It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager and I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.
There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.
Remember the letter-writer who wanted to ask for a hotel room far from his coworkers because of PTSD-related night terrors? Here’s the update.
I want to thank all the commenters who responded to the original letter. Based on their feedback and learning more about how block bookings work, I decided to go to the conference. I also did some double-checking on how my workplace had handled reservations like this before, and discovered that if I didn’t want to wait for them to arrange everything, I could arrange the hotel part of things myself and submit that for reimbursement. While I learnt a lot from the commenters about what a block booking in a hotel actually is, and how mistaken I had been about what it entailed, I still felt it would be easier to have handled the booking separately and have that for an excuse about where I ended up if one of my coworkers or the office admins got curious about things. Maybe that’s a little cowardly of me, but I really didn’t feel I could trust myself to be blasé about my night terrors in the moment if something came up. Ultimately I booked the hotel and conference tickets within a few weeks of writing to you and prepared to submit them for reimbursement.
And then the world decided to take a turn for the worse. I had written to you before the 2024 election happened, and my employer lies firmly at the intersection of higher education and another field that Trump and DOGE targeted extensively for funding cuts, starting functionally from day one. My area of expertise and the focus area of the researchers I support were additionally targeted as undesirable by a number of cabinet officials in the new regime, based on their personal beliefs. All of which meant that Trump’s victory had a rather seismic impact on departmental priorities and funding. Massive amounts of our grant funds were frozen within a week or two of his election, and one of the immediate responses of my department was repurposing all professional development funds to pay operational expenses while we waited to see how things would shake out. Reimbursement for me attending the conference, I was told, was flatly out of the question, and we wouldn’t be sending the whole department anymore. We might not be sending anyone who wasn’t paying their own way.
When I tried to discuss that with my associate dean, I was told that if we weren’t sending any of the luminaries from the department, reimbursing me would cause far too much friction in the department. I was strongly encouraged to cancel my bookings and get what refunds I was able to, since even attending on my own dime was likely to be perceived poorly by those with more departmental status and authority over my work and future. I got pretty depressed in the wake of that conversation, and honestly didn’t know what to do.
I had one of those Google photo retrospectives pop up on my phone a couple of weeks after that conversation, showing a picture of me and a mentor I had been paired with by my employer, back when I started working for them, and I reached out to them for some guidance — probably the first time I’d ever proactively done so. “Go,” they said. “This is the best thing that could have happened for you. Now no one here is going to set what panels and events you need to or can’t attend, or try to influence who you meet and connect with. If you can afford it, even if it’s painful, you should go. And maybe book your flights now while they’re cheap.”
So I went. It was painful financially (though I benefited from applying for some grants, which helped to offset the pain), and my department wouldn’t even let me count the time at the conference as time worked, so I had to burn more than a week’s worth of PTO for the multi-day event and travel. With the departmental plans scuttled, I didn’t have to worry about being near them in the hotel rooms, but I did listen to the commenters who suggested letting the hotel know about my night terrors ahead of time. As people predicted, they were easily able to accommodate the request to be somewhere secluded, and while I can’t know if I disturbed other guests at all, I can say I didn’t have issues with police knocking at the hotel room door.
Being on my own for the conference was, as my mentor predicted, actually really beneficial. I ended up attending a number of sessions that were less about the skills related to my current position, and more focused on the experiences of management and managers, and the impacts other institutions were feeling based on the administration’s policies. A lot of that was scary to hear about; many departments like ours at peer institutions were seeing 40–60% reductions in headcounts. I also got to spend time in the vendor hall and see all sorts of new tools and talk with a lot of account reps about areas where my department wasn’t using purchased tools and their features fully or as intended.
So I brought that back with me. When I wasn’t in a session at the conference, I was scratching out notes about what I was hearing and learning, and how we might be able to apply it. A vendor showed me how to leverage automation in a service we’d previously done manually? Into the notebook it went, so I could find out who the owners were. New ways of billing for services we rendered to get around the reduction in indirect cost reimbursements? Probably going to be unpopular, but who knows, maybe it would be helpful — someone was probably responsible for talking with accounting, even if I didn’t know who. What might be accomplished by me, what lay in other people’s purviews, who would these slides best be connected with — I ended up with something in excess of a notebook’s worth of notes.
And then when I got back, I started actually doing it. Two of our more outspoken change-resistant staff ended up out on FMLA leave at the same time, and I kind of just stepped into the vacuum. I ended up bringing three fairly notable automations to our service provisions by the end of the year, freeing up more staff time for other, more valuable initiatives. I bought personal subscriptions to some vendor products so the researchers I was working with could showcase policy impacts of their research, which they leveraged to convince private donors to support research when funding was tight. I passed on information to coworkers about things that might help them, and apparently that’s part of how you build political capital — no one ever told me. I’ve now found myself being asked to be included on projects by people three and four layers up the org chart from me. It certainly wasn’t all me moving things forward — lots of my coworkers and our leadership have been doing a lot of work to make sure we’re valued and funded. Consequently, our department has only seen about a 10% reduction in headcount, and we’ve even been allowed to backfill some vacant positions.
One of those backfills involved me being promoted to a management role towards the end of the year.
