I’m an executive director in an industrial equipment distributor and, as our business is facing a downturn, it seems a good time to invest in my education and apply for a two-month advanced management programme at Harvard Business School. But my chairman has been extremely negative, refusing to pay for the course and making clear he does not think it a good use of my time. I really want to do this and can afford to pay for it, but I wonder if it is madness to make an investment in myself that may amount to damaging my prospects with my current employer.
Director, male, 42

Lucy’s answer

Yes, you are mad. I’ve just checked the Harvard website and see you are proposing to spend $60,000 on something that promises flatulently to turn “senior executives into indispensable leaders”. I have hardly ever come across people who were indispensable leaders and the idea that anyone could become one by dint of an eight-week course is fantasy. The website goes on to promise that “participants [will] leave equipped to make the tough decisions required to manage through the downturn”.

The first tough decision on how to manage in a downturn has already been made by your boss: ban all management training courses that serve to make employees more attractive to rival employers.

You say you see this course as an investment in yourself. In that case, you need to think of the likely returns. If you intend to stay with your present employer, these returns will be negative. You will irritate your chairman by going away and irritate him even more when you come back spouting the stuff that you have picked up in your short time there.

If, however, you see this course as a way out, there might be some point to it. Harvard is a badge, and some employers are still impressed by it. You might make contacts that could be worth something, too.

If this is what you have in mind, then I’d put it on hold. You claim that this is a good time for such an investment as business is slow; I think it’s a rotten time as no one is hiring. I suggest you try to forget about it for a year. If you are then still wedded to the idea and if the economy is picking up a bit, perhaps you should think again.

But I can think of other things I’d rather do with $60,000.

Twice a week, I travel into London for work, which takes two hours each way. What is the best use of my time on the train? Should I see it as an extension of my office and continue to do project work? Should I save it for the mundane but important stuff like filing emails? Should I improve my CV by learning Spanish? Or should I chill out and watch The Wire? My family thinks I’m a McNulty-obsessed workaholic at the best of times, and kick up a fuss if I do any of these outside office hours.
Management consultant, female, 44

Lucy’s answer

You should watch The Wire. Not merely because it will give you the most pleasure – it will give your family most pleasure, too. I’m married to a workaholic just like you. I tolerate the endless hours hunched over the computer. But what I don’t tolerate are the further hours hunched over the TV watching The Wire. Work is work and I have a respect for it. I have no respect for this wretched series that is so proud of being realistic that you can’t understand what anyone is saying.

There is a lot of The Wire, but not enough to fill eight hours a week – which raises the problem of what to do with the rest of your time on the train. The reason this is a problem is because we don’t really know if a commute is work or home. It feels a bit like work, as we don’t do it voluntarily, but we do it in our own time. I suggest you solve the problem by using your management consulting skills and draw three columns and label them Work, Commute and Home. Write down all the things that can be done in each. Sleeping can be done on the train and at home but not, usually, in the office. Most work tasks can be done in all three. You’ll find the nicest home tasks – seeing family and friends, dancing, gardening, and so on can be done only at home. So, the aim is to use the hours on the train to release as much time as possible to do things at home. See it as the place for computer games, ringing the plumber, paying bills and so on. Don’t use it for work e-mails unless that means you will be able to spend more time at home. Otherwise you simply free up time at work that you will then fritter away pointlessly.

And whatever you do, do not spend time improving your CV. It sounds as if your CV is fine as it is.

I recently received a call from a headhunter for referral about one of my former staff. This person had done a good job for me and I certainly would have given him a positive reference. But I had heard that he had been fired by his new boss for fraud. I had not investigated the question further, so this was hearsay only. I had a split second to decide, as the headhunter would have understood hesitation as a negative. I decided to talk only about what I personally knew and gave him a positive reference. Did I do the right thing?
Manager, male, 55

Lucy’s answer

Of course you did the right thing. The headhunter wanted to know what you thought about this man when he was working for you, and you told him. He did not want to know what rumours you had heard about him subsequently. It is the headhunter’s job to hunt those down and find out whether there is anything in them. Whether he is competent to do this is another matter.

When giving a reference, one has two duties of fairness: to the future employer and to the ex-employee. You can get into trouble with the law if you are unfair to either. A reference in which you are unfairly damning can result in a suit from the old employee; one where you recommend someone who did a terrible job for you can land you in court too. As a result, many employers limit all references to a few tediously unhelpful details such as name, job title and dates.

This seems to me a shocking waste. It is fantastically unlikely that someone will sue if you are acting in good faith. And these taciturn references end up unfair to everyone: good employees don’t get the reference they deserve and future employers are even more in the dark than they need be. If your man worked well for you, he deserves to be recommended.

Even so, I can see why you feel vaguely uncomfortable. If this man turns out to be a Robert Maxwell, you may feel you are playing a part in his future career in fraud. In fact, you aren’t. You are just telling the truth as it seemed to you.

But I suspect you are also anxious because the rumours have shaken your own judgment and you wonder whether someone who struck you as a good egg might have been rotten. You should not worry on this score either. It is a fact of office life that one can work with someone for years without having the faintest idea what they are really like.

I was a director in M&A at a big investment bank and quit in February. I could see the writing on the wall and hated my job anyway. I joined a small outfit that does interesting work with better hours, but I took a 50 per cent pay cut on my base salary. Since my bonus expectations are muted, I suspect I took about an 80 per cent cut overall. I thought I would get past that and focus on the job challenges and the new environment, but I find myself resenting my employer and myself for being so stupid. Should I quit and sit on the beach like everyone else?
Executive director, male, 31

Lucy’s answer

First, I want to salute your courage in admitting that money matters to you. This unfashionable view has so got up the noses of Financial Times readers that they have quite forgotten their manners in the responses they left on FT.com.

This week the outgoing head of Shell put forward a more palatable view when he claimed that a 50 per cent pay cut would have had no effect on his work.Yet he hasn’t put his goody-goody theory to the test – and you have. You found that halving your salary cut your enthusiasm. I am sure it would reduce mine, too.

I think much of what is making you cross is your own failure to predict how you would feel in this new, badly paid job. Yet I don’t accept that your experiment has been a disaster, as you learnt two important lessons: first, you don’t like feeling underpaid; and second, jobs that promise to be interesting often
aren’t.

Your best course of action is to jack in the new job at once and head for the beach. This too may turn out to be a mistake but if so, you ill learn a third, even better lesson: how much having a job matters to you.

My guess is that you will be no happier on the beach. You will resent the fact that you are being paid nothing at all to watch other people sitting on the beach being paid nothing either.

Once you have learnt that not working is not fun, you will be in better shape when things pick up again. By then you may find it’s rather nice taking home a fat salary for doing something that, by the sound of it, you are really rather good at.

I am leaving my job after 19 years and taking “early retirement”. My question concerns leaving drinks. What I would like on my last day is just to slip away with no goodbyes and no fuss. However, this is not the done thing, which is to invite the entire office for drinks, put one’s credit card behind the bar and give a gracious speech. Even if I accept that I need to do something like this – although I am far from convinced – do I have to invite everyone? There are several people I will not miss and who I feel no need to socialise with. And just how much money do I have to put aside?
Manager, female, 52

Lucy’s answer

There are four arguments for inviting the whole office out for a drink. It is the done thing. Not doing it can cause offence. You may need to work with these people again, so it’s wise to butter them up. And it will make you feel better to tie up the past 19 years with a pretty bow.

All four arguments are feeble. Leaving drinks may be the done thing, but you don’t have to do it. One of the joys of early retirement is that office conventions need no longer concern you.

Not giving a party won’t cause offence — there are so many leaving dos now that one fewer may be a cause for celebration. Nor will a drinks party help you get work in the future, as 19 years’ experience will surely count for more to former colleagues than a glass of plonk.

The only decent argument is the fourth: leaving parties can make one feel better about going. But if you think buying drinks will make you feel worse, and poorer, then I’m sure you’re right.

A leaving party is a bid for immortality in the minds of one’s colleagues; if you have any colleagues who you care about being immortal to, you should do something, but do it your own way. To have drinks in a nearby pub is a waste of money as your dreary do will merge with everyone else’s. The most memorable leaving party I’ve been to was given by a delightfully eccentric woman who slipped out of the office quietly on her last day, just as you would like to. Three months later, she hired a cinema and subjected chosen colleagues to a three-hour film of Don Giovanni. I will never forget her.

I am a PA to an extremely volatile boss. Over the years I have developed a good working relationship with him – I understand his little ways and work around them. I also have – or had – a good relationship with his wife, with whom I often talk on the phone. The two of us sometimes joke about his lack of organization and about his tendency to forget appointments and then blame someone else. However, since last Monday he has been cold and distant and keeps referring sarcastically to his “famous lack of organisation”. I am certain that his wife has said something to him. Is there anything I can do to rectify the situation?
PA, female, 36

Lucy’s answer

Talking about people behind their backs is never wise. But being wise all the time is dull, and if you work for someone who is volatile and tiresome – as your boss sounds – you clearly need to be able to moan about him from time to time.

The danger is that if you moan to A about B and A suddenly takes it into her head to tell B, then you are in the soup. I’ve been caught out a few times this way, and it is frightfully awkward. The only consolation is that one then marches up to A, gives them a rocket and watches them squirm.

Alas, as the snitch is his wife, you can’t do this. Any attempt to discuss it with her will make it worse.

God knows what was going through her mind at the time. Perhaps she is jealous of you. Or perhaps she is so utterly boiling over with rage against her disorganised husband that, in attacking him, she enlisted your support to underline what a hopeless, pathetic case he is.

Understandably, he is furious to think the two of you are ganging up on him. He will feel roundly humiliated, which means you must not make any attempt to discuss it with him. Even if you apologise, any mention of the incident will remind him of it and increase his humiliation.

He is dealing with this by being a baby, by sulking and making sarcastic asides. The best route for you is to be excessively, exaggeratedly grown up. Do your job fabulously well. Appear oblivious to sulks and comments. If you look neither hurt nor embarrassed by his asides he will desist eventually. These sulks are too tiring to keep up indefinitely if one is not being rewarded with a response.

If he doesn’t come round quickly, you may feel inclined to find a better boss. But it might be easier to stick with this one and find a better confidante instead.

My husband works in M&A at associate level. Lots of his colleagues have been fired, so he now works every day until midnight and often at weekends too. In his little time off, he sleeps, watches TV and sometimes sees a couple of friends for a drink. He started this job because he hoped to become rich, but now it’s clear that he won’t get much, if any, bonus this year. He has become stressed and nervous, he sleeps with his BlackBerry and just keeps on complaining. He wants to look for a new job – but has no idea what he wants to do. I think it’s too risky for him to quit in current times but his job is damaging both of us.
Client advisor, female, 28

Lucy’s answer

I wonder which part of your predicament bothers you most.

Is it that the expected riches have not materialised? Is it the way your husband works the whole time? Is it his incessant complaining? Is it the BlackBerry by the bed? Is it the way he watches telly, sleeps and sees his friends? Or is it that even though he claims to hate his job, he can’t think of anything he’d like better?

I can see that all of these could be annoying – with the possible exception of sleeping, which deserves a little tolerance. If he were my husband, what I would dislike most would be his wanting to leave but being clueless about what to do instead. If he can’t think of alternatives, the endless complaint does not deserve endless sympathy. For now, he is stuck where he is. Unless he has a private fortune – which you imply he hasn’t – it would be madness to quit until he has another job or scheme up his sleeve.
For you, this means finding a way of being less bothered by it all. As far as the money goes, I assume that will get better if he sticks it out. The hours, however, are not likely to improve much. This sort of work demands a lot of time. The BlackBerry beside the bed strikes me as something you should learn to live with: I’ve never known why people make quite such a fuss about this. We all have other distracting things by our beds – books and telephones and newspapers – and so long as we sometimes close them and put them away, it isn’t the end of the world. Having drinks with friends isn’t that bad either: at least he has friends, which is more than many unhappy men do.

The only really troubling thing in this picture is that he never seems to make any time for you. If he isn’t prepared to be nice to you in his spare time, I fear that a change of job may not make things much better.

I have recruited a sales person whose job is to represent our business to senior types in banks. He constantly uses the construct “we was”, as in: “We was hoping you’d recognise us as a sophisticated supplier.” He also uses a lot of jargon, which creates a poor impression. He peppers all his communications – spoken and written – with “piece” and “reach out” and “going forward” and “value added”. When I mentioned it, he said this was just the way he talked and, in any case, was normal usage and I shouldn’t worry about it. Should I?
Manager, male, 50

Lucy’s answer

Yes, you should worry very much – not that your salesman can’t talk properly, but that he doesn’t even pretend to pay attention when you tell him off.

This reflects badly on one or other of you: either he is an intolerable upstart – as well as a murderer of language. Or else you are a liability as a manager. Not only do you hire people without having listened to what they say, you can’t get them to pay you even the most cursory compliment of appearing to listen to what you say.

As for the jargon and the dismal grammar, many readers of this column fondly believe that people who sell things should be able to express themselves clearly and elegantly. This is utter rot. Some of the very best salesmen talk the most awful drivel and have emerged from school without any flair for grammar. Think of
traders on market stalls and their signs “Avocado’s – 3 for £1”. Shoppers passing by don’t think: I’m not going to buy them because the apostrophe is misplaced.

The only reason for minding is if the jargon and weak grammar are at loggerheads with the image of your product, or if they make what he is saying hard to understand. The first could be the case if the product you are selling to these “senior types” is quite pukka, meaning that a barrow boy isn’t the right person to sell it.
As for the jargon, this matters even less. Most of the senior types I know in banks can’t utter a sentence without throwing in a couple of “reaching outs” or “pieces” and so will surely embrace your salesman as one of their own kind.

My graver worry is not about the “we was” or the “reaching out”. It is the fact that this man can’t express himself comprehensibly at all. Did he really say: “We was hoping you’d recognise us as a sophisticated supplier”? Ignoring the off-putting Uriah Heepishness of this sentence, the real stumbling block is “sophisticated supplier”. What on earth is that?