and realized that there was some

duplication of efforts there. Um and I have I haven't had that conversation now that I think about it, And that might be a a better avenue because it doesn't appeal to their personhood, right, It appeals to their worker identity, which is so strong anyway, I think that is worth saying. I mean, I wouldn't go back. And if this happened a year ago, obviously you don't want to, but like if it happens, to bring it up again. But if it happens again, definitely. And also you could say it preemptively.

If someone is going on vacation and you know that they're likely to have that tendency, you could say, I know that you're really dedicated and you might be tempted to do this. Here is a reason that I'm asking you not to, so it might be interesting to say that ahead of time. The other thing you can do is is maybe it's funny. I always tell people to take this approach when they're talking to their manager. When they want something from their manager and their word the

manager won't agree. I always say, ask for a limited time experiment, because that's easier to get a yes too. And I think there's a version of that that could work for you here too, which is that I think you might have better luck if you say to someone who's about to go on vacation, who you know as a workaholic, you could say you could talk about all the reasons why this is important, and then you could say, um, I know this might not be like a permanent change

that you want to make. I want to ask if we can do it as an experiment this time, because I think we can find a way to make it work. Will you agree to see this trip as an experiment and then we can see how it goes when you're back. I think that's a good idea. I could definitely do that. It's so much easier for people to commit to that than to commit to what might feel like a really fundamental change in the way that they relate to work.

Mm hmm, that's true. I want to go back to something you said earlier about your boss never sleeping, because I can understand why that would would unsettle you a bit. And even if your boss has been very explicit about not expecting that of you, I mean, our bosses model stuff for us, and that's hard. Um My strong suspicion is that if you have seen evidence in other ways that your boss is a reasonable person, that they probably do not, in fact expect you to only sleep three

hours and night too. But I think if you're ever feeling weird about it. You could tackle that head on. I mean, you could say, you know, I've been thinking about these workload issues on my team. I'm trying to find ways to make sure that people are actually coming to work well arrested, because I want them not burning out and I want to be able to retain people in the long term and have them doing their best work. I mean, you might not even need to explain all

that it might be. It might be obvious, but if you feel like in your culture you need to explain it and do um and then you could say, you know, it hasn't escaped my notice that you sleep hardly at all,

and sometimes it can. I worry that it will make me or other people on our team feel like they don't really have standing to say, Hey, I really need a full night's sleep, and I just want to check that with you and make sure that I'm being crazy in thinking this, and I suspect you will get reassurance. I suspect so as well. And I I hadn't thought until you said that about the impact that his schedule and his habits probably have on my team, even though

they're insulated both by distance and now by me. Because for a long time in the absence of my predecessor, they were not reporting to him, but working more closely directly with him. And I bet his habits and his needs had a strong impact on them. And I you know, I know you raised this at the beginning, but I think you're probably I think you're probably right. UM. I don't mean to sound a surprise. I think you're probably right that that that probably had an impact on the

on the culture here too. And it also reminds me, frankly, and this is something I wonder about. I know, as a manager it's important to model what you want your staff to do. UM. And I try to. I stick very firmly to when I leave every day, in part because I have a small child, but I do work in the evenings, and I have told my team explicitly, you know, I have to work sometimes in the evenings. I have a little bit of a shorter day because

I have to be able to do daycare, etcetera. UM, if you need the accommodations of these kinds, you know, I'm happy to work with you on them too. But if you get an email from me at night, it's just because I'm getting the work done. I do not expect you to respond to it, um, but I wonder about the impact of those emails on on them, and so I've tried to say something similar about the mode

of communication. You know that if I send you a text in the evening, so it's not actually texting, but some kind of message in the evening, that's you know, that's how I'll communicates in the urgent. But please don't respond to or feel that I am asking you to respond to email. But it's a complicated situation because I do have to get that work done to get my work done, and as the head of this office, that just is my responsibility. But I don't want it to

trickle down to my team. And as we're when we're in busy periods of time and I am working, you know, a number of nights during the week, I worry about that impact. I used to send emails to my staff really late at night, like two or three am, because I am just like a weird night owl and I am just highly productive at strange hours. And it took me a long time to realize that I was freaking people out because we're getting work emails from me at

two I am, and I I did two things. I started being much more explicit with people, um about just as you have that I'm just up and working then because it's my choice, but I'm certainly not expecting anyone to respond before they get into the office the next morning. But also I had to start saving them as drafts and sending them the next morning. Um yeah, because some people just never believe it. I think, regardless of what you say, um So, I mean there might be some

work around like that. Sometimes it doesn't make sense for the work, especially if you're working with people in lots of different times and you might not be able to wait to send the email and you might need to send it. Then I think probably for you, it's going to be just a lot of explicit talking to people and reminding them. And if you are really reinforcing, you know, if it's one conversation, they might think you okay maybe

and then promptly forget about it. But if you're reinforcing it, if you're talking about it in an ongoing basis, I mean not every day, that's going to be weird, but but you know, on an ongoing basis and it's coming up and you're reminding people, I think it will start to feel more real. And the other thing I would say is I would lay all of this out for your team and talk to them about it and say like, here's what I'm seeing. These are the reasons that I

know are in play. So you don't want to sound obviously like you're completely out of touch. You want to make it clear you do recognize that this is the culture and there are all of these pressures on them, but that your sense is still that even within that context, people are too connected to work when they don't need to be, and ask for their input about what might help, because there might be obstacles to solving this that you don't even realize, and hearing their perspective would probably be

really helpful. Yeah, I think that's a good idea. I don't know that I've done that enough lately, And and I think one of the things that has made me worry about it in coming into a sort of already existing structure and culture is that what if their jobs are just a lot harder than I realized and it's really taking them this amount of time, in which case are they going to tell me that, you know, are

they going to be upfront about it? Are they going to end up feeling bad or inefficient about the way they're doing their work. There's a point at which I start to worry about looking like I don't know what their lives are like, and actually not knowing what their lives are like. We'll pause here for a quick word from a sponsor and then we'll come right back. When you see, people are working long hours, So what kind of hours are we talking about, Like in an average week,

what do you think people are working? Um, I think so it's hard to me. It's hard for me to actually know because I do leave the office because I have to, so I don't always know when they leave. But I have, for example, a staff member who basically doesn't have internet at home. UM. It's just it's a very bad connection, and I will regularly get emails from him at seven thirty at night. UM. And I realized right that if you work in consulting, the day of

seven thirty at night is joyous. But if you work for a nonprofit and you're making what you make at a nonprofit, and you're doing this regularly and also not taking any of your paid time off, this is a problem, or at least I feel like it's a problem. I have another staff member who I think starts working her work week on Sunday morning every weekend, and I'm getting emails from six am two thirty am off and on

on the weekdays. Okay, yeah, I so yeah. I think one of the issues that you want to get a handle on here is is the workload forcing them into this and do they legitimately feel like if they pulled back, they would miss deadlines and important things would go undone. Because if that is the case, then the solution isn't

just telling them, hey, workless, um. In that case, you would have to take a bigger picture, look at the workload and figure out do you need to cut projects, do you need to bring it more staff, do you need to backburner things? There would need to be some solution that's outside of their control, but hopefully is in

your control. So it might be worth sitting down individually with people or at least the ones where, like definitely the person who seems to be working all day Sunday, UM, lose the ones where you think that the problem seems the most pronounced, and explain that you are concerned about how high the workload seems to be and that you want to get more nuanced understanding of exactly what's on their point so that you're better able to figure out solutions,

and then maybe have them walk you through what's going on at a pretty nitty gritty level. So maybe like take ask them to walk you through what they're juggling this week and how long things are taking and why.

When you do it, you want to be careful not to put people in the defense of like you don't want them to feel like you're questioning whether they're efficient enough or not, So you you need to be really explicit that you're seeking to understand, not looking for It's not like a gotcha, you're not looking for a problem with the way that they work. But if you get really into the weeds, I think you'll be better equipped to judge, oh, yes, this is just an insanely high workload,

or maybe it's not. But you also might realize when you do that that there are some obvious places where you could cut back. Like to give you an example of what I mean, if you really dig into it, you might really lies someone is putting hours every week into something that actually doesn't need to be that high of a priority, or that they're putting hours into getting something perfect when they could put in twenty of the time and have it be good enough. But maybe they

don't know that because it's never been discussed. Um or you might find there some kind of like system problem, like maybe someone can't move something forward until they get input from another team and that other team is constantly a roadblock, or or who knows. I mean, we can't

predict it. But I think if you dig in with an eye toward thinking about whether things have to be done the way they're happening now, or whether there might be shortcuts that would be okay for people to take, or even whole projects that could be put on the back burner temporarily or forever, or or you might come away thinking, Okay, yeah, this is a really insanely high workload and there aren't any obvious easy ways to lighten anyone's burden here. But even that last thing, I mean,

that's the hardest one to handle. But that at least tells you the solution isn't that I just keep nudging people to work less. The solution has to be something in that you're working out with your management, right. I think if you do that, you'll come away with more

information about what's going on. And also that's a good time to ask people for input too, And you might even ask them whether they can identify places where they or other people could be cutting back, because they might have opinions that they've kept to themselves about a program not having much impact or not being worth the energy that gets put into it, or a process being really onerous that maybe the old manager didn't want to change and so everyone's just kept doing it, or or who

knows what. But I think having those conversations and explicitly asking for that can maybe draw some of that out. If there is anything like that, I think that's a great idea. If that's not something I had thought of about, you know, are there places they see that can be

simplified or that aren't having impact? And I do think that just because of the particularities or a situation, it took them sort of many months to trust that when I said, you know, I'm concerned about the amount you're working, it wasn't in any way having to do with their performance or that I wasn't sort of lowering them into a trap where I was going to yell at them. Um. But I think I've been here long enough now that

they they feel a little more secure. Um, and so this might be a good time to have to start having those conversations. Yeah, I like that a lot. And I think also it might be there's so many things that could be at play here, and I think you're going to get to most of them if you do this kind of really digging into it. But another one could be and this is so common in nonprofits where there's like this ethos of if something seems like a worthy project, let's just find a way to fit it in.

So you could have a team of horribly overworked people who aren't saying no to anything new that comes up because something their played is full. Something new comes up, it feels like it would be worthy and have a valuable impact, and so they just take it on without looking for, well, what are we going to cut to

make room for this? Um. That happens in every sector, but oh my god, it happens in non off it so much so you might need to do some work on resetting your team's culture in that regard and training people that when they or your team as a whole is taking on something new. You talk about where the time for it is going to come from that. The assumption isn't just oh, you'll pile this on top of

the already overwhelming pile that you already have. That you'll talk about what to cut or what to push back to make room for it. And that is something that very much has to come from you. They're gonna have to see you asking that question every time and then backing it up by actually helping them cut things so that they know that you really mean it and it's not just lip service. Yes, I I agree so much.

And I'm just thinking about the once or twice where I've had someone say to me when of my teams say, can you help me figure out how to prioritize this? And I see that as this window into I don't know how I'm going to get this done? How do you want to get this done? Like? What do you

want me to not do? So I do this? Which I think is great right that someone's coming and saying that to me, But I think I probably do need to give that opening a lot more um And I think that was at least the beauty of having this new staff members start who was able to take projects

off of our let's say are most burdened, do you remember. Yeah, And I might even start, just like make a little note for yourself that every time something new comes up that someone is taking on, maybe for the next few months, say to them, what do we need to cut to make room for this? Or what do we need to push back to make room for this? Because they might not even give you the opening on their own, because they might not even be thinking that that is a possibility. Yeah,

I think that's true. I think the the expectation and just the feeling around here, especially because how mission driven we are, is if this is the thing we need to do to make possible what we need to make possible for the clients, then we'll find a way to do it. And I know that I'm not always as good as I could be about modeling that in my

own workload. I mean, I think I do it a good deal all the time, but I think for my own insecurities or whatever reason, I don't do it all the time that I should um to my bosster, to my board, and so giving them explicitly the opportunity is

going to be important. Yeah, And I think to you, I mean, we all sort of inadvertently fall into this thing where we assume that if someone is asking us to do something, they must expect us to make the time, and they must know all the other things that are on there our plate, and if they're putting this on there too, we're just expected to handle all of it. But so often we train people to think that because

we don't speak up right, right, I agree? Is it helpful to talk about, like, if you do take a look at this and you realize it's just an insanely crushing workload and there isn't a lot that people can do about it, Is it helpful to talk a little bit about what to do if that is what you realize. Yes, because I think that might be the case, and in

at least one situation. Okay, so if you do what we were talking about earlier, you sit down with people, you have them really walk you through like this week or this month, and you try to really get a feel for how much time does stuff take, and you take out all the stuff where you realize, oh, here's an inefficient and an inefficiency we could cut this out, and then you're left with still this whole pile of work.

So I think ideally you would do that for everyone on your team or close to everyone on your team, so that you have this whole long list of all the stuff that has to be done and roughly how

much time stuff takes. And then so I would take that information and then I would write out a reasonable work allocation for each people, So taking all the stuff from that long, that big pile of work and assigning to each person in order of how important things are each of those items, and then stop when each person has a list that represents a full workload. So maybe for you guys, it's not forty hours a week. Maybe

it's forty five, maybe it's fifty. I don't know what number it is that you want to get to, but it's probably less than what it is now, whatever that number is, stop your list when each per since is full, and then see what is left over. And if you have a bunch of stuff left over that did not fit at anyone's plate, and I suspect that you will, then there is your list of the stuff that your team doesn't actually have time to do but is cramming

in anyway, and and there's your problem. So at that point, you could reshuffle some of the things on that list. You could take some things off and put some things on. You could decide that some are going to come off the list altogether. But at some point you might need and I suspect you will find that you're probably at this point you would need to bring your own boss

into the conversation. Like if you were contemplating cutting things entirely, or if you're realizing, Okay, if we're going to do all this, we need more people to get it done, that's the point where you'd bring your own Boston. But but when you did that, you would have this very stark written illustration of what the problem was. So it wouldn't just be this amorphous like, oh, people feel overworked. It would be here's what people can get done in forty five hours a week, and here's all the stuff

that is still happening on top of that. I think that's incredibly helpful. Good it. Well, So do you feel like you have some next steps to try to tackle this? I do. I feel like I have a couple of great next steps. Thanks for talking that through with me. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It was great to be here. This was a really helpful conversation.

Thanks for listening to the asking manager podcast. If you'd like to come on the show to talk through your own question, email it to podcast at Asking Manager dot org. Or you can leave a recording of your question by calling eight five five four T six work. That's eight five five f T six nine seven five. You can get more ask a Manager at ask a Manager dot org or in my book Ask a Manager How to navigate clueless colleagues, lunch stealing bosses, and the rest of

your life at work. The Ask a Manager shows a partnership with How Stuff Works and is produced by Paul Deckett. If you liked what you heard, please take a minute to subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. I'm Alison Green and I'll be back next week with another one of your questions. M H.