Send your questions about office, money, career and work-life balance to workfriend@PK Press Club. Include your name and location, or a request to remain anonymous. Letters can be changed.
Collapse of boundaries
Dear work friend,
I occupy a role specially created to support a department head who is not my direct superior. Over the past few months, our once close professional relationship has evolved in uncomfortable ways. He was upset that I was spending time socially with other coworkers outside of the office, but not with him, and told me he felt hurt and “rejected” because I maintained boundaries between my work and personal life. I have explained many times that these boundaries are important and that I don’t want the relationship to become more intimate. Instead of accepting this, he began to reveal problems in his home life.
As I considered working with another executive at the company, he told me that if I did that, “he wouldn’t be able to protect me.” I told him that his language and behavior was creepy, romantic, disrespectful and inappropriate. During an intense conversation that followed late that night, he said he hated “walking on eggshells” around me and even said he wanted to stop.
I don’t want to overreact or destroy my career. I don’t want any of us to give up either. In an ideal world, I would like to repair the working relationship. But I also constantly feel on edge, emotionally burdened and unworthy.
I have several questions: Am I right to consider this sexual harassment or at least a serious boundary violation? How do you maintain professionalism with someone after making the relationship emotionally coercive? If that were even possible, what would healthy repair look like in a situation like this?
You should speak to a lawyer. What you are experiencing is sexual harassment by any practical measure: the department head created a hostile work environment And implied a quid pro quo threat. But I’m not qualified to say whether you could win a case on this basis. Many employment lawyers offer free initial consultations and can make an evaluation once they are informed of all the relevant facts.
What I am qualified to tell you is that this guy is a manipulative guy. Although “manipulative behavior” is not a legal category and a columnist’s statements carry no legal sanction, I hope my verdict can at least help you overcome your fear of overreacting. Your co-worker has engaged in a months-long campaign of emotional coercion and unwanted intimacy that has left you feeling anxious and exhausted – and you’re trying to consider “healthy repair”! On the contrary, I fear that you are not reacting sufficiently.
The only way to maintain professionalism in the face of this screening routine, which would make even the most toxic emo teenager blush, is to patrol the borders militantly. Ignore or refuse to answer questions or conversations that are not directly related to your work and limit your communications to work hours, regardless of the threat of emotional blackmail. And pleaseI beg you, do not have any more “intense, nocturnal” conversations with this man.
