Good Job is Slate’s advice column on work. Have a workplace problem big or small? Send it to Laura Helmuth and Doree Shafrir here. It’s anonymous!
Dear Good Job,
I’m a department head at a university, and I’m struggling to navigate a deeply toxic relationship with my dean. She is married to another department head in our college, and she consistently shows favoritism toward his department. While that’s problematic, the larger issue is her leadership style, which is demoralizing and self-serving.
She regularly belittles faculty and staff—both publicly and privately—and seems to make decisions based solely on how they benefit her career or image. If a proposal flatters her or boosts her visibility, it’s approved. If it benefits students or faculty without spotlighting her, it’s often dismissed or ignored.
One particularly humiliating incident occurred when we attended an event at another university. I was invited to a “deans-only” gathering by another dean (as were several other non-deans), but my dean publicly scolded me for attending and later berated me in private, accusing me of overstepping. I tried to explain the context, but she wouldn’t hear it.
I want to support my department and advocate for my colleagues and students, but I feel like I’m constantly walking on eggshells. I’m also concerned about retaliation if I speak up or escalate concerns. How do I protect myself and my department while dealing with someone who seems to thrive on control and intimidation?
—Department Head
Dear Department Head,
Your dean may be brilliant in her scholarly field, but she’s willfully ignorant about leadership. It sounds like you aren’t her only target, so let’s start with ways to protect anyone who has to report to her. Many deans and other people in academic power roles need better management training. Your boss is breaking two of the most basic rules: “Criticize people in private, praise them in public,” and “your job as a manager is to help the people under you succeed.” Your dean is basically your boss, and your boss’s boss is probably a provost or chief academic officer. Tell that person that a leadership training workshop for everyone in the academic hierarchy could make the university more successful. Mention whatever metrics matter to your boss’s boss—scholarly publications, faculty recruitment, graduation rates, anything that might be impaired by having a bully for a dean. (You don’t need to specify that your dean is the person who needs this training most.) The training should teach your dean (and everyone) some basic skills, and it sends a message that good leadership matters to the executive office. As a bonus, it might reveal that your university needs a conflict-of-interest policy against having someone supervise a relative, as your dean appears to be doing with her spouse.
As for your personal toxic relationship with the dean, it’s time to manage up. If you don’t already have a regular check-in with your dean, ask for one. Send a memo to her before each meeting with a bullet-pointed list of the things you’d like to update her on. She was absolutely wrong to berate you about attending the deans-only gathering, and she should’ve listened to your explanation, but you could have avoided some of the drama by letting her know ahead of time that you would be there and why. In general, try to avoid surprising your boss. Ask for her support and advice early on when you have projects that will benefit faculty and students. If she needs to take the credit for these projects before she’ll approve them, fine. Thank the dean for her support whenever you praise (publicly!) people in your department for any successes. This will feel gross, I know, but getting support from the dean is one of your biggest responsibilities as a department head. Giving her flattery and control—or the illusion of control—might let you control her.
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Laura Helmuth and Doree Shafrir want to help you navigate your social dynamics at work. Does your colleague constantly bug you after hours? Has an ill-advised work romance gone awry? Ask us your question here!
Dear Good Job,
I’ve stayed home for 11 years as a stay-at-home mom to my child. I’m ready to re-enter the workforce, but I’m clueless. I have a generic bachelor’s degree and a nursing degree, but I don’t want to return to health care. None of my past employers are still in business (small, independent medical practices have closed). How do I write a resume and consider a new job when I’m middle-aged, applying for part-time jobs outside my field of experience that I’m “overqualified” for? Due to COVID shutdowns and homeschooling my daughter, I haven’t had opportunities to volunteer. My resume stops cold in 2013. Where do I start?
—Lost in a Changed Land
When you jump back into the job market after some time away, try these three strategies: reconnect, reframe, and possibly retrain. Contact people you used to work with (search social media, especially LinkedIn, to find them) and ask to catch up. You want something from them, sure, but use the reconnection as an opportunity to celebrate and spread kindness. Do you have fond memories of someone who mentored or trained you? Tell them you appreciate how they guided you earlier in your career, and you wonder if you could ask for their help again. If you mentored someone else, say you were impressed with how they grew into their job back then and would like their advice now. Be specific about your memories, both to remind them of the work you did together 11-plus years ago and to let them know they made a lasting impression on you. Then ask your former colleagues how they moved on when your previous medical practices closed, how your field has changed, and what kinds of new jobs or titles seem promising right now.
One of the challenges of entering any new field is learning the lingo. As you research the sorts of jobs you would like to try next, notice the language in job descriptions. Write your resume to match those terms as well as possible, translating the skills you developed in nursing to whatever they’re looking for. If you supervised any shifts, you “managed teams.” If you helped your independent medical practice shift to new treatments or software, you “led innovation.” You must have a lot of experience in evaluating data, crisis management, communication, observation, and planning. People tend to be impressed by medical and scientific training, so play up your clinical and biomedical experience if it might be an asset in your new job.
A lot has changed since 2013. You don’t mention whether you’ve kept your registered nurse license current while you weren’t working. If not, consider taking classes to get relicensed, which will give you an advantage in a lot of nursing-adjacent fields. If you want to try something completely different, take some community college classes to learn more. Your original college, nursing school, any new school, or your local library might have career services offices that can help with your resume and job search. Your nursing experience, whether you renew your license or not, should give you an advantage working in fields like pharmaceutical sales, fitness training, physical therapy, senior centers, or other health-related jobs. Plenty of people take time away or shift to new careers in middle age, and there’s no shame in it. Recapture the confidence you needed when you cared for patients. You know how to draw blood and set broken bones; you can do this.
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Dear Good Job,
My partner recently started his first real structured nine-to-five after years spent studying in graduate school and doing gig work. And I think he’s struggling to adapt to the rigid lifestyle. He’s complaining about the work a lot, even though it’s exactly what he studied for and knew he’d be getting into (and it’s not quite different from what he was doing in graduate school). I try to provide a space for him to openly vent about how dissatisfied he feels, while also occasionally gently pushing back on some of this thinking that seems a little distorted.
I’ve been working a much more structured position for many years now, so I’ve come to understand that this is just the grind that comes with working in corporate America. Mostly everyone I know wishes they were doing just about anything else with their day! I want to be supportive and empathetic, but I also don’t really want to encourage him to find another job when I know another job is probably not going to be the thing that makes him feel better. How can I be here for him as he makes this transition?
—Burnt Out Before It’s Begun
Dear Burnt Out,
A big part of any relationship is listening to the other person complain. (Another big part of any relationship is learning when to put a cork in it and stop complaining.) Your partner is seeing work dysfunction with fresh eyes, and you are kind to listen to him vent and affirm that the grind is real. You’re probably right that finding a different grind won’t be more satisfying. Any job can be superficial, dehumanizing, and exhausting. Grad school can be all those things, too, but corporate work is a fresh hell.
You should ask your partner first if he’s looking for solutions and not just sympathy. If it’s the former, encourage him to talk through his complaints and discuss solutions together. I hope your partner’s new job is helping him appreciate the stresses you’ve dealt with in your structured job. Remind him you’ve had similar frustrations, and share strategies you’ve used or observed that help people accomplish what they want in a job without being too ground down by it. He may feel trapped, but he has more power than he might know. If he can identify people at his new job who have similar concerns about certain work problems, they can form an alliance and push for change. He could ask someone to mentor him as he figures out the new job. Or could he become a mentor? If he’s too junior to do so at his new corporate job, he might be able to mentor students from his former grad program, or he could offer to guest-lecture there. He could give current students a better understanding of what to expect when they move to a corporate job, and teaching could refresh his own motivations for pursuing this career. If you can help him remember why he cares about the mission and meaning of his work, that might help him withstand the grind … and eventually find something more interesting to talk about.
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