How do I [32F] protect my work relationships from a bad nepotistic hire?

A Reddit user (32F) works at a small company where most employees know each other, and nepotism is common. The user is facing challenges with Gavin (40M), a senior team member who hired his wife, Donna (39F), to work on projects alongside the user without prior consultation.

Donna is underqualified, anxious, and often disrupts the user’s work by seeking help constantly. The user is frustrated and unsure how to handle Donna’s behavior while maintaining her position at the company. She seeks advice on how to manage the situation and what to say if asked about Donna’s performance.

‘ How do I [32F] protect my work relationships from a bad nepotistic hire?’

I work for a small company with 11 employees, soon to be 16. I like my job and most everyone I work with, bar one member of the senior team I’ll call Gavin \[40M\]. Gavin isn’t the top of the food chain but he has a lot of clout, as the CEO really likes him and handpicked him to join the company based on their past relationship.

Most of the people at my company have worked with each other before in past roles or know each other personally. Hiring friends is the norm, though I’m one of the few “outsiders”. This hasn’t been an issue at all up until recently, when Gavin hired his wife Donna \[F39\] to work part time at the company and asked her to work on some of my projects without consulting me first. I only found out she was going to share projects with me on the day she started.

Unfortunately, Donna is not experienced nor naturally talented in the work she’s been assigned. She’s been insecure, needy and anxious from day one, and lacks the basic skills necessary to do her job well.

I’ve tried to help her adjust because I would actually welcome some help with my workload, but she pulls me into meetings for an hour or two every time she’s in the office, asking me really basic questions and/or just quietly panicking at me. She also does this with CEO, who she knows personally through Gavin.

I’ve tried to pull away a little bit by not responding instantly to her Slack messages and not accepting every meeting she’s tried to book with me. The result has been that she’s started interrupting me in meetings, asking basic but usually inappropriate questions addressed to me. I don’t think she’s intentionally undermining me because she’s always grateful when I ‘help’ her but I’m finding it hard to stay patient. Gavin, of course, always chimes in to support her in team settings.

I’ve also tried to build my 1:1 relationship with Donna so there’s enough trust to establish boundaries, but unfortunately I can’t really find much common ground with her. She’s quite negative, complaining loudly that no one at the company has their s**t together and I feel like she probably says the same things about me to her husband and the CEO outside the office.

There are very subtle signs that the CEO may be starting to realise hiring her wasn’t a great idea – if she wasn’t Gavin’s wife I think she’d definitely be on her way out, so I think my best strategy here is to wait this out and try to stay calm. However, the CEO booked a 1:1 with me next week and if he asks me about Donna I’m not sure what I’ll say.

I feel the resentment growing, not just at Gavin and Donna, but also at the CEO for not establishing a fair work environment. I don’t want to ruin my place in the company over this. My question is, how do I handle Donna while covering my own ass? And what should I say if asked about what I think of Donna’s work?

\*\*EDIT\*\*: Whoa, this blew up. Thanks all for your comments and advice – I just read everything. To clarify a few things:

1. Donna isn’t my direct report. We don’t have managers at our company, so technically no one is. I wasn’t asked to train her, but when I found out on her first day she’d been told to “support” some of my projects I sort of had to step in.

2. I don’t know if the CEO is going to talk about Donna in our meeting, but I don’t like being caught off guard so I’m thinking more ‘what if?’

3. She doesn’t have a JD or even a title, so I understand her anxiety to some extent as our environment is pretty chaotic. Given her personal connections I told her she could probably just define her own role and give herself any title she wants, but she hasn’t done it.

4. I don’t ignore her messages, I’ve just stopped responding \*immediately\* because it fucks up my focus 5. I’m not the only person she’s doing this to. She naturally also books Gavin into long meetings and also the CEO . She’s the only one who gets this level of attention from the senior team in the company and it’s not really sustainable in any case

6. The work I’ve tried to help her do is still substandard, which is mainly what’s worrying me, and she doesn’t really have the right mindset for this type of business that I’ve seen. She might get away with it as just an average employee in a big company, but in this setting it’s glaringly obvious.

She’s made references a few times that she’s been near quitting from stress, so I really don’t want to get any more involved in this unless I have to. I don’t want to get her fired. But her flailing around, taking up my time is indeed disruptive to my ability to get things done, especially right now because I have additional project work on top of my daily responsibilities.

I would just talk to her but I’m afraid she’ll take it totally the wrong way because she’s so wound up, and I already have a not great relationship with her husband so I don’t want any of that backsplash.

I think my best case scenario is that the CEO takes over her coaching completely if he wants her to stay. I don’t feel like I can really ask for that directly but maybe I could angle for it.

**TL;DR:** Senior colleague hired his wife to join my team and she sucks, how do I manage the relationship with her and minimise collateral damage to my own relationship with other colleagues who are friends with her?.

Let’s dive into the reactions from Reddit:

HatsAndTopcoats −  My advice: Be honest but tactful, and focus on the impact to your work. Even though she’s obviously frustrating as hell, don’t share that. Say things like, “It’s hard for me to spend the time I need on my own tasking when Donna is asking me to meet with her several hours a day;

for example, on both Tuesday and Wednesday I sat with her for ninety minutes answering questions. Is there a better way for me to be handling that?” “The document she produced needed an extra two hours of editing before we could give it to the client.” Act in the manner that you aren’t complaining, simply giving him information about how things are going and if this is what he wants then that’s fine with you.

And if he indicates that he doesn’t want to hear negative things, then stop going down that road for your own sake. But you can’t expect him to fix things if nobody has told him what needs fixing – you need to give him a chance to be a good manager until you see that he’s not going to take that chance.

Sum_0 −  You have the right idea, play it cool for the time being let her incompetence do the work for you. Do your best to maintain a good and helpful relationship (this is for your benefit, not hers). If asked in your 1:1 about her, phrase things in the most positive and helpful way you can but be truthful (these are not mutually exclusive). I have learned the hard way that in situations like this, being “right” is not enough to protect you from fall out from going up against a nepotistic hire.

noplacelikegnome −  Don’t go into this unprepared. This meeting may also be in your performance. Have you missed any deadlines? The wife may have complained that you aren’t taking the time to train her.

I would have a list and length of all the meetings you’ve attended with her and a list of the ones you denied and what you were working on that you felt it was necessary to deny them. edited to say – I don’t mean take a list in with you obviously. Just have the info at your disposal in case you need to make a rebuttal to her claiming you are unhelpful.

lailaaah −  With being interrupted in meetings, I used to have an assistant like that. The only thing that worked was to say “hey, I’m in a meeting right now, we’ll talk later,” like a stuck record every time he tried asking a question or saying it would only take a second or whatever.

I think what I would do at this point is set up a regular meeting slot with her- daily, weekly, every other day, w/e- and then turn down any meeting requests outside of it. If she keeps asking to meet, just tell her your next meeting with her is on [DATE].

If she asks questions, ask what she thinks she should do (quickest way I’ve found to redirect stuff like this!) And if she complains to you about people, just make the most noncommittal response possible- or ‘oh, that’s odd, X doesn’t strike me as being so bad’, and then go back to work.

In terms of what to say to the CEO, be cautious. Don’t say anything about her unless he asks, and ideally wait until you have a sense of how he’s feeling before he says anything at all. Point out specific things, and make it clear that you’ve discussed them with her or otherwise tried to work on it before bringing them to his attention.

So rather than “She’s increasing my workload’, say that she still needs a lot more support than someone at her level would be expected to, and that that’s eating into your time. Tell him that she’s repeatedly interrupting meetings and other work despite being asked not to.

Mention specific instances where the work she’s produced hasn’t been up to scratch and what impact that has had. Also, I would suggest job hunting. You don’t want to work for a company with that level of nepotism, because it *will* bite you in the ass at some point.

asinine_qualities −  Diarise your interactions with her: time/date/nature of interaction. When CEO asks, show him your diary. You needn’t give your opinion, he should be able to deduce from the length and nature of the interaction whether it’s a good use of his employees’ time. It isn’t your job throw her under the bus. But you can offer unbiased accounts of your interactions with her.

leggomahaggro −  “She’s a unique hire, definitely have a lot to learn should she decide to stay long term. I believe she would do a lot better with her husband training her than she does with me.”

Meanwhile, start looking at other jobs. Whenever this blows up, and it will from the way you’ve described your interaction with her, her husband will point his fingers at you since he assigned her to you. He will try to cover his ass, so you need to as well.

ConsistentCheesecake −  I think you should stop ignoring her on slack or with meeting requests. Perhaps set up one or two weekly meetings with her, set a firm time limit for them, and when she approaches you at other times, say, “we will discuss this on Tuesday during our check-in.”

Regarding how to talk *about* her work to your superiors, that’s trickier. I would approach any problems you have with her from a perspective of, “I would like your advice on how to manage this so that we can work together more effectively, and here are the challenges I am facing with her,” not from a perspective of complaining about her. This is assuming that she has not done anything really terrible.

Skippylu −  I feel like she probably says the same things about me to her husband and the **CEO** outside the office. However, the CEO booked a 1:1 with me next week. I would be very careful with this and would advise looking for other jobs. What is the purpose of the 1:1? Are these normal in your workplace or is this a random occurrence?

AlmostPerfectWaffles −  Could you not direct her to books, courses, tutorials, videos, or other training to help her with the things she should be able to do but can’t? So the next time she asks something you have already explained, or which is something that she should have known coming into this role, you can say: “Sorry but I really don’t have time to teach you this, but you could take this (online) course to learn about this topic as well as other things relevant to your role.”

I would be honest in your 1to1 but perhaps more by asking questions:

* I was not told about this hire until the morning she started, so I had no chance to prepare. Why is that?

* What exactly is her background? I wasn’t given the opportunity to review her CV.

* Is she going to be taking some courses or formal training, because I think she could really benefit from that.

* She’s frequently requested to meet me to ask very basic things that I think someone starting her job should know about. I am happy to teach people but so far it’s taken quite a lot of time out of my week to train her (mention number of hours if you can, or a ballpark number such as ‘around 10 h a week’) and I feel it’s affecting the time I have for my other tasks. How many hours a week are you happy for me to allocate to training her?

* I think she’s not very used to our company culture as she’s started to interrupt me when I am in meetings. What is the best way to bring her up to speed with our office culture?

Monique7G −  I would definitely bring it up in the 1:1 meeting if the boss brings it up. I don’t think its wise to say anything about the prospect of letting her go because that seems like an overstep, but I would talk about how its affecting your work and ability to do your job productively.

She’s still asking questions that a beginner would have mastered by now and indicate that she’s not developing in her role at the pace you would have expected. She interrupts you which affects your focus and disrupts your meetings with other coworkers/clients.

Apart from what you might say in the meeting, maybe a helpful instruction you could give her would be to try and figure out the answers to her questions for 15 minutes before she comes to you. Ive heard of big companies like Google doing this because it increases productivity. Just say that you think it will help her learn better to try it herself and then that could help get her off your back for a while. Good luck!

Handling work dynamics, especially with nepotism at play, can be tricky. Have you experienced a similar situation with a coworker who wasn’t a good fit for their role? How did you approach it while protecting your position? Share your insights in the comments!