As a new supervisor in today’s workplace, you certainly don’t need to sprint toward your people with fire in your eyes and a club in your hand to convince them you mean business. But it is also true that supervisors, especially line supervisors, really are the equivalent of early responders. They’re the ones whose early…
Posts Tagged with accountability
Not a natural authoritarian boss? It’s not necessary.
Here’s a classic, common situation for line and new supervisors: for whatever reason, an employee has begun having trouble managing his or her feelings, it’s tending to spill out, and may be affecting customer service. From the outside it looks relatively minor. It’s not blatant or outrageous – not a firing offense – but it’s…
Are You Making Managing People Harder Than It Needs To Be? The Key to Being a Good Boss: Set the Example
Contrary to some academic schools of thought, successful “people management” is not a science (if anything it’s more on the art side), it’s essentially a skill. Some managers are blessed with great natural instincts for handling people, but – with a little self-nudge and a learning attitude – any manager can do just fine with…
Employee Regret
I laughed out loud when I first heard the term “tattoo regret,” but I know first-hand that, in a human workplace, there’s a threshold moment when a manager realizes he’s got employee regret. An employee isn’t working out – but it’s not funny, and not easy to fix. The actual problem might be the employee’s…
Workplace Coaching? Affirmative
The thing I like best about coaching is how straightforward it is: either our sessions are useful in a tangible way, or they’re not. If they’re not, the sessions should stop. Sometimes it’s crystal clear why the sessions are helping. The interactions are stimulating, validating, liberating, or something that feels right. Sometimes it’s less obvious,…
Parallel Universes
When I read business articles, I often get the feeling that the work world I see isn‘t quite what those folks are thinking of when they write about the workplace. The problems they focus on always somehow seem the same – either non-strategic thinking or poor communication, or both. As I read, in my minds eye…
The “Micro-Managing” Accusation
In many workplaces, the key quality that makes someone a manager is his or her willingness to step up and take responsibility for the satisfactory completion of the work product. Since these managers know that their own job performance is being closely monitored, there’s a huge motivation to be right on top of real and imagined problems – in fact, failure to anticipate and act on “preventable” situations is one of the main reasons managers lose their jobs.