4 thoughts on “Stop being a wimp and manage your people

  1. Strange, some high tech companies in Silicon Valley do not allow spouses or kids. Especially those in stealth mode.

    1. Sometimes I wish that I worked at one of high tech companies just so I wouldn’t have to deal with coworkers’ visitors. We haven’t really seen many spouses (most of my coworkers are unmarried, anyway), but people bring their babies from time to time. Or their dogs. And it’s annoying because it turns into a 30 minute ooh-and-aah session and thanks to the fact that my cubicle is right in the center of the suite, I hear everything. Somehow, these visitors always show up when I’m in the middle of working on something that requires concentration – never when I’m just filing or doing light cleaning…

      I think I’d like a blanket “visitors should be kept to a minimum”, out of the consideration of your coworkers policy – I think I saw some workplace (I want to say it was a gov’t agency) that had this type of policy. I mean, I don’t want to necessarily ban people, but at the same time, some people take things too far.

  2. I’m sure lots of places don’t allow visitors at all. I’ve always worked for companies that allowed visitors, but never had to deal with an obnoxious regular visitor.

  3. My own mom was the worst office visitor. She worked for the same company in a different location so she could freely access my building. I tried many times telling her to please not visit (because she wouldn’t visit just me, she wanted to hang out with “Jilly’s little friends” including my supervisor. She’s the one who made my supervisor aware that I hadn’t graduated from college (it wasn’t a requirement, I had only stated my dates of attendance, and my supervisor just assumed I’d graduated and never brought it up, so I had no idea that it was an assumption she’d made or that it would have possibly made a difference in my candidacy-nevermind that I was a high performer). That changed the relationship with that supervisor for the next 5 years I was there. I asked my supervisor not allow my mom to visit but she wouldn’t back me up on my request. I think she wanted to know what else she might get out of my mom, and it was sadly obvious that I couldn’t manage my own mother. Needless to say, there are many, many issues with my mom that have never been or ever will be resolved, but this one actually hurt my career a little.

    By the way, I did go back and finish that BA and then went on to get my MBA, and I left that company, so that lovely situation can’t happen again 🙁

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