When I have a dissent with my boss he often uses non-related arguments that have nothing to do with the discussion we are having. I observed that this is happening when he obviously doesn't know how to counter my arguments. For example I needed a day off for moving to a new place. He said he can not grant me, because his wife who works for the government didn't get a free day when her father died.
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10This example doesn’t seem unrelated. You asked for a day off for a minor reason (your own concern and up to your own scheduling) and they compared it to asking for a day off for a major reason (out of her control). Is this just an odd one out or are they all similarly "non-related"?– MisterMiyagiCommented Aug 12 at 12:47
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50@MisterMiyagi I don't see the point. I don't work for the government. His wife doesn't work in my company. It is not my fault, when her employer is cruel. To me it seems like I have to pay for the injustice that his wife was experiencing. I think it's also unprofessional. If he says, he can not grant because he needs me urgently in the company that day, then of course I can understand. But what has the working conditions of his wife to do with my work and my life? Nothing!– ITfeeCommented Aug 12 at 13:34
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20Another way to interpret what your boss is saying: "our policy is not cruel, it's normal, other employers do the same thing."– Kate GregoryCommented Aug 12 at 15:43
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5@ITfee I can understand you not agreeing that similar rules should apply to you, but it is hardly unrelated. It’s a comparison to what is common for other employers, and at least in my neck of the woods would correspond to a more lenient employer and more severe situation - "if those cushy government folks don’t, why should I?". All of what you listed are reasons why (you think) your boss is wrong, not why it is unrelated.– MisterMiyagiCommented Aug 12 at 20:04
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4It would help a lot if you added what jurisdiction you're in and what kind of company it is. Also is your boss the owner or head of the company or just part of middle management? If possible, the nature of the business you're in might help.– Todd WilcoxCommented Aug 13 at 4:22
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8 Answers
Let them explain. Maybe it does have a connection, maybe it doesn't and they notice this themselves:
Okay... I don't really get what that means for our current discussion. Could you explain please?
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4But remember that, in the end, they are not obligated to explain their decision to you. Understanding their reasoning may help you make future plans, but will probably not help you change their mind this time. Accept that a decision has been made, stop arguing, and move on.– keshlamCommented Aug 12 at 14:11
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4@keshlam, well it depends what ends I am helping things towards. This answer is pretty sound in that it suggests explanation should be sought from the manager. You've interjected to say they are not obligated to explain and to counsel the OP to accept the situation (even though it is unexplained), but of course the OP could coerce them to explain, or could defy their decision and then coerce them to accept the defiance, so part of the help of my comment is to explain that the options are not limited in the manner you suggest, and to express my view that your counsel is generally unsound.– SteveCommented Aug 13 at 1:24
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3@keshlam, I think the lynchings tend to happen when employers start to threaten economic violence against workers. You're right that if a person is only concerned with remaining employed, they will accept anything, including sleeping in the office 24/7 and no wage at all, but for most people the terms of employment are important, not just whether they are employed at all, and one of the terms which would be particularly important to most is that bosses do not feel empowered to completely arbitrary behaviour, and that they know that, in the end, they too can be made to suffer arbitrarily.– SteveCommented Aug 13 at 2:08
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5@keshlam, my proposal aligns with this answer: seek explanation. It is you who went down the rabbit hole of asserting that no explanation is due, that the OP's employment may be threatened if they don't accept arbitrariness, and to even counsel them to accept it when there are a very large number of alternatives they may want to take and very well can (including, for example, consulting their union rep, seeking new employment at leisure, or continuing to row with the manager). The OP is seeking consent for a day off to move house for heaven's sake - hardly a silly or extreme request.– SteveCommented Aug 13 at 6:54
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14@keshlam "But remember that, in the end, they are not obligated to explain their decision to you. " If you are accustomed to abysmal worker protections and exploitative companies, you are right, in countries like that you are not entitled to an explanation. In other countries with labor laws worth their name, an explanation why PTO is denied is legally required. You cannot deny someone taking PTO for arbitrary reasons like "because I say so" or "because my wife didn't get her PTO approved either".– nvoigt ♦Commented Aug 13 at 7:05
For example I needed a day off for moving to a new place. He said he can not grant me, because his wife who works for the government didn't get a free day when her father died.
I agree with you that his response is unrelated, unless your company has a policy of following the government's policy when approving leave.
That said, I think you made a mistake here (and so did his wife), which is giving a reason for wanting leave. If you're allowed to take leave at all, then it's your leave to take regardless of your reasons. If your employer needs you to not take leave on a certain day, then that would be because of their reasons, not yours. For example, if you work in retail, it would be reasonable for your employer to refuse leave during a busy holiday season. Other reasons might be because there is a deadline approaching for a project that you are key on or some other kind of crunch time for the business.
In terms of what you should do, I think you have two main options, and perhaps you might pursue both of them. The first option depending on the makeup of the company you work for. If there is an HR department and leave policies, then you can review the leave policies and when you want leave, make sure your request is in line with those policies and then make your request following the correct procedure. If you feel like your leave request is denied in a way that is not following the policies, then you go back to your boss and/or HR and bring up the issue and ask questions.
The second option is to update your resume and quietly start looking for another job. This supervisor doesn't seem to be trying to create a mutually beneficial work environment and doesn't seem to want to give you clear and reasonable explanations for their decisions. (I emphasized "seem" because we really know very little about your situation based on what little information you've given us).
I suppose your third option is to just put your head down, work, and stop expecting reasonable explanations from your supervisor.
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1This is the correct answer! your boss is not entitled for a reason for the vacation. Giving people reasons for your actions opens the door for arguments and counter arguments. Normally if the other party is persistent just use "I have urgent private matter to attend to"– LongCommented Aug 13 at 12:30
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In terms of giving reasons, I agree with both the answer and the comment. You setup a social convention that is not good and share personal information un-necessarily. That said, a boss that is this argumentative and unhelpful will immediately ask why so their current process can continue. The conversation then becomes about sharing the reason rather than whether the holiday can actually be taken, so I'm not sure how helpful that part of the advice is in this case. Commented Aug 13 at 12:40
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5Well, since we don't have a jurisdiction mentioned in the question, one point against the policy of not giving the reason for a leave would be if the jurisdiction in question requires employers to provide a leave for purpose of moving, and there are jurisdictions which require leave to be given for specific purposes. Commented Aug 13 at 15:41
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5"If you're allowed to take leave at all, then it's your leave to take regardless of your reasons" -- this is oversimplified. In some cases, there are types of leave that can be used only in the presence of specific events. It's not clear whether OP sought to take vacation (the most general-purpose leave) or sought a day off for moving that would not come out of their vacation.– nanomanCommented Aug 13 at 15:46
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@nanoman I think I over-simplified that sentence. I meant “if you’re allowed to take leave at the time and in the category of reasons (as in sick time may be different from vacation time), then the precise reason shouldn’t matter.” Like if you have pneumonia or Covid it’s still sick time. If you’re allowed to take PTO on a given day, that’s your time to do with as you please, your boss doesn’t need to know exactly what you’re doing then. Commented Aug 13 at 18:51
It's very disputable in this case whether the argument is "unrelated" or not.
Obviously, it is an argument unrelated to the circumstances of your workplace.
If leave is granted for any reason whatsoever (is there a possibility you're in a non-Western jurisdiction here?), then moving house is usually a good reason for a day's leave.
The relationship your boss is presumably alluding to is about common policies and practices in similar employment, and comparing the gravity and strain of dealing with a death in the family and dealing with a house-move.
Whether the emotional strain of a death in the family is comparable to the practical need to physically attend to a house-move, in the need for time away from work, I don't know. One imagines one can physically present at work during grief (even if one does not work effectively), whereas one cannot physically present at work when also carrying a wardrobe between houses.
You would ultimately have to consider the circumstances and argue the issue further to discover whether your boss is being reasonable or not.
Some bosses don't attempt to perform governance of a whole situation, but instead simply haggle for the best advantage to their own perceived interests (either individually, or as the boss class), and it can be important to distinguish whether you need to have a robust argument to persuade them, or whether they will deploy spurious arguments and you simply need to demonstrate that they cannot win other than by granting your interests.
The real problem here is that you are empowering your boss to decide whether or not the thing you need to do is worthy of granting you time off. You're oversharing. He's not your mama or your daddy, and I am assuming you're fully grown.
"Boss, I need to take time off for a personal matter."
--> "What kind of personal matter?"
"It's PERSONAL." (Repeat as much as you need to).
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The OP mentions a "free day" - I took this to mean a paid day off in addition to standard leave allocation. It would seem reasonable for a manager to ask why this special consideration was required.– simoncCommented Aug 14 at 9:40
I agree with some of the others, that his counter argument is actually related to yours in the sense that he can't grant you day off for something minor, just how his wife couldn't get one off for something major. In other cases it is worth asking, why he can't give you a day off or how his argument is related to yours. That is as long as you don't ask in a snappy or antagonizing kinda way. That'll only lead to further conflict.
That being said. it might be worth checking the law. Where I live it is mandated to give an employee 1 work day a year for the purpose of moving (most places do 2 however).
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1If I ask someone e.g. how murderes are treated in Germany, the answer can't be that the US has the death penalty. For me this whole discussion is not about a day off or two for a personal cause, it's about the principle of how we argue in a workplace environment. Discussions shouldn't base on bad private life experiences. Of course you can compare with the general situation in other companies (which btw grant 1 day without even taking vacation in most cases). But don't make your employees feel like they have to pay for something bad the boss experienced in his private life.– ITfeeCommented Aug 16 at 10:51
I observed that this is happening when he obviously doesn't know how to counter my arguments.
Counterpoint: rather than your manager not knowing how to counter your arguments, you don't know what it is that the manager is actually saying to you.
In both scenarios you referred to, the allegedly unrelated information is not being used as a direct justification for the rule, but rather a counterexample that indicates that your personal expectation of what should happen is not necessarily the norm, or a given.
This could be a conversational anecdote, or a more concrete denial of your explicit request in the form of an anecdotal counterexample; but in either case the manager's response is not unrelated to what you're talking about, definitely not in the way that your question alleges it is.
For example I needed a day off for moving to a new place. He said he can not grant me, because his wife who works for the government didn't get a free day when her father died.
It makes significantly more sense that what was actually conveyed to you is that he can't grant you the day off; and subsequently he pointed out an example of someone who would be more justified in getting a day off, but them also not getting a day off.
In other words, his response wasn't "you can't have the day off because my wife didn't get a day off", it was "people with more of a reason to get a day off still don't get the day off, so you can't expect to get a day off for this".
The purpose of the example is to highlight your expectation of the rule: I need a day off for this reason, I think this is a valid reason, therefore I am entitled to the day off; is not automatically valid. Your manager is telling you that your expectation simply does not match reality, which he explains by providing an example of someone with more justification for getting the day off still not getting the day off.
You can disagree with not getting the day off; but there's no validity to your claim that this response is unrelated to what you were talking about.
I could have also said that I don't like the coffee in our office. And he would have replied that the coffee at the workplace of her wife is worse.
In such a hypothetical example, it sounds to me like you and your manager are disagreeing on what kind of conversation you're having.
Based on your manager's response, it seems like he's treating this like a casual conversation. You bring up a topic, he responds with something anecdotally similar to the topic at hand.
Based on the issue that you seem to be taking with your manager's response, it seems like you're treating this like a call to action to fix the problem. Rather than assuming that this is your manager's failure to not respond to you the way you want to be responded to; consider that you failed to communicate the actual goal of the conversation in the first place, i.e. calling your manager to action on improving the coffee in the break room.
Alternatively, it's possible that the same thing as the day off conversation happened: you are misreading a counterexample (i.e. "this is not enough of a reason for us to get different coffee, as evidenced by this anecdotal counterexample") as if it's a direct justification ("we couldn't possibly improve our coffee until my wife's coffee has been improved").
If that is actually what happened, then there is really nothing you can do. It is just silly. It is hard to know how to counter this as the details of your work place were not included.
Depending up on your employer, in the future, you would just send an email that said I will be taking X day off for personal matters. Basically saying something like "cool story bro, but I won't be here on Thursday". This will not work with all employers.
The next would be to just call in "sick". This works fine for employers (in the US this seems to be an increasing trend) do not differentiate between sick time and PTO. Here use the general statement, "I don't feel well", and that is true as you don't feel like moving and working.
It sounds like this manager is somewhat gutless, so often it is easier to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.
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6Calling in sick on a day you wanted to have off is a sure way to get a suspicious boss, who even in countries with strict labor and privcacy laws would be allowed to send someone to look and if they see you are moving, question your sickness and fire you for cause. This really is the fastest way of losing all your protections of the law (except maybe for committing a violent crime). Granted, if you have zero protections by the law to being with, like in the US, you ain't losing much...– nvoigt ♦Commented Aug 13 at 7:12
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1@nvoigt The manager is not reasonable, period. Now what? If you need a day off, call in sick. I would use it for this particular instance. However, future instances..."Not feeling well."– pauljCommented Aug 13 at 15:01
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@paulj: If you take the stance that the day off is non-negotiable no matter what the boss says, why bother calling in sick on that day at all? Just to be clear, I'm not saying you shouldn't, I'm saying that calling in sick, while lying about it, on a day that you requested to have off that was already explicitly denied, making yourself vulnerable to being caught lying if anyone were to physically follow up on you, ... it's going to significantly damage your reputation (if not your employment outright) to the point where there's pretty much no point bothering calling in and lying about it.– FlaterCommented Aug 22 at 5:48
In the given answers, I never see the obviousness in the situation: your boss is bullying you!
When you let him walk all over you, you'll be his bitch and he will go further and further until you reach breaking point.
When you don't let him walk over you, he either might start respecting you or he might fire you. In the meantime, best thing to do is start looking for another job, so in case he does fire you, you're not unemployed.
