Workplaces aren’t supposed to pressure people into making expensive, high-stakes decisions before they’re ready, especially not under the guise of encouragement.
Her boss has been relentlessly pushing her coworker to do something she isn’t ready for. The result? Sky-high anxiety, daily lectures, and a tense environment that has everyone on edge.
When she finally spoke up and told her boss to step back, his response wasn’t exactly professional. Now, she’s wondering if she did the right thing, or if she just made herself a target.
This woman has a career in veterinary medicine, and this is an industry that relies heavily on education and proper licensing for employees.
She and her boss are both licensed veterinary technicians, and her boss has more experience than she does, as he’s been doing this for longer than she has.
Their clinic sits in a tiny town, and they do general wellness, so it’s extremely difficult for them to find quality people to work with them.
She has one coworker named Nancy who has the correct background education-wise for their industry, but she has not received a license.
“Nancy has shown interest in getting her license. To get it, you take a very expensive, thorough exam. It costs close to $400 to take the national exam,” she explained.
“Since Nancy showed interest, our boss, whom we will call Chad, has constantly pressured her to take the exam. Chad asks daily when her test date is and tries to train her on how to do our duties before she’s licensed.”
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
“This has put a lot of pressure on Nancy, which she’s admitted verbally to our staff. Nancy has shown extreme anxiety in learning these licensed tasks since it’s been a decade since she was in school.”
She watched everything get so bad that she finally confronted Chad and said that he was basically hazing Nancy into taking her exam.
She told Chad to back off, as Nancy is developing anxiety around all of this. She reminded Chad that the best thing for Nancy to do would be to study on her own and only take the test when she feels prepared enough to do well.
$400 is a ton of money to waste in these times, and it doesn’t make sense for Nancy to flush her money down the drain. It’s not like Chad is pressuring Nancy because they don’t have enough licensed techs (they have five at their clinic, so they’re not scarce).
“If anything, it’s assistants we constantly need, which Nancy is. Nancy loves being an assistant and is excellent at her job. Ever since I said something, Chad told me it was none of my business and to back off, telling me I’m not the leader he is,” she continued.
“I was livid, but I want to keep my job, so I just walked away and took the high road.”
Standing up for a stressed-out coworker hardly makes you a favorite in your boss’s eyes, but it definitely makes you a decent human being. It’s sad to see Nancy being bullied into advancing her career instead of being encouraged to grow.
I think she did the right thing defending Nancy, but it sounds like it’s time to continue supporting Nancy in a more subtle way, because, as we all know, office politics are tricky to navigate. She already made her point, and if Chad continues on his path, it sounds like she should loop in someone higher up to help.
Do you think she was wrong to confront Chad after he needlessly stressed Nancy out to the max?
You can read the original post below.
By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
