Inc.com columnist Alison Green answers questions about workplace and management issues--everything from how to deal with a micromanaging boss to how to talk to someone on your team about body odor.

A reader asks:

I am a female manager at a small, mostly male company, and directly manage several people (all male). One of the six has worked for me for multiple years. Since he began his employment, I always felt he had a "crush" on me and kept my distance (as much as I could as his manager).

His crush has gotten increasingly more obsessive over the past year: constantly staring at me, using absurd reasons to contact me through email/messenger/texts, whether at work or evening/weekends, and getting extremely emotional/upset if I do not frequently talk with him or provide feedback for his every task. He never says anything inappropriate or makes any advances but is making me increasingly more uncomfortable.

My tendency to avoid the employee combined with my obvious annoyance with his increasingly absurd reasons to interact with me is reflecting poorly on my management skills -- to the extent that my manager is questioning my abilities to manage.

Green responds:

I think your move here should be to address the problematic behaviors, while leaving the presumed cause of the behaviors (the crush) out of it. In fact, it doesn't really matter if there's a crush in play or not, because what he's doing is inappropriate regardless of what's behind it.

It also might be easier for you to tackle this stuff if you remove "crush" from your thinking and instead just see "legitimate conduct and performance issues that I need to address like any other."

Specifically, that would mean the following:

* Address the staring. When you see him staring, meet his eyes and say, "Is there something you needed?" Do this every time you see it. Chances are good that it's going to jog him into realizing that he's staring, and he'll stop. But if that doesn't happen, then you can address the pattern: "I keep noticing you looking at me. What's up?" Followed by, if necessary, "Could you stop that? It's unnerving to me. Thank you."

* Address the constant emailing/texting: "I'm finding that I'm getting so many emails and texts from you that it's interfering with my ability to focus on other projects. Can you please save up anything that's not time-sensitive for our weekly check-in (or for one email a week, or whatever makes sense in your context)?" Then, if it continues: "As I mentioned previously, I need you to save this sort of thing up for our weekly check-in, but it's still happening. What's going on?"

* Address the emotional reaction if you don't talk with him "enough": "I'm not going to be able to provide you with feedback on every small task, although I'm glad to debrief some key projects during our weekly meeting. Why don't you propose one or two each week that you'd like to debrief and we can do that then? Beyond that, though, I need the person in your role to work pretty independently, without daily interaction with me. Is that something you can do?"

And again, the key here is to see all of this the same way you'd see any other performance issue. "Motivated by a crush" doesn't move him to a special category where he's not manageable or where it's okay for you to avoid him.

Take on the specific behaviors, forget the crush, and see what happens.

Inc