Alison Green - Ask a Manager: How to Navigate Clueless Colleagues, Lunch-Stealing Bosses, and the Rest of Your Life at Work

Ask a Manager is the ultimate playbook for navigating the traditional workforce in a diplomatic but firm way. Alison Green covers just about every conceivable awkward moment you can (and will) experience as an employee, coworker, or boss and gives you a script for how to address and, more important, solve the problem.

E RIN L OWRY , author of Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping By and Get Your Financial Life Together

Ask a Manager is essential reading for anyone who has to navigate the weirdness of office culture, managers who are possibly unhinged, or the dreaded coworker who will just not stop talking. Alison Green is the workplace mentor you always wantedwise, kind, and unflappable.

J OLIE K ERR , author of My Boyfriend Barfed in My HandbagAnd Other Things You Cant Ask Martha

This book should be required reading for anyone who manages or is managedor often feels like the only one who has ever had a bad coworker or needed to give notice or asked for a raise. This book handles just about every work conundrum youve ever stayed up late at night worried about. Id recommend reading itand then conspicuously leaving it in your break room. Green is the work guru weve been reading for years: Of course her book is fantastic!

A LIDA N UGENT , author of Dont Worry, It Gets Worse and You Dont Have to Like Me

Clear and concise in its advice and expansive in its scope, Ask a Manager is the book I wish Id had in my desk drawer when I was starting out (or even, lets be honest, fifteen years in). Alison Greens pragmatic approach to solving workplace dilemmasfrom taking criticism to dishing it outwill not only make you a better, happier employee, it will help you tolerate less-than-perfect managers and put you well on your way to having their job somedayand doing it better.

S ARAH K NIGHT , New York Times bestselling author of The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck,Get Your Sh*t Together, and You Do You

As someone who has lost (happily devoted, rather) countless hours of her life to committing the Ask a Manager archives to memory, Ive been ready for this book for years, in some ways since birth. In some ways I have been genetically coded to have this book in my life since I was born. I dont know anything about having a job, and Alison Green knows so much; she always seems to have the perfect thing to say, the balance between tact and firmness. Every time I think, This is it, this is the Unsolvable Problem, there is nothing anyone could possibly say to address this broken situation, Green will toss out four or five perfect short sentences, and Ill think, Oh, yeah, thatll do it. This book does it.

M ALLORY O RTBERG , author of Texts from Jane Eyre and The Merry Spinster

Alison Green is the resource I wish Id had as a young worker bee. Her advice is sage, straightforward, and empathetic.

A NDI Z EISLER , cofounder of Bitch Media

More than a decade ago, I started a workplace advice column, Ask a Manager. At the time, I was working as the chief of staff for a nonprofit lobbying organization, and I kept seeing people make choices at work that didnt produce the outcomes they wanted. It occurred to me that people could use a place where they could get a managers perspective on their work problems, and thus Ask a Manager was born. I figured Id mainly be answering questions about writing a rsum, asking for a raise, adjusting to a new boss, and other basic aspects of having a job.

Little did I know Id end up spending most of my time fielding much more nuanced questions about how to talk to each other at workfrom what to say to a coworker who wont stop texting you, to what to do when youre allergic to a colleagues perfume, to how to deal with a boss who steals your lunch (seriously).

It turns out that our workplaces are full of people who are frustrated, hurt, or fed upbut arent speaking up about it because they cant figure out what to say or even how to start the conversation. And when people dont know exactly how to say something at work, they often end up saying nothing at allcausing their irritation to fester and grow and leaving the problem unresolved.

I know this because I now receive around sixty letters a day at Ask a Manager from people asking for help with workplace interactions ranging from the mundane to the truly bizarre.

And lets be clear: Im not a perfect manager or colleague. Ive made lots and lots of mistakes, and I definitely dont have all the answers. But in a decade of running Ask a Manager, Ive had to think through a wideand weirdrange of interpersonal issues that arise at work and, in particular, what to say when you need to talk about them.

Surprisingly often, the answers to the questions that my letter writers ask come down to this: Speak up. Thats often all thats neededa conversation. But the reason people dont take that step is that they have no fricking clue what to say.

And thats understandable. Your job is your livelihood, so of course youre wary of injecting tension or weirdness into your encounters with colleagues. Your quality of life at work often depends on having a decent relationship with your coworkers and (especially) with your boss, who controls everything from what work assignments you get to whether youll still have a job next week. So, yes, the stakes are high.

But the stakes are high if you dont speak up, too. When the issue is seriousfor example, if youre not getting paid on timenot speaking up could mean not being able to pay your bills. But even when the issue isnt so crucialeven when its, say, asking your coworker to turn his music down or to stop calling you mladynot speaking up means not having perfectly reasonable conversations, in the name of avoiding minor awkwardness. If you speak upnot adversarially, not aggressively, just calmly and matter-of-factlyyoull build a reputation as someone whos able to navigate tough situations with relative grace. Youll also significantly improve your quality of life at work, because when you speak up appropriately, you improve your working conditions and relationships. (You also might find that those skills are transferable to life outside of work, which is an added bonus.)

By the way, the not adversarially part is pretty crucial. While loads of people choose not to speak up at all and suffer in silence, Ive also watched too many people speak up badly. Theyre too aggressive and they come in too hot, and as a result their perfectly legitimate concerns are lost in the messaging.