NEWS YOU CAN USE: “Cry at work if you never want to succeed,” Kyle Smith writes at the New York Post:
Crying is an absolutely spiffing way to get what you want — in the short term. But once you’ve hosted a one-person snivel party, people tend to remember it. And nobody wants to see it again. People will start finding excuses to gently steer you away from challenging situations. They’ll do your work themselves. They’ll find someone else to give the hard-deadline gotta-have-this-now project.
All of which means you’ll become devalued and marginalized. If you want to secure the promotion, snag the bonus, make it to the top, you’ll have to prove you can do the tough stuff. Women will be set back 100 years if they start believing it’s OK to cry on the job.
But hey, OK, fine, if you just want to remain on the Girl Track for the rest of your life, by all means interrupt the weekly departmental meeting to fill your empty venti cup with your hot, salty tears. But take a good look around you as you do so. In my experience, women bosses tend to be even less sympathetic than men to female issues. Why? Because women bosses know what it’s like to be women. They managed to make it anyway, and they think other women should, too. Bosses like employees who remind them of themselves.
Which dovetails nicely with this incredible vignette in a New York Times piece titled, “What Happens When Millennials Run the Workplace?”
[Chris Altchek, Mic.com’s 28-year-old CEO] recalled a companywide meeting last September that coincided with the religious holidays Yom Kippur and Eid al-Adha. An Anglo-Pakistani employee asked why management had announced a flexible time off policy for the Jewish holiday, but not for its Muslim counterpart.
“So I told her, ‘Great point, being inclusive and respectful of all religious affiliations is incredibly important to Mic,’” Mr. Altchek said.
Afterward, in front of a smaller group, he was approached by a younger, entry-level employee who said that there were two words missing from his reply. “I was a bit confused and said, ‘O.K., what were those?’” he recalled. “And she said: ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t hear an apology.’”
Mr. Altchek did not think such a comment belonged in a workplace, especially his.
“I was a little taken aback by the tone, but I told her I would address it and make sure the person who asked the question wasn’t offended by the answer,” he said. “You have to control your temper. It was in front of a bunch of people, which was probably better, because I was forced to be calm.”
That employee is no longer with the company. (Mr. Altchek said she was let go for “performance-related issues.”)
As Sonny Bunch of the Washington Free Beacon tweets, “I would take great pleasure in firing this person in front of the entire staff,” adding, “I hope the girl who did this writes an open letter about the trauma she suffered on Medium.” Heh, indeed.™