Checking in With the Boss
by Rax King

When I started my first office job, as a newly minted executive assistant who’d been hired out of a customer service gig, I was vastly out of my depth. My boss was a chaos-brained CEO who was constitutionally incapable of completing a sentence, much less giving detailed instructions for tasks upon which millions of dollars always seemed to hinge. The years I’d spent absorbing the rage of angry customers hadn’t prepared me for the sedate, mannered confusion of the job I’d just taken, which was in most ways much easier but just incomprehensible enough to keep me anxious about my job security. Right around then I started reading Ask A Manager, Alison Green’s workplace advice column. Though Green occasionally answers letters from workers in food service, retail, and the trades, the bulk of her advice has always been for professional email-senders.
It felt almost like work, covertly reading Green’s guidance to people who cried when they received professional feedback or couldn’t word a business email. When I ignored my mounting pile of bewildering assignments in favor of reading Green’s advice to other executive assistants who were in equally far over their heads, it felt like a pleasantly low-effort form of professional development.
Green started Ask A Manager in 2007, back when everyone with an internet connection was starting a blog. But her project was different from the aimless, who-cares fare that characterized much of the early blogosphere. She had a killer hook—to borrow the words of her introductory post, “If you’re not sure what the hell your manager is thinking, or how to ask for a raise, or whether you might be in danger of getting fired, or how to act in a second interview … ask away.” Who doesn’t want to know how to ask for a raise or predict their own firing?
At first, Green supplied boring entreaties to job applicants to “individualize” [sic] their cover letters for specific jobs, plus listicles (“5 questions job-seekers should ask interviewers”; “9 ways to ruin an interview”). She’d link to other workplace-related blogs, mortared together with pious filler posts about how important it is to tell awesome employees that they’re awesome. She isn’t a thrilling writer—a lingering side effect, maybe, of all the time she spent in a world where the first task of writing is not to thrill, but to communicate in a convincingly managerial dialect. Those early entries evince the chipper eagerness to please that remains an endemic feature of LinkedIn blog posts and Indeed job listings everywhere. References to “rock stars” run rampant, as do “formulate,” “execute,” “drill down,” etc. What is it with managers and the word “formulate”? They’re all addicted to it, and I’ve never heard it used by anyone else. I suppose the purpose of the word, along with its cousins “utilize” and “ping,” is to tell listeners they’re hearing from a capital-M Manager—which is certainly how it sounds on Green’s blog.
It’s a paywall, but a small one
Read this post and get our weekdaily newsletter for $3 a month