The People Who Can’t Stop Calling Their Spouse’s Boss to Chew Them Out

Few people are as knee-deep in our work-related anxieties and sticky office politics as Alison Green, who has been fielding workplace questions for a decade now on her website Ask a Manager. In Direct Report, she spotlights themes from her inbox that help explain the modern workplace and how we could be navigating it better.

If you’ve ever listened to a friend or partner complain about their job and thought to yourself, I’d love to give their boss a piece of my mind, you’re in good company. Most people leave it at that, but there’s a small but persistent subset of people who actually do get involved, calling their spouse’s boss to demand a raise, emailing a manager about an unfair performance review, or otherwise inserting themselves into workplace issues that aren’t theirs to handle. If you think this is weird, it is. It’s also more common than you might expect, judging by the letters to my workplace advice column over the years.

I’ve continually been surprised by how many people I hear from who want to contact their loved ones’ managers (or already have) or who were on the receiving end of that kind of contact from an employee’s family. Sometimes, that contact is pretty malicious: In one case, which Slate covered in our Good Job column, an employee’s ex sent details about their adventurous sex life to their employer, trying, and succeeding, to get them fired (horrific). Most of the time, though, people’s spouses have their partner’s best interest in mind.

This person wanted to ask his wife’s boss to give her work that would make her happier:

My wife has been working at her current position for over five years in HR. However, she isn’t trained in this, and she has a master’s degree in an unrelated field that is actually the primary focus of the company. Because she is hardworking and competent, her boss refuses to see her as a fit for positions within the company that she is actually trained in. She has stated her desire to move into this other area, but so far it has been ignored.

As her husband, I want to see her happy, and she is not. She is incredibly intelligent and very gifted, and it bothers me greatly that she isn’t working in the arena that she is trained for. I would like to write a letter to her boss on her behalf, but I don’t want to jeopardize her job. Is this a bad idea?

Yes, it is a bad idea! It’s natural to want to see your spouse happy, but going around her to contact her boss directly will undermine her professionally and make it look as if she can’t advocate for herself. It’s also inappropriate enough to risk blowing up your wife’s reputation at her job.

This person felt that his wife was overworked and wanted not only to contact her manager but to go over her manager’s head to their boss:

Even as I write this at midnight, my wife has gone back to update some work because, at 4 p.m., her manager asked her to complete a piece of work, she finished it at 7 p.m., and she logged off and went downstairs. Then, when I went upstairs at 11 to go to bed, she checked her email—her manager had said it wasn’t what she had asked for and wanted it changed by 9 a.m. … She would kill me if I fought her battles, so I can’t do anything in the open, but I’ve been thinking about sending an anonymous email to the manager’s superiors explaining what a piece of work she is and how she’s effectively bullying my wife by setting unrealistic expectations.

Think that’s bad? This manager gave an employee a glowing performance review but mentioned that people had begun avoiding her because they were frustrated that she brought up her husband and children in every conversation, even entirely work-related ones. Guess who he heard from shortly afterward?

The next day, I received an angry email from her husband. He was upset about me insulting his wife and wanted me to apologize to her, as well as him and their children. He made references to freedom of speech and went on and on. It was a long email. I did not respond since he doesn’t work here and I felt his email was out of line. Now he won’t stop calling. I don’t answer when he does—I just let the call go to voicemail.

For her part, my employee says she agrees with her husband and doesn’t see anything wrong with what he is doing. She has continued to bring up her husband and children in every conversation. … Her husband won’t stop contacting me, even though he doesn’t work here and I’ve never met him.

And lest these accounts make you assume it’s only husbands interfering with their wives’ jobs, it’s wives too:

The wife of one of our employees called me to complain about how often our husband receives work calls after hours. He’s in a job where he’s on call some of the time, and we were clear when we hired him that he’d sometimes get calls in the evening. I stammered out an awkward response about how if her husband had concerns, he could speak with his manager, but I really wanted to tell her that if she objects to it, she needs to talk to her husband about it, not us.

Spousal interference can even get in the way of a partner being hired for a job:

I have a candidate in our hiring process, Bob. He seems to be a good fit for the position, but I am having difficulties communicating with him because his wife, Sue, is very involved to the point of interfering. If I leave a voicemail for Bob, Sue will call me without Bob being present. If I am able to get Bob on the line and he is with Sue, he will put the call on speakerphone. Sue is also the one responding to the emails I have sent requesting training certificates and confirming booking times. She asks all the typical questions candidates themselves would ask: travel, accommodations, process specifics, deadlines for the documents I need, where and when the supplemental training will happen. Bob said she likes to “be involved.” I told him that while I appreciate that, it makes it difficult to complete the onboarding process when she is as involved as she is, and I need to have confidence that he can perform independently.

I have let Sue know that I cannot discuss Bob’s employment with her, but she continues to call and email. … I’m tempted to pull his offer and find another candidate, as this is proving to be much more work on my end to manage both Sue and Bob, and to be frank, this is reflecting very poorly on Bob’s capabilities of being independent and competent.

Sometimes it’s parents inserting themselves into their adult children’s work lives, as this manager relays:

An employee’s father emailed me asking me to call him. Since the employee (whom I’ll call Fergus) is currently out of the country on business, I was worried that something had happened to him, so I called his dad back right away. He was very cagey but finally came out that he wanted to talk to Fergus’ boss to find out if Fergus had been “properly briefed” about the dangers … of his travel? Of his job in general? I think he was focused on the travel, but he refused to be specific about his concerns. For the record, our work is in a somewhat defense-related field but not directly dangerous, nor is the place the employee is visiting dangerous (Western Europe).

I asked if Fergus knew he was calling and he said no, and that he didn’t want him to know. I told him that we are not in the habit of talking to employees’ family members without their consent, and that if he had a concern, he should bring it up to his son himself. I am more than happy to talk to the employee if he is concerned, but I didn’t feel comfortable talking to his dad.

This seems to happen particularly around vacations, when one person wants to plan a surprise getaway for their partner and contacts the partner’s manager to try to secretly arrange for them to have time off:

My boyfriend’s family and many of his close friends live in the U.K. I would like to surprise him with a trip to the U.K. for Christmas and his birthday so that he can spend it with the people who mean the most to him. However, in order to do so, I would need to contact his manager to ask about booking time off for him. I know that he is allowed to have one week of vacation per year and he has not taken his vacation this year. How would I go about asking my boyfriend’s manager to request time off for him?

This puts bosses in an awkward position. For one, it demands that they get involved in the details of their employees’ personal lives, which is an obvious overstep. For two, it presumes that bosses should know private, minute details about their workers—such as whether they really want to use their vacation time or would prefer to save it for something else, whether this trip might leave them without any remaining time for something they’re already planning on their own, or whether the employee would even want to go on the trip at all (and might prefer to use their job as an excuse not to!). It can also cause work problems, since the employee won’t know they can’t count on that time to complete projects, meet deadlines, or schedule important meetings. If you want to surprise your partner with a vacation, it’s far better to ask them to arrange the time off themselves, while making the destination itself the surprise.

To be clear, there are times when someone might genuinely need to contact their spouse’s or family member’s employer, but those times are limited to the person being hospitalized or otherwise too ill to speak for themselves. In that case, by all means it’s appropriate to let their manager know what’s going on! Otherwise, meddling in someone’s work life will undermine their professional reputation and make the meddler look alarmingly controlling. That’s not to say that people can’t help their loved ones with work situations; they absolutely can. But the way to do it is by being a sounding board and offering advice behind the scenes, not by demanding a raise or protesting a performance review on their behalf.