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Difficult Conversation #3: “You work for me & reek of alcohol.”

February 7, 2010
I realized after my book was published that having to tell a direct report that he or she “smells drunk” would have been a great “difficult conversation” to include, and I was also surprised that no one wrote in with it as an example.  Oh well, no biggie.  Nothing wasted.  It makes for perfect blogging fodder now.

It has happened to me several times and also to lots of managers I know – an employee comes into work reeking of booze and has no idea.  Admittedly, it can be awkward to tell someone that he smells as if he’s been drinking at 9 o'clock in the morning (or earlier).  It’s a tricky one because discussing it could sound as though you are judging your employee for decisions she is making in her personal life, which is none of your business any more than it is your place to offer commentary about her social habits.  So how do you make your point without crossing boundaries and keep the conversation from slipping into one about what he or she did the night before?

It’s not new news that I am a big advocate of cutting to the chase, making the point and putting the conversation behind you.  In cases like this, you have to say something.  You have no choice.  You can’t ignore it.  Ignoring it hurts everyone involved, including the business itself and the other people who work there. 

So for me, when an employee flung my office door open one morning during my retail days and filled the room with bibulous fumes when he said, “Girlfriend, I was at the fiercest party last night,” he made it easy for me to tell him that he smelled like he was still there.  I sent him home.  But for the others, which included an Account Executive, a salesperson and an assistant, I just simply posed the question, “Do you know you smell like alcohol?” They invariably say no and act shocked, which gives me the opportunity to state clearly that the smell of liquor is in fact coming off their breath.  And then equal to, if not more important than the heads up itself is to explicitly say, “‘Morning after bar breath’ in the workplace is really, really bad.”  Since they now know that you will not hesitate to have the conversation on the spot in the future should it be necessary, the problem usually corrects itself simply because they don’t want to be embarrassed again.  If it doesn’t, there is a bigger problem.  It’s not the odor.  It’s the drinking, in which case there will likely be all kinds of performance conversations going on that are not limited to olfactory offenses.

Posted by Donna Flagg on February 7, 2010 | Comments (3)