our brainstorming meetings are awful, a work friend divorced their spouse and propositioned me, and more
It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…
1. Why are all our brainstorming meetings terrible?
This has happened in pretty much every brainstorming session in my career, and I am losing my mind.
We organize a brainstorm-session, which is “throw everything on the wall, and eventually you reach something brilliant nobody has thought of before.” Or somebody, in a meeting goes, “Any ideas or suggestions? Come on, let’s hear some ideas.”
Very important during brainstorming: “No”s are not allowed, to keep momentum going.
But the moment the first person offers a suggestion, somebody goes, “No that is not working” or “that is a dumb idea”, or “why would you even suggest that,” crippling the entire process. Now everybody is anxious and not saying anything, for fear of being publicly humiliated. A few times, people were especially encouraged to come up with ideas, and the first ones were immediately shut down for not immediately solving the problem at hand. I guess I have been too optimistic about this, but isn’t the point of brainstorming to see if maybe something could work, instead of immediately dismissing everything? How can I stop people from doing that and ensure this is working more effectively in the future?
I wrote back and asked, “Is someone in charge of setting ground rules at these meetings and then facilitating the conversation?”
No ground rules were ever set or introduced. In larger meetings there was a moderator nominally in charge, but didn‘t really do much beyond starting the session, or saying something like, “Let‘s collect ideas for 10 minutes” and then never ensuring things are going smoothly. In smaller groups (four people, brainstorm amongst yourselves for 15 minutes), no one is explicitly in charge.
That’s the problem! All meetings, including brainstorming meetings, need someone who’s in charge of facilitating so they don’t go off the rails — and in brainstorm meetings, that person needs to lay out clear ground rules at the start and then ensure the group adheres to them. The fact that every brainstorming session in your career has lacked that is pretty weird (unless you’ve spent your whole career in this one place?), but that’s the reason for what you’re encountering.
Normally you’d have a facilitator lay out expectations up-front (here are some good ones) and then actively engage during the meeting to remind people of those rules and reinforce what they want to see.
2. A work friend divorced their spouse and propositioned me
Years ago, a coworker (A) befriended me. This person recently announced that their spouse (B) filed for divorce. Almost immediately after saying this, A propositioned me. I ended the friendship and blocked them.
At first, I thought A was simply gregarious and outgoing. Early in the friendship, they introduced me to B and their child, whom I consider lovely people, and I became like a family friend. But looking back, it’s clear A had feelings for me. I also suspect they relocated the family to a state with softer divorce laws.
I eventually contacted B and was pleasantly surprised when they thanked me for reaching out: the divorce filing was a complete shock to them and they felt isolated. Since then, all remnants of my goodwill toward A have completely shattered.
I may have escaped a potentially harrowing situation with A and I just want to go away for a while and forget it all. I don’t want to abandon B, but I really wish we could have met some other way.
What are your thoughts? Could I have handled this whole thing better? How can I avoid befriending people like A again?
A is the person who could have handled this better, not you. You’re just a bystander.
You can’t always avoid befriending people like A. People can be one way at work and with friends, and a completely different way within their marriage, and yet another way with people they’re interested in sexually/romantically. If you only see one of those sides of them, you can be blindsided if you get a glimpse of a different one. That doesn’t mean you did anything wrong or should have seen it coming. Now, maybe with A, there were earlier signs of their interest in you — but just because you can see those signs in retrospect, that doesn’t mean you could have reasonably been expected to recognize them earlier.
It’s also worth noting that you don’t really know what went on in A and B’s marriage or in their divorce. A says B filed for divorce and B says A did. It doesn’t really need to matter to you, a party outside the marriage. The only thing you really know for sure that A did wrong was propositioning you right after announcing the ending of their marriage, but even that — depending on the specifics of how they went about it — doesn’t necessarily indicate they’re a terrible person (although the details really matter here and there aren’t many details in your letter to judge from).
In any case, if you feel like you’ve learned things about A that you wish you knew earlier, it’s worth reflecting on the friendship and whether there were earlier signs you ignored or didn’t see then but do now. You might find lessons to take away for next time. But it’s also possible that this is just a sad situation for A and B and you don’t need (and aren’t positioned) to draw conclusions beyond that.
3. My job is to help my coworkers, but they always turn down my help
I’m leaving my current job, but I’m curious about how you would handle a recurring communication problem I’ve had here. The general pattern is that my boss asks me to help my coworker with an upcoming task or project, but when I relay this to my coworker, they don’t want the help. Or the coworker will verbally accept the offer of help, but then tell me they don’t actually want help when I follow up about scheduling a time to do it together, or never get back to me about when they’re planning to do it, or do it themself before the time we had scheduled.
My job is definitionally a support role. When people don’t want me to help them, I don’t have enough work to do, my career doesn’t advance, and my boss doesn’t get what he’s paying for. I understand and accept that my coworkers might not trust the quality of my work, since I’ve made some highly-visible mistakes. I’m just not sure what my path forward would be if I were staying in the job.
I am the most junior member of the team; this is my first job out of college and I’ve been here two and a half years. I don’t have scheduled one-on-one meetings with my boss or anyone else, and it can be tricky to catch people around the workplace for casual conversations (I’m hesitant to interrupt people when they’re working with headphones in, which is most of the time). So, it’s been hard to find opportunities to name patterns or ask for help. Thoughts?
This is very much a “talk to your boss” situation. You’re leaving so it doesn’t apply now, but ideally when you spotted the problem, you would have talked to your boss about it — framing it as, “I’m finding this happens a lot and I’m wondering about the best way to handle it.” There are a bunch of ways your boss might respond to that. It’s possible that she wouldn’t do much of anything, but in other cases she might decide to make it clearer to your team mates that she wants you assisting with those projects, or give you more training so people are more eager to accept the help, or coach you on how to approach people differently (or when and how to follow up with them), or just dig more into what’s going on to figure out how to solve it.
My hunch is that your hesitation to interrupt people is probably playing a role (and that your hesitation to have ever raised this with your boss is part of the same thing), and maybe the high-visibility mistakes mattered too (or it’s also possible that they played no role, who knows). But this is very much the kind of thing to discuss with your manager. If she’s hard to get ahold of, you’ve got to be assertive about it (which can be something like sending a message saying “I need 10 minutes with you this week to talk about a workflow issue,” and here’s more advice on that too).
4. My resume has two very short jobs in a row
I moved to a new city in April and had to find a new job after a two-year stint at a larger consulting firm. I joined a start-up company in April, which unfortunately shut down and laid everyone off in June. I then panic-started at another start-up (in June), but am quickly realizing this isn’t the right place for me (for several reasons).
Now I’m struggling to figure out how to apply to jobs with two three-month job stints. I’ve read you say several times to not even show the shorter stint jobs, but this is two in a row. I’m also unsure how to mention what I’ve been doing since April if/when it comes to the interview stage, or how to talk about why I’m looking to move now.
Leave off the first one (April-June). Moving in April and taking your current job in June isn’t a big deal; it would be normal for it to take a few months to find a job in a new city. If you’re directly asked if you were working during that time, you shouldn’t lie, but it probably won’t even come up.
That way you’ve just got one job that you’re looking to leave quickly because it’s not a good fit — just like Monday’s letter-writer. Like them, you just need to really make sure this next one is stable and somewhere you’ll be willing to stay for a while.
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