Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2026/01/managing-someone-who-wanted-my-job-should-i-tell-my-boss-im-having-menstrual-cramps-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=35019

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

1. I’m managing someone who wanted my job, and is acting like it

I have recently taken a management role with a new employer, and I love the work and the place I am working.

I am in a director position and have learned that the assistant director, Jane, also applied for the job, but obviously was not chosen.

How do I handle two things: (1) others in the office asking Jane instead of me when I should make the call (they then catch themselves), and (2) Jane trying to “agree” with what I decide or say, but in a way that suggests her agreement is needed or being solicited? I take pride in being a good manager. I know how to communicate items that are discussion points and those that are informational only, but I think she is trying to assert some authority she does not have.

She also had a “plan” for us to be co-directors, which will not work. My boss doesn’t think she should be in charge of the office due to some past questionable judgment, and I am trying to ease into the division of labor conversation. Overall, how do I navigate this without wanting to scream or not being a good manager for someone I supervise?

Mostly, by continuing to calmly and matter-of-factly assert your authority. You don’t need to sit Jane down for a big “I’m in charge here, not you” conversation — at least not yet. There’s a good chance that you can simply demonstrate that, by calmly continuing to do your job and owning your authority. If she agrees with your decision in a way that implies she’s part of decision-making when she isn’t, that’s fine; cheerfully accept her support. It’s going to be clear soon enough through the way work is actually handled that you’re making those calls. (The same goes for people asking her things instead of you and then catching themselves; you’re new right now and they’ll likely get used to you being there in time. If they don’t, you can matter-of-factly ask them to bring things like XYZ to you rather than to Jane.)

There might come a time when it’s clear you need to address it more explicitly, like if she’s undermining your decisions or actually doing work that should fall to you, but it doesn’t sound like that’s happening at this point.

However, I don’t know how straightforward you’ve been in telling her that her co-directors plan is off the table. If you haven’t clearly told her that, you need to.

2. How to encourage employees to do community service on their own time

My company’s leadership has been soliciting ideas for volunteer activities we can do together as an office, with the goal of being able to have a page on our website listing the wonderful impacts we are making on the community and show it off to our clients. Of course, leadership does not have a budget for this, meaning that they do not intend to pay employees for their time spent volunteering, nor offer extra PTO, nor do they want employees taking time out of the workday to volunteer.

In essence, they want us to give up our precious free time to do company-approved volunteer activities with our coworkers, in order to make the company look good. While I actually enjoy volunteering and have spent many Saturday mornings removing invasive plants with local organizations, this just rubs me the wrong way. There’s got to be a better way to encourage people to give back to their community!

So, I’d like to ask my fellow readers: Are there any workplaces out there that have succeeded in getting employees to engage in community service, without offering any monetary incentives? How did you do it?

I’m happy to throw this out to readers to answer since you’re asking for them to weigh in, but: No. If they don’t want to pay people or offer extra PTO or give them work time to do it … then too bad, sounds like they don’t get to credit themselves for employees’ private volunteer work. This is like saying, “We want you to be a good person in your private life but then let us take credit for it.” Or, fairly literally, “We want you to donate to charity and let us claim the contributions were ours.”

You and your coworkers should tell them that if they want the company to look like it’s active in supporting people in need in the community, they’ll need to provide work time for it to happen in.

3. Should I tell my manager I’m having menstrual cramps?

I’ve been dealing with some health stuff lately. Yesterday, after half a long day of meetings, I messaged my manager to let her know that I wasn’t feeling well and would be taking the rest of the day off. She expressed a good deal of concern and well wishes for rest and recovery.

The thing is, I wasn’t feeling well specifically because of awful cramps. This happens to me to me every so often, thankfully not on a monthly basis. Maybe a few times a year. I’ve even taken a whole sick day before due to cramps. I’m probably overthinking it, but is it ever appropriate to share the reason for these episodes? Should I let my colleagues or manager know that I’m not contagious and it’s not the sort of thing that will necessarily get worse? I work hybrid, and I’m going to show up on Zoom today looking pretty normal. I guess I’m getting in my head thinking that my manager might think I was lying or something. I’ve never given her any reason to believe I’d do that. I’d just love to hear your thoughts!

You can, but you don’t need to — just like you really don’t need to get specific about any medical issue you’re having (and it’s good to normalize not sharing details, for all sorts of reasons). And it doesn’t look suspicious to take a sick day and then show up looking okay on Zoom soon afterwards; that’s super normal!

It’s also perfectly fine to refer to this as “a flare-up of a chronic condition, but nothing to worry about.”

Related:
how much detail do you have to give when you call in sick?
can I keep mentioning my period at work?

4. How soon is too soon to ask for a raise?

I began a new job three months ago and was brought on to support someone in an existing role and to bring more processes in house. To use a made-up example, I have close to a decade in teapot analysis, with three years most recently having full ownership of all systems in place, the transition to a modern data system, and extensive experience in digitizing and streamlining processes. I was brought in as an expert to help them migrate to this modern system and help overhaul their entire workflow. The person I was brought in to support had experience in entry-level teapot analysis but was thrown into the deep end when she started working here. Additionally, very few of the processes I thought were already in-house are. I didn’t know most of this until I started.

I came to this agency enjoying the prospect of a larger scale overhaul and was offered the middle salary range for the position, which I accepted but was somewhat of a pay cut. However, my last agency was in turmoil because of funding cuts so I felt afraid to negotiate and figured this was what they could offer. My mistake there.

As part of my role, I have access to funding information and know that the person I support, who has only been in the role 18 months, makes a staggering 30% more than me. Since I have been here, I have taken on more than half her workload, have introduced new streamlined workflows, and am on schedule to migrate us and pull more than 50% of what a consultant is doing into our office.

I am feeling caught between a rock and a hard place. While seniority surely factors into some of her wage, they brought me on as an expert with significantly more experience to help them and I am having a hard time reconciling the difference. I am fortunate to work somewhere very stable and get on well with my boss (who also has little experience in teapot analysis). I am really struggling now with the pay difference, both mentally and in terms of my budget. But working in an NGO also means everyone is talking about funding and I don’t want to seem out of touch by bringing this up. Would I be off base to ask about a bump in pay to get me closer to what my coworker is making?

It depends completely on what her job is versus yours. If she’s, say, the director of fundraising and manages donor relationships and you’re the person managing the fundraising database, it makes perfect sense that she’s paid a lot more even though you’re far more skilled at managing the database. In that example, there’s a huge and important part of her job that’s separate from (and generally more senior than) the database work you took over. On the other hand, if she’s the database manager and you’re the one managing the database and bringing all the strategic perspective too, then you have much more of a case for a salary bump to bring you closer to hers.

As a general rule, though, three months is way too soon to ask for a raise unless something significant has changed about the job since you were hired. It doesn’t sound like that’s the case here; it sounds like the motivation behind asking for a raise is really about finding out what your coworker is making. Given that, wait until you’ve been there close to a year and make your case then.

5. Is planning a promotion a work-hours activity?

Should “planning your career growth” happen during work hours, or on your own time?

I’m currently working toward a promotion, and my manager has asked me to propose what my scope of role would be if that were to happen. The idea is to give them talking points to make the case to their boss, and also to make sure we are on the same page about what meeting expectations looks like at the next level.

On whose time and dime should this thinking and planning happen? It’s work-related and I wouldn’t be doing it if not for my job, so it seems pretty straightforwardly a “work hours” thing when you put it that way. But it still feels weird to do that instead of getting ahead with my current workload. My job is one where there’s never really a point where the work is done and I have time left over for other things.

It feels like this is complicated by the fact that this is in service of a promotion, too; obviously in addition to convincing my manager the scope is there at next level, I need to be delivering well at my current level. But perhaps that’s omnipresent imposter syndrome clouding my thinking.

It’s squarely a work activity that shouldn’t need to be on your own time. You’re thinking through a role at the company and how it would be structured and what it would be responsible for and what success metrics would look like. Those are work activities regardless of whether you’re the one doing them or your boss is.

The post managing someone who wanted my job, should I tell my boss I’m having menstrual cramps, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2026/01/managing-someone-who-wanted-my-job-should-i-tell-my-boss-im-having-menstrual-cramps-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=35019