Ask Eric: Manager’s affair causes chaos

Dear Eric: I work at a small bank with nine staff members, including myself. We have a dilemma. The president and his assistant are sleeping together. They rush us out of the office at the end of the day and stay back to do who knows what. They also take multi-hour lunch breaks.

The problem is that some of the workers are taking advantage of the situation. They’ve leave early or come in late, and the president doesn’t say anything because he’s afraid of them going to corporate HR and letting them know what he has done. This leaves some of the other employees, who don’t abuse their time, reeling and wanting to go to HR, but it probably would shut the office down because no one here is capable of taking over.

So, do we say something?

Eric says: You have to say something to HR. This is a mess, and the mess — not the whistleblowing — is endangering your job and your customers’ well-being. It may become necessary for the president to be replaced. If that’s the case, there are people who are trained as interim or crisis leaders who can step in.

Being a part of a small office can make it harder to call out bad behavior because there’s a fear of creating huge waves in a small pond. But the waves are already there. The president clearly is not exercising good judgment.

Dear Eric: I am recently widowed and have been living in our home in our quiet neighborhood for more than 50 years. When Jack became ill and close to death, our neighbor Mary was very helpful to me.

We used to email each other every day. I told her I had traded my car for a small luxury SUV. What I got was, “Well, I hope you feel good about yourself.”

She said she couldn’t understand why I complained about the workers I had called to the house to do things for me. I didn’t complain about them. The man who came and moved furniture for Jack’s hospice had an obnoxious smelling cologne that I mentioned to her, and she reacted by asking how I could think ill of someone who had done something so kind for me.

I told her I was done with this assessment of my character. I feel bad about all this, but I didn’t start it. Mary is in a poor financial condition and I’m not, so maybe this is envy. Though I feel badly, I’m not inclined to fix what I thought was a friendship. Am I wrong?

Eric says: An unsolicited character critique is not good friend behavior. Those who are close to us sometimes can see things about us that we can improve. And, with permission, they can share them. But that’s not what Mary is doing.

It sounds like she’s working through some resentments — perhaps about money, perhaps about class, perhaps about something else entirely. But it’s up to her to be upfront with that, rather than resorting to passive-aggression.

If you want to see if there’s something to resurrect in this friendship, you tell her, “Something changed in our relationship, and I’d like to talk about why. Are you open to having a conversation about it?” You’ll both want to use “I” statements.