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When life happens, should you tell your manager?

Navigating trust in the employee-boss relationship

Author

Maxy Lotherington
April 23, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Sometimes, life happens. You have a major life event – sickness, family, relationship, whatever – and work is still there. Handling the mental load of something in your personal life will impact your ability to do your best at work. So today, we’ll explore this question: when life happens, should you tell your manager?

First off, we have to talk about if you should trust your manager.

Ideally, your manager would look out for your best interests and support you. If you have one like this, then being honest with them about when you’re not at your best will have a positive impact on your work.

Unfortunately, not all managers are like this. A lesson I’ve learnt the hard way: managers don’t get your trust by default, they need to earn it.

How can your manager earn your trust? Well, trust is a really personal thing, but for me it looks something like:

  • they’ve demonstrated that they’ll fight for me and what I care about

  • they keep their word when they make a promise

  • they behave like this, consistently, with their other direct reports too.

When my managers have demonstrated these qualities, I trust them to have my back and I’ll ask for help when I need it.

Remember that liking your manager is not the same as trusting them. Your manager can be your biggest fan and you can have a great time together, but if they don’t consistently advocate for you it won’t matter in times of stress.

Great advice as always from Better Off Ted, cancelled too soon.

Let’s get back to our original question: when life happens, should you tell your manager?

Generally, my answer is yes – but your level of trust and how comfortable you are will determine how much you give them.

You should tell your manager something’s going on so that they know the likely impact on your work and they understand any differences in performance. But you can keep it brief and impersonal so that they don’t have to have the intimate details of your personal life.

This topic is bigger than I can cover in < 400 words, so I hope this was helpful even though it’s at a very high level! Is there anything about the manager/employee dynamic you’d like me to explore? 🤔

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Would you believe this conversation has happened in two group chats and an episode of Better Off Ted for me this week? Thanks for the inspo, friends 😘