My colleague won't stop commenting on everything I eat. My assistant rolls his eyes at people and meeting.

My manager expects me to work 24-7. Why does my coworker keep taking credit for all my ideas?

Have any wisdom for me?

Hi, I'm Alison Green. Welcome to the Ask a Manager podcast. Some of you may know me from my website,

askamanger.org, where I answer daily questions from readers about how to navigate all sorts of sticky situations with coworkers, managers, and employees.

Each week on this show, I'll take calls and talk directly with listeners about the toughest, most frustrating, or just plain weirdest work predicaments they're facing. I'll help you figure out

what to do and say to handle these situations successfully and get the outcomes you want. So let's get

started. This week, I'm going to do something a little different on the show instead of taking

a listener call. This is an episode I have been excited to do since we launched

the show, and it's actually one of the reasons why I thought a podcast could be really helpful.

As you may know, I write a work advice column where I answer letters from people who are often in

tricky situations with their managers or their coworkers. One thing I do a lot in my column is give

sample language that they can use to talk to the person. And along with that, I often talk

about the right tone to use in that conversation, because tone really, really matters.

Of course, on my website, my answers are in writing, and it's not always easy to convey tone in writing.

So I wanted to devote this episode of the show to actually demonstrating tone, because this is such a perfect medium to do that in.

So we're going to talk a little bit about tone at work in general, and then I want to go through some specific examples and show you the tone

that I would recommend using in a few different potentially tricky situations. About tone at work

in general, most of the time with tricky work conversations, you want to sound calm, matter of fact,

and collaborative. Generally, the tone that you want is the same, matter of fact, and collaborative.

Generally, the tone that you want is the same tone that you would use to raise any other work problem. So if you imagine yourself saying something that isn't at all emotionally charged,

you know, I'm having trouble getting the software to run the way you showed me,

...