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 managing people
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…
Adam Grant’s Give and Take: A theory that says generous people do better at work than selfish ones.
A nice article that confirms what we want to be true. A regrettable reality is that human services workplaces are not loaded with “givers.” They’re there, but not in droves. There are far more “matchers” and “takers” (to use the article’s parlance.) Sadly, actual behavior at work adapts to the workplace culture – and despite the…
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…
“We Can Do This” management
Every once in awhile I dream of coming up with some phrase that’s so memorable and evocative, I can copywrite it. Then it would get picked up out there somehow, create some “buzz,”, generate a ton ideas and comments – as well as a bestselling book. So far, no luck. But I was leafing through some…
The Monkeys on Hawthorne’s Back
I can see how managers can come to resent, or at least view negatively, an employee’s need to be reassured, reinforced, praised, validated, or “checked-in” with and communicated with, so constantly. Since managers are usually squeezed for time themselves, their ideal employee is a self-starter who takes initiative, works fast and efficiently, doesn’t make mistakes, doesn’t need hand-holding and – above all – doesn’t take up managerial time.