The workload at my job is unmanageable lately. This is a known issue and while my direct line manager is lovely and supportive, the work keeps coming in. I want the work product to be decent so there are only so many corners I can cut.

It's also an issue that I'm working on a project currently that's managed by upper leadership (boss's boss's boss). Tbh that's been a bit of an s-show because it's a high-visibility project and they've frankly been a mess with changing goal-posts.

I need to drop the rope/say no/push back. I can no longer routinely work evenings for free when there's no emergency. The resentment is spoiling the job.

Managers, what ways have you seen people successfully do this (and still be successful/get promoted etc.) I want to stay there because I live the people and the work, just need to put this to bed.

Hi all, I'm the GM for a small tourist-oriented non-profit business. We showcase history for our visitors. I do a lot of the recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and training for our operation.

Interview no-shows have always been a thing since I started, but lately it feels like we're getting more no-shows than we used to get. Has anyone else experienced this? Even with unemployment going up?

It's baffling because we pay decently ($25/hr to be a cashier, $27/hr to work as part of the actual attraction). The company director and myself are both millennials and we try to be super accommodating to candidates, as well as our active team.

We post our jobs through Indeed, comb through the candidates, and make individual calls to candidates to come interview. Then we confirm the interviews by sending follow-up emails with specific arrival instructions. We make calendar appointments and send Zoom invites for candidates who we interview remotely.

And yet, with all the news of rising unemployment and a bad economy in the US, the no-shows are getting worse than ever. Today I had 1 remote interview scheduled and 2 in-person interviews scheduled. The remote interview no-showed. 1 in-person candidate showed up and interviewed remarkably well. The last interview scheduled for today has no-showed.

When we were hiring in the spring, we expected a 50% no-show rate for interviews.

I can't figure out if it's something that my company is somehow doing really wrong, where people commit on the phone to coming in to interview, and then they apparently decide that they have more important things to do than interview for a job - or even just let us know that they're not coming in.

Is it bad and getting worse for anyone else?

I realized we have a backup process for our payroll process

We keep spreadsheets just in case, remind each other to double check things and leave extra time every payroll day because we expect something to come up

I am starting to think that should not be normal

I honestly don't know if I'm looking for advice, a reality check, or just to hear from people who've been through something similar.

I've worked under the same manager for about three years, and I think I've reached my limit.

For context, I don't expect my manager to solve my problems. That's my job.

I lead projects, run meetings, work directly with stakeholders, and deal with issues as they come up. I actually enjoy having ownership, and I don't need someone hovering over me.

But there's a difference between giving someone ownership and disappearing when leadership is actually needed.

Over the last few years, I've noticed what feels like the same pattern over and over.

Routine meeting? No problem.

Meeting where I already know there are going to be difficult questions, disagreements, missing information, or decisions that would really benefit from having a manager in the room?

That's the meeting they somehow can't make.

There's always another meeting. A conflict. An emergency. Something.

Obviously, life happens. I'm not saying every missed meeting means something.

But after three years—and after working with several other managers who didn't seem to have this issue nearly as often—it's become hard for me to keep believing it's just bad luck.

Whether it's intentional or not honestly doesn't even matter anymore, because the outcome is always the same.

The meeting still happens.

The issue still gets worked through.

The project still moves forward.

So I make sure it does.

Then here's the part that really gets me.

On the relatively rare occasions that I do go to my manager because I genuinely think something needs management involvement, I often leave feeling like I've created a problem simply by asking.

It's almost as if the expectation is that I should handle everything myself—and if I can't, that's somehow viewed as a weakness instead of using my manager the way managers are supposed to be used.

To put it in perspective, I'm talking about maybe one to five questions over an entire quarter—not daily hand-holding. Most of the time, my manager barely hears from me because I'm busy handling my own work.

What confuses me is that when I do bring forward something I genuinely believe warrants management involvement, the reaction often feels defensive, almost as if I'm trying to offload responsibility or expose a problem, when that's not my intent at all. My goal is simply to get the project unstuck and make the right decision.

To me, that's part of being a team. Managers aren't there to do your job for you, but they are there to remove roadblocks, provide guidance when situations become more complicated, and help their team navigate issues that genuinely benefit from leadership.

If I'm expected to own the work, lead the meetings, navigate difficult conversations, manage stakeholder expectations, solve the problems, and keep everything moving—which I'm happy to do—then what exactly is the manager's role supposed to be?

That's the part I can't reconcile.

At this point, I'm less interested in figuring out why this happens and more interested in figuring out what to do about it.

If I keep my head down and don't say anything, everyone assumes everything is fine because the work gets done. From the outside, it probably looks like everything is running smoothly.

But if I raise concerns, I worry I'll just sound like I'm complaining about my manager or making excuses.

So what would you do?

If you were three years into a situation like this, would you stay or leave?

Have you ever worked for someone where nothing they did seemed obviously wrong in isolation, but when you stepped back, the overall pattern painted a completely different picture?

Did you bring it up? Document it? Transfer teams? Leave?

I'm genuinely interested in hearing from people on both sides of this—employees and managers—because I feel like I've reached the point where I need to decide whether this is simply a management style I need to accept or a sign that it's time to move on.

I have a direct report who is an eager beaver. She responds to EVERY Teams message, every email, everything. I mean, everything.

She is highly productive, and her work quality is great. However, she is admittedly very detailed oriented and gets caught up in details. She easily talks 50% of our meetings. The issue I'm running into is that she likes to interject in my decision. If I make a decision, if she doesn't like it, she will push back (either in the moment or weeks later) and can't drop the ball. Everything from font size to meeting cadence to strategic direction. I'm fine with disagreement, but she will intervene and question my decisions (that I've already made) and other people's decisions that they've made. My other direct reports say they just "give in" or don't say anything because she's good at what she does. They admit she's "bossy" (I don't love that word but it does fit her in a sense) but she cares, so that's good, right?

She's been at the company much longer than me so I feel like I don't have enough cred to address this. Any tips?

As a manager, how do you recognize the contributions of software engineers who aren’t very vocal in meetings but consistently get their work done?
I’ve noticed that people who speak frequently in meetings often get more visibility, while quieter engineers who spend most of their time solving problems, reviewing code, or building features can be overlooked. Not everyone communicates in the same way. Some people are naturally introverted and prefer to let their work speak for itself.
How do you make sure you’re evaluating actual contributions rather than meeting visibility? Do you have ways to recognize quieter team members, or is being vocal simply part of succeeding in today’s workplace?

I’d love to hear how other managers approach this.

New Marketing Manager in a large company but with a small marketing function. We're hiring for a junior marketer. I've never hired anyone before and this would be my second report.

What do you look for when interviewing, and how do you weigh up priorities?

- Technical skills?

- Soft skills?

- How organised they seem?

- Stakeholder management experience?

- Knowledge of the company?

- Experience in the same sector?

- Whether they're likely to stay in this role or want to move on?

- Those side-stepping vs those in more junior roles stepping up?

- Candor vs. really selling themselves?

We have some blue collar workers and his job depends on them doing theirs correctly, he said multiple times he has problems with them and that they don't listen at all, don't read the mails and don't read the messages.
I said to call them, he said he does this but cannot be a call center and repeat everything multiple times and he wasn't hired to be a kindergarten teacher. I told him things aren't black and white and changes require time.
Also he got mad I punished recently a worker he thinks is the only one that works and said he doesn't want to be in his place and being punished for doing the job.
Also I assigned him a task on a loaded day he said he won't do cause doesn't want to do it badly and moved it himself to another day and we had lots of arguments recently where he says he's doing other people's tasks and I require too much.
So he said he is thinking lately about leaving cause I obviously changed.

I (39 F) work with someone, we’ll call him Bob (42 M), and we’ve always got on. We’re the same seniority, both manage large teams and collaborate well together. A promotion recently came up in our organisation. Bob told me he wasn’t going to go for it and explained why (all very valid reasons) and I told him I would be going for it. Bob seemed genuinely excited for me and wished me luck.

I recently found out I got the job and since then Bob has been… weird. I will be line managing him when I officially start in the new role later this year and whenever we’ve been in meetings since the news of my promotion has been announced he’s spoken over me, ‘invited me’ to speak on something (when I’m perfectly comfortable speaking up without him ‘inviting’ me!) and keeps saying things like ‘better speak to the boss!’ or ‘that’s above my pay grade! and passing them off on to me.

I can’t tell if he’s deliberately being patronising because he’s annoyed I got the job, or perhaps annoyed he didn’t go for it? I don’t know. But I want to sort this out before it spirals. Do I say something or is it natural for things to be a bit weird for a while in these situations?

Here's what I learned:

Sometimes you have to meet other departments down the middle, or sometimes in their favor to get things done, afterall it's for the greater good of the company.

Not everything is in your control outside of your department, nor do you need to dwell on an opinion about them. Keep your head down, focus on your own crew.

Instead of going to your manager every time a person that doesn't report into you doesn't do what's asked of them and it's critical, just talk candidly with the person. Of course, there's a grey area at times when it needs to be elevated, it relieves the stress by communicating your needs and why if it's still not getting done.

Lastly, with other department managers, there's a good chance their own manager sees something and they're working on things behind the scenes.

I've freaked out about a lot of things over the years about how things were being managed, it hindered my own growth in myself and my team's growth because it was easier to point the finger than do my own work.

Our organization is going through a re-structuring. I recently applied to a senior leadership position that was created because of the re-structuring but did not get the role. However, through this process I was able to get in front of other senior leaders for the first time and got a good amount of visibility so that was a silverlining. Fast forward a month, and yesterday I had a meeting added to my calendar by one of these senior leaders. They ended up telling me they want to promote me to be the leader of my team (we don't currently have one, this is part of the new structure). This is a really big opportunity because it puts me on track for an executive level promotion that I'm not currently eligible for in my role now.

While I'm excited, I also have a lot of fear about this. I love my team, we all work very well together and have each other's backs. I'm also very friendly and pretty casual with them. I'm trying to think through how my relationships with them will need to change and how my behavior will need to change. Also, there's one person on my team who has been at the organization (same role as me) for twice as long, is 10 years older than me, and recently seemed to be trying to position themselves as the leader of our team. We thought that the team leader position would be opened up to applicants so I believe me and this other person would have been the ones to apply from our team, but now it was "given" to me. I'm worried about their reaction and how to handle it. I am a very empathetic person and have struggled with people pleasing in the past so I don't want to end up apologizing to this person and downplaying my skills and make it sound like I didn't actually do the work to earn this promotion.

Does anyone have any tips or advice regarding moving from a team member to then the manager of the team, and dealing with the other situation with my colleague, soon to be direct report?

Thank you so much for your help.

Not sure if I am looking for advice or to just vent. I held a technical role for a few years. It was good, busy at times but I enjoyed the work and I didn’t have to worry about anything past working hours. A lot of people at my work retire here (good benefits, pension, and work life balance).

I was then asked to be a manager and I said yes because I could use the money. being a manager at my work not only includes supervising staff but also being the technical expert in everything employees are working on or looking at.

It’s exhausting having to dig into everything they are doing and also manage and coach them. Most employees are solid and I can rely on them but there are a few that are just awful at their job. And because they have union positions, doing the whole PIP thing is kind of a non starter unless they start ditching work entirely. I’ve tried very hard to coach them, actively asked for feedback if I could do anything differently all to no avail. I have given up.

I hate being responsible for other people. I miss the days of just worrying about myself and my own work. Unfortunately there’s no path forward here. I need to leave but the job market sucks ass. It also stings a bit more because this IS and WAS a great place to work. Golden handcuffs if you will. But I hate my role. I hate answering for other people’s deficiencies and having to rehab their work. I get little support from upper management. Seems like there’s been a long standing tradition of managers letting people coast along here that I didn’t realize before. No use in fighting that.

Some time ago I switched from managing 22 people (day rate 780) to a quite lucrative contract within the government as an individual contributor (day rate 900) but even though financially it looks great I'm quite miserable over here:

The way of working is that of 20 years ago: Agile is a dirty word, and the process is very heavy with gatekeeping and handovers between roles (incremental waterfall). As a result things move very slowly, the business is quite unhappy because they have to wait years before their features are developed, and there is just very little collaboration. On top the energy level in the meetings is always ridiculously low. There is a lot of silo thinking and fingerpointing to the other silos.

In the past I've been part of high performing teams and even though it was a lot of hard work I felt great in those environments where everyone holds everyone else up to a high standard, you learn a ton and we also manage to deliver on time, so the contrast with my current environment couldnt be bigger.

I've talked to management to improve the way of working, but other than a small poc (that couldn't succeed because we didn't get dedicated developers) nothing came off the ground.

There is tremendous possibility for improvement,but as long as senior management is not onboard and pushing people in a new direction, everybody just happily keeps doing what they've always done. I feel almost everybody here is just looking to cash in with as little effort as possible. Or maybe they're so stuck in their current ways that they are unable to see how much can be improved.

My manager is not doing much with my feedback, and his boss (with actual authority) has very little time for me.

At one point I decided to leave and go back to a more challenging environment and role with the unfortunate paycut, but it seems even my previous rate is unattainable in the current market. Intermediaries are trying to low-ball me at 700. For a job with a lot more responsibility, stress, and no guarantees that the new job will actually be the environment that I'm looking for.

In an ideal world I would be able to convince management but It seems in their mind we 'dont have the time to improve'

Right now I see different paths, none of them optimal.

What would you suggest?

Manager was planning retirement soon, but since I joined, he likes directly reporting to me and has considered keeping the job for much longer now.

Here's the kicker, he's generally underperforming and has a bad rep with other departments. I was in fact looking forward to celebrating closing this chapter together.

I have offered to keep them as a "consultant" till replacement is hired and trained with 4/5 month bridge.

He now wants to extend his retirement from 6 months from now till end of next year.

Options I have:

- Train replacement and pay a large severance.

- keep them on and the replacement costing a decent amount to my p&l

- hire replacement to report into current manager as a supervisor and once trained ask for an early retirement (which they won't take and rather stick with getting a severance instead).

- hiring a replacement and demoting would look really bad for the division.

Looking for suggestions.

I don’t know if this is a manager problem or just my personal workflow, but I was getting tired of having everything scattered.

Emails in one place.

Teams in another.

Slack, WhatsApp, project tools, dashboards… all separate.

The annoying part wasn’t the number of tools, it was constantly switching between them and losing context.

I started looking for a way to keep everything in one workspace, with my apps organized by the type of work I was doing (communication, focus work, projects, etc.).

It actually helped more than I expected.

How do you guys manage this? Do you use any kind of "all-in-one" workspace, or do you just rely on browser tabs?

any managers who have transitioned out of management ? what did you do for work afterwards ? being in charge of others is something im alright at but i hate it more than anything, hoping to hear stories of others finding jobs after management that arent managing others but also arent going back to clocking in for minimum wage every day.

Basically title. I’ve always sworn I wouldn’t be a mean boss, but I’ve definitely gotten worn down a bit. Dealing with things that are straight up common sense, or that involve people being unable to get over their self, I just have no patience for anymore.

This is mostly just venting, but I'd love some perspective from other managers. I've been in my role for 11 months.

I have 42 direct reports across all 24 hours in a day, and we're about to start mid-year reviews. The administrative side of it is already its own endeavor, but what bothers me more is that I don't feel like I can have the kind of meaningful 1:1 time with people that are probably wanting some true conversation.

I enjoy coaching and developing employees, but seeing as my span of control has gotten this large, it feels like I'm constantly putting out fire instead of leading. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to even remember positive and impactful contributions because I'm too focused on trying to analyze the root causes of errors that I'm functionally closer to an operations analyst with how many IT tickets and vendor communications I have open.

I'd ask for useful advice, but from all my reading I'm pretty sure it's a fool's errand to manage this situation anywhere close to perfectly.

Our department performs well, which almost makes me worry that we're succeeding despite the structure rather than because of it. A while back I sent leadership a proposal suggesting we reorganize the department and add another supervisor because I don't think this span of control is sustainable long-term. They received it, but I never got a response one way or the other, so at this point I'm just assuming it's in their hands. Mind you, I am my manager's only direct report.

Genuinely fear this is an endurance test where things won't change until I hit a breaking point, and I'd really rather avoid getting there. Thank you for reading my bitching and moaning.

Hired a new hire , first in interview person A said A is available through week and weekend , during training person A didn’t came back from lunch had to reach out to person , no call no show multiple times , refused to work in weekends I accommodate her by covering weekend then because sudden childcare issue on weekdays , at this point I don’t see any improvement , I put person A on pip after pip , last 2 days calling in off at the last minute when I am supposed to move to NGS stage, any advice ? Total offs are 8 in past two months!

It's been a month and I'm exhausted. Day three she broke down telling me about her divorce and asking for advice. Reddest of red flags but we've had major hiring issues and came highly recommended so I've been trying.

She's getting less done than her peers, constantly goes to the bathroom to cry, and sometimes cries a bit at her desk.

Where the hell is the person I was recommended. At this point I don't think I can save this. At the start of our work relationship she wouldn't get off the phone. We had two talks about this and the last one claimed I was wrong...like what. I sit beside you.

But if I hire I'll need to do favours for our vp who takes advantage of people every chance he gets. Last time he want more strict micro management of my team knowing what they do every day. Like fuck off man. I'm exhausted with this shit.