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

1. I manage a manager who dislikes his new, qualified employee

I run a small nonprofit. I’m less than six months into the position and have inherited some HR challenges. One of the directors I manage, Dave, is, frankly, a terrible manager. He only manages three people, but in the six months I’ve been here, one person quit and one was fired after a dramatic meltdown. Dave just hired a new person, Julie, who he wants to fire within the first 45 days. She has excellent experience, more than he does in the program he is running. She has raised some concerns directly to him about the quality of the work via email; I saw the message, and she approached it professionally.

He said she has been late three times and refuses to do the data entry that is a part of her job. She says she hasn’t been adequately trained. My assessment is that they just don’t like each other and are now looking for things to justify their positions. She thinks he’s incompetent and he thinks she’s rude and undermining his authority.

They both came to me about this situation last week. I’ve been sitting on what to do next because I do not want to lose the new employee. While Julie is not perfect, she does have excellent skills that we need. How do I deal with this situation?

You need to manage Dave much more closely — and you need to lay out for him very explicitly that you’re concerned about the situation in his department and that, having just lost two people in quick succession, you’re not going to fire a third simply for being late a few times. Moreover, given that you know Dave is a terrible manager, I’d be inclined to believe Julie that she hasn’t been adequately trained and that her frustrations with Dave are well-founded — which means that you’re going to need to get much more involved in the situation than you’d normally be doing, including reviewing the training plan with both of them and coaching Dave pretty intensely on your expectations for how he manages people. Plan to spend at least a few weeks intensively involved with both of them, so that you’re setting expectations about how you want things to go and also so that you’re getting a more detailed sense of exactly how Dave operates and what’s going wrong. Stay open to the possibility that you shouldn’t have Dave managing people at all, but you’ll have a better sense of that once you spend a few weeks more enmeshed and have a stronger feel for exactly what’s going on.

If you’re thinking you don’t have time to roll up your sleeves and dive in like that, the alternative is letting Dave keep cycling through employees, which will slow the organization down more in the long run. If you absolutely can’t make time for that in the next few weeks, consider having Julie report to someone else temporarily until you do have time to dig in more.

Related:
how do I get my direct reports to be better managers of their own teams?

2. Firing an employee who went viral for attacking football fans

I just saw an article about a Baltimore Ravens fan who was seen in a video attacking two men who supported an opposing football team. He was identified and fired from his job the next day.

This happens regularly when moments go viral. But can companies do this? Is it because there is video proof? I thought we couldn’t necessarily let someone go even from an arrest. They are still innocent until proven guilty, right? In this case, the guy hadn’t even been arrested, just had a really stupid, violent moment go viral. Can he come back and say he was unfairly fired, as the moment didn’t even happen at work?

In most states, employers can legally fire you for behavior you engage in outside of work, as long as the firing doesn’t violate a specific legal protection you have. (For example, most people couldn’t legally be fired for attending a union protest, because unionizing is a protected right.) There’s no legal protection for physically attacking an opposing team’s fans. In this case, the company likely figured that they don’t want to be associated with someone who publicly engaged in vile behavior that went viral, and that’s their legal prerogative.

You mentioned laws that prohibit firing someone for being arrested, but federal law actually doesn’t prohibit that; it’s dependent on state law. Some states do limit what an employer can do in response to an employee’s arrest, depending on the nature of the crime and how it might relate to their particular job. But in this case the firing was likely about the behavior itself, not the arrest; I imagine that with the exact same set of facts but no arrest, their response would have been the same.

3. My employee is accessing files from our previous employer

In my industry, movement between companies is fairly common. So I am now supervising someone who used to be a peer at OldCompany, which is a direct competitor of NewCompany.

Today, my direct report shared a “helpful” reference document that I know for certain is a proprietary document from OldCompany. We are working on a project very similar to what we worked on at the previous employer, so it’s sometimes tempting to bring in ideas from our old work. However, this was not simply referring to an idea, but sharing a link to an internal, unpublished document from OldCompany. The relative obscurity of the file she shared makes me think that either she somehow saved everything we worked on at the old job, or else she might still have access to her old account somehow.

I told her right away that we cannot have access to documents from OldCompany at NewCompany. I also let my current boss know, since I don’t want there to be legal issues with it somehow coming out that NewCompany employees are accessing competitors’ IP. Do I need to notify my old boss from the previous employer that my current employee still has access to their files? With my employee, does this warrant more than one clear conversation about this being not okay?

To me, this feels like a big violation, but my current boss didn’t respond as if this is a huge deal. For example, my boss didn’t ask which employee of mine it was, just told me to make it clear it’s not okay. In my mind, though, this is a serious judgment issue with my employee. My employee apologized and said it won’t happen again, but I’m not sure if this is something I should drop. What do you think?

You addressed it and she said it won’t happen again. You don’t need to go back and repeat yourself unless something about her response made you think she didn’t take you seriously or didn’t understand that you meant all OldCompany documents, not just this one. If either of those is the case, then yes, go back and say you want to make sure you were clear about the scope of the prohibition and how seriously she needs to take it … but otherwise, it sounds like you’re equating repeating yourself with pounding in the seriousness of the message and, assuming you communicated clearly the first time, you don’t need to do that.

4. I don’t want to be called by a shortened version of my name

I’ve been at my job for over five years now and everyone there calls me by a shortened version of my name. I didn’t say anything at first because it was only some people, some of the time. Gradually everyone shifted to the nickname, even people who were meeting me for the first time. Is there a way I can get people to call me by my actual name?

Yes! “I actually prefer Valentina, thank you.” You’ll have to say it a lot, but eventually it will stick with most people. Just be straightforward and prepared to have to reiterate it. If you want, you can also acknowledge that you didn’t speak up earlier — “I don’t know why I didn’t say this earlier but I go by Valentina.”

5. Should I tell a recruiter I’m pregnant?

I’m currently 16 weeks pregnant (yay for secondary fertility!) and in a job where I’m really not happy. A recruiter from a placement agency reached out to me for a general interview. I know talking to a recruiter doesn’t mean I’ll actually be offered a job, but I was wondering if the advice to not tell an employer before you’ve received an offer still stands if a recruiter is involved.

I feel like if I tell them they’ll be less likely to try to place me, but I also don’t know if having them involved would change what happens if I do get an offer. If I were to get an offer and then disclose my pregnancy to the company, is it easier for them to pull the offer and say it has something to do with the agency even if the real reason is I’m pregnant? Not sure how to proceed but I would really like a new job, even if it means changing while I’m pregnant.

Nope, working with a recruiter doesn’t change the advice. Wait to disclose until you have an offer. The company will have the same legal risk pulling the offer at that point that they’d have without a recruiter involved.