He is trying to stop it, what am I missing? In my opinion, the pussy boss is the one who is overreactive and would have fired her without thinking over thoroughly enough.
There’s probably a reason Joey P. is a manager and I’m not. I used to just take everything to heart to quickly and act to quickly and then what would happen is I was understaffed because I was too concerned about the wrong things. I think it is wise he didn’t do anything right away and he called his boss to seek help in the situation - I think admitting he was over his head was the correct thing to say to his boss. I have found that the managers I have known who act that way are much more frequently employed and promoted. Every action has repercussions; if you fire this woman without proper thought put into the situation, the cure may be worse than the disease. Firing someone can have an impact on morale, it can also be costly in terms of retraining and UCI rates.
She walks to the register; so from that we know she has a customer facing position. If she has been there a long time how will customers react? Also, what will the other employees think? Just as with the limited information presented me and you are coming to different conclusions the other employees will also have their conclusions - and with limited information those conclusions could be along the lines of “asshole boss” not “asshole employee”.
It reminds me of a situation I encountered a while ago, a service manager I worked with, he was very good at his job, was pushed to the point of yelling at a customer (not really a customer because he didn’t spend any money, and was unequivically disruptive and costly in terms of time to deal with), everyone who worked there was like “thank god, hopefully we we won’t have to deal with that guy again.” Unfortunately, a customer just overheard the manager not being nice to the “customer” and wrote a bad yelp review about how rude the staff at the store is. This post is getting too long, stopping now.
For the record, you will never be a good manager if you refuse to fire a bad employee. Good hiring practrices go a long way toward fewer firings, but no one gets it right every time. With an underperformimg employee you have options, including transfer to a job where they can succeed. An employee with a bad attitude, though, is like a cancer - it will spread and it will harm the organization. Not “may”, but “will”.
It is not your problem when an employee has a bad attitude, it is theirs. Your job (your problem) is, as Rachellelogram said, to call them on it and give them a choice of changing the behaviour or losing the job. Until you can do this, you cannot say that you “deal with issues”. A couple of tips:
Do not confront her on the floor. Call her into your office and close the door. Take her outside. Take away the primer and the explosion is less likely to happen.
Ask your boss along as a witness if you’d like, but you do the talking. You are the line boss, you need to handle the problem.
Document, document, document, even in an at-will state. This will save you much grief because the empoyee will not be surprised when the firing takes place (you have written evidense of the warnings and consequences) and there will be much less chance of a lawsuit or successful unemployment claim down the road.
Agreed, but you don’t have to bring the BS on yourself. You don’t have to eat just because someone else tries to put it on your plate.
Take the requisite classes to get certified to teach keyboarding/computer tech at the high school level. You’ll have 3-7 classes/day of teenagers to lord over, who will certainly be completely cooperative with your every whim. If something or someone doesn’t fit your idea of perfect subordination to you at any time, there will be administrators who will immediately make it so.:rolleyes::rolleyes:
Well screaming at your boss and storming out in a huff is usually a pretty good way to get fired at most places.
A good boss will try to deescalate the situation and then try to get to the root of the issue. Typically, unless they are psychopaths, employees don’t just blow up for no reason. That’s often a good indicator that they feel overwhelmed.
But you absolutely can’t let that sort of behavior continue. Especially in a customer-facing roll.
I spent 38 years as either a shop foreman or manager. I am pretty thick skinned for the most part. The one thing that I never seemed able to completely accept was that betrayal from close associates is a given. Part of my job was to recognize and groom guys from the shop that had good potential as managers or leaders. Time after time I would bring them along, groom them, show them my job and even give them added responsibilities that were normaly mine. Almost without fail when they felt confident enough and sensed some vulnerability on my part they would go on the attack. In every case I came out on top but it never fails to hurt a bit.
There’s the route I took: civil service. I had the basic qualifications to take the test (a high school diploma and no felonies) and I passed it. Promotions are also based on taking tests and I did well on those. Within five years I had a couple of hundred people working under me.
I agree with that, screaming at your boss is not acceptable. It seems as if people are reading the situation as if he is just letting whatever go, and he is too afraid too fire his bad employee. I see the situation as him being proactive and taking a measured approach to the situation instead of just letting what he feels at the moment and his view of the situation to dictate his actions. There is probably a huge difference in the manager/employee interactions between the work environment that exists in a professional environment and what exists in a small business retail environment.
Your choice of employee can be much more limited, so you end up having to put up with a lot of stuff - where that line is ends up being is different for every business probably. Think of it this way, there are lots of low level customer service jobs available. And like anything, there is a hierarchy of where people will work. If someone is unskilled they will probably work at Whole Foods, if someone isn’t qualified to work at Whole Foods they’ll work at Starbucks. If you have a small retail business your applicant pool may consist of people who can’t get a job at Whole Foods or Starbucks; so what are you left with? Not saying this is universally true - but just trying to illustrate the vast differences in the available applicant pool. Where I work now, the manger was looking at resumes, and he literally had to consider applications that were not even close to what he was looking for. Eventuallly a person who gave a reference that actually said he was not a good employee was hired; originally the hiring manager thought “no way, who would provide a reference from a previous employer who wouldn’t recommend him.” This was the best qualified person he could find. And this job pays more than double minimum wage(which, granted isn’t much, but just imagine what you’re applicant pool would be if only minimum wage was offered).
I hated retail management and working for small businesses for this reason. I decided to go back to school mostly so I could hopefully be in a little better, more structured and pleasant environment. I’ll see how it goes.
I think managerial titles aren’t all that hard to get, but true leaders are hard to come by, and very valuable - you need experience, education/credentials, thick skin and sound judgment. You can probably get away with 3/4, but I think it would be less than ideal.
OK, so you do all that. Obviously this costs more money. Retail margins are typically razor-thin, so you’ll have to raise prices some amount to compensate.
But if you’re just a store-level manager in a chain, you probably have no real control over prices, and you’re going to be judged on your store’s profit.
Even if you have control over prices, all that does is just increase the chances of you becoming an Amazon showroom, where people come to your store to ask all the questions of your informed salesmen, then go online to buy it for 10% cheaper.
Depends on who you count. I knew some very young assistant principals and directors of technology. In any case, the barriers to entry appeared relatively low. If you took the classes and became certified - poof you’re in management if you could get hired somewhere. And I saw it happen, sometimes to the misery of everyone involved.
Well, I was a bit unclear. To me, some of the barriers to entry were 'not giving enough money to the local school board’s party fund" or 'not being connected by blood or business connection" to those who vote.
If you have a job and there is a market for what you do, you can pretty much just make yourself the boss of whatever it is you do. If you develop software, then be a boss at developing software. Don’t go try to be the foreman of a toilet scrubbing crew.
We had another thread on this subject not too long ago. I don’t like being at any level of management, but the lower level manager you are (easiest career to be the boss of somebody) the worse the job sucks.
If I had the chops to be CEO of some company that actually merited the use of CEO as a job title (I hate the use of that title in small business, usually expressed as President and CEO), I might feel differently. But I don’t, so I don’t.
I’m surprised that nobody has told you the obvious answer: Go work in the family business. Once you are hired, everyone will assume that you will, eventually, become their boss, therefore you will get treated with far more deference than most. Eventually, after a few years, your family can move you up and give you defined roles and responsibilities.
Family doesn’t have a business? You need to ask them why they failed you in assisting you in chasing your dreams.
Where do you work? Everyplace I’ve ever worked, it’s like pulling teeth to get devs to move into management roles. Even where I’m at right now, we easily have a staff of 100+ devs, but the company is advertising for managers and tech leads because nobody internal wants to take on those jobs. We all just want to write code.
In fact, my last manager stepped down after 6 months as a manager; they talked him into doing it as he was a long-time highly-respected QA person. Took him 6 months to realize he hated it and would rather be in QA again. They moved him back into a QA lead role and hired someone from outside the company to take over the manager job.
In one place I’ve worked TPTB automatically moved those with X or more years under their belt in the industry up to management without so much as a mention. What would happen was the veteran would get notice that “Starting Monday you’ll be at X location”. When the veteran arrived there on Monday and discovered that s/he was the only FT person in the department, that’s when s/he realized they were now the manager of said department.
Most people went along with it because they didn’t want to lose any benefits or such. Some had a natural ability to manage while others constantly bumbled their way through it. Very few people stepped down IIRC.
Yeah, pretty much. Only a couple of details messed up:
Nurses are not the subordinates of doctors. She sits on that “throne” whether a doctor is around or not. More likely than not, she’s harassing him to sign the 834 Orders she wrote, called him about and now just needs his fecking signature before she can file them. Then she’s reminding him who all his patients are and what’s wrong with them.
The RN is probably also the one passing out the medications, which can take for-freaking-ever. Before each medication, she’s got to do an assessment, take vitals (or make sure the CNA took them and knows how and knows when to report anything weird), check two forms of identification, review the meds, scan the meds, pop each fecking pill out of a fecking blister pack (and I’ve got homebound patients on 43 pills; I can’t imagine how many nursing home patients are on), hand them to the patient, sometimes one by one. Get another glass of water, chart in the computer the time that she administered each medication, and then do another 59 patients…all in two hours.
The RN’s license is on the line if anyone fucks up. She’s technically “delegating” all that other care she’s not doing with her own two hands. Part of delegating is being legally and practically on the line if it isn’t done correctly or in a timely fashion. That’s a terrifying amount of risk to go with all that heady power.
But, yeah, you’re right that they don’t have to have a lot of experience. Of course, at the good places, they will, but I was offered a job just like this - night shift, only RN on the floor with 60 patients and 3 CNA’s - right out of nursing school. Of course, I turned it down flat. They may not give a shit about their patients, but I do, and I would not subject them to a new grad RN for that kind of job.
Been working my first nursing job, in home health care, at the same company since Nov. 2011. I’ve been offered the Director of Nursing job for the last 6 months. (I keep turning it down because it’s a shit job with a shitty staff, and I don’t need the hassle; it literally sent my favorite DON to the hospital with stress induced illness and her doctor’s pushing her to go on permanent disability rather than go back to work in that job.) I’m actually more experienced than the last guy they hired as DON. He lasted a week and a half.
You’d think, right? Sadly, no. I’m sure they’re awesome in some places. In others, they’re rank newbies who don’t know jack. Like, don’t know that a venous stasis ulcer is a complication of PVD. (I seriously had this argument with the last jackhole, over which should be the Primary Diagnosis.)
