You don’t have to do it. You can decline to answer, you can leave entries blank, you can skip the whole exit interview.
If you think you can make factual statements that might help either to get rid of the guy (possibly after the next two people say similar things) or get him some training in managing, it’s a nice thing to do that. Honestly, if it’s just that he took a random irrational dislike of you, there’s probably no benefit to anyone in your saying so.
I worked for years for a soul-crushing boss, and when i finally transferred to a different department, her boss asked me to talk about it. I didn’t think i had anything actionable to say about her behavior, so i didn’t. I told my grandboss that i was happy to move on and had learned valuable things in the role. He knew we’d had troubles, and he asked me point blank, “is that all you want to say”, and i said it was.
I’m not the only one who found her soul-crushing. I’ve spoken to other people with similar experiences. But i couldn’t think of any constructive criticism, didn’t have any dirt bad enough to get her fired, and didn’t want to hurt my relationship with the rest of the company. So I was bland.
This was somewhat my situation. It wasn’t sexism or an “ism”, but there was a pervasive fear of saying anything in contradiction of the manager or her favorite, otherwise both of them would target you. You’d get shitty, difficult, tedious work and any mistake would be jumped on more harshly than otherwise.
If it was only happening to me I’d maybe think it was in my head, until several other people wanted me to say something before I left.
I worked with a senior coworker that was supposed to mentor me in my position for a few years. It was horrible, nothing I did was ever good enough for him. Luckily there was a junior employee that worked closely with me, and we both went through the same sort of hell. Having someone else go through the same thing to help me see it wasn’t just me helped a lot, but I still became very depressed and anxious over the whole thing. It ended when the senior coworker just flat out told me he thought I should be fired. Luckily I had already been in the process of moving to another department - it wasn’t final yet, but I told him I would either transfer to another area of the company or quit. It was so nice to not have to interact with him at all after that, my quality of life went way up. I seriously considered going to HR over the things he would say to me, I had written lots of examples down, but ultimately decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. I was very open with my boss why I left, and turns out everyone knows this guy is a jerk. He just has lots of seniority and produces good work, so his boss (different from my boss at the time) protects him. Glad I’m out of that mess.
If something does seem to be discrimination, just be aware the laws against retaliation are strict enough that you can’t be retaliated against for making a good faith complaint, even if the complaint gets investigated and they find no evidence of discrimination. So just commenting on actual cases that seem to you to be discrimination can’t hurt you, at least according to the law. If they do retaliate against you, then you have a much bigger upper hand over them at that point.
I haven’t heard you describe anything that is serious, so the following probably doesn’t apply. Your company may have a code of conduct. If the bad behavior is sufficiently bad, you may be obligated by the code to report it to hr or a hotline or whatever.
A coworker once told me that someone else said something that was against the code to them. It sounded unlike anything i had heard before, but after double-checking the company’s code, i was obligated to report. I did, realizing i needn’t form an opinion of veracity of the coworker, but just related what they told me.
Lucy, Do you think it’s ok to just answer some questions but not others, or will it be too obvious if I only don’t answer the questions about my manager
IMO it raises more questions when you only do part of the exit interview, and even if the inference drawn from that is they wanted to say something not positive but didn’t feel comfortable about it HR has nothing on why you didn’t feel comfortable, so there’s nothing they can do that might really be helpful for others. If you’re that uncomfortable with doing some part of an exit interview, skip the entire thing. If HR asks why you’re skipping it, you can say “I’m not comfortable doing an exit interview for [reasons]” and let them decide what they want to do from there. But I’m also the person who, if you’re asking me to do an exit interview, I’ll give you an honest assessment of what I think about things; if you don’t like the feedback, that’s not my problem to deal with but I’m telling you something you should probably go think about.
If that means bridges get burned and I end up on some “do not rehire” list there, … OK, fine. Whatever. Not my loss. There’s other companies I can work for, other managers I can work under, they’ll be happy to have me. Like, say, the one where I currently work and the one I currently work under. But I’m not going to do an exit interview and pretend everything is sparkles and rainbows and unicorns when it’s not, and I’m leaving because of whatever things stink all the way to Denmark and back, because of some possibility that maybe one day, I’ll have to find a place to go work and that place will be my only option.
Yes, you can answer just some questions. Or skip the whole thing if you prefer. What’s your concern about “it being obvious”? They aren’t going to punish you for not saying bad things about your boss. I mean, they can’t fire you. But they aren’t even going to put you on the “don’t rehire” list because you skipped some questions.
I think you are stressing about this more than you need to.
50 posts in this thread makes that obvious.
I hope bbj accepts your answer as legitimate. But, still might ask yet another poster for the same opinion.
