That would explain why your staff have no respect for you.
Having been a manager, and having been managed here is my $0.02.
If it is a problem with one person, talk to that one person privately. If you suspect that the problem is larger than that* mention it in public. Do not mane names in the public meeting. Do not lose your cool in a public meeting.
*How much larger is left open, depends on how many employees you have. If there are four, then two would be enough, if there forty, then six or eight.
Another view of this;
Four people on Second Shift. Supervisor and three Officers. One individual has a habit of ensconsing himself in a particular lounge and watching TV or sleeping on duty. Has been caught more times than I can count, has been written up for it several times. Dumb bastards won’t just fire the moron.
A couple of days ago he got caught in there by the Supervisor of another area.
Friday they sent out an e-mail reporting this without naming names and reminding us that we’re not allowed to do this.
Now, I understand that here in Minnesota, Passive-Aggressive is a state mandated mode of behavior that might actually be written into the State Constitution. Or maybe they were even passive-aggressive about that and just kinda wrote around it.
But their Non-Confrontational Ideal of “Not singling out anyone for embarassment” gets flattened by the Freight Train of Reality that says “We all know who you’re talking about, so you just humiliated him in front of his peers.”
While at the same time, not actually doing anything about the problem. Because if he hasn’t changed his behavior after all the times he’s been written up and/or reported on, he’s definitely caught on that you never do anything serious about it.
Or they get angry because you attacked them in public. If you catch me on a mistake and tell me individually, I’ll be grateful. If you catch me on the same mistake and tell me in front of everybody and his Mum, I’ll be pissed.
And sometimes it turns out that the misbehavior was justified; you hadn’t heard about the reason but that’s perhaps a communication problem, not a behavior problem. One of the most glorious cases for me was this boss who barked at me to stop leaving the 20-people meeting and coming back in; my response was “my apologies then, I’ll just leave and if you need me please call me in.” He growled some more, I explained that I wasn’t leaving for air and by the way I needed to go again, so if you’ll excuse me…
He followed me, then stayed at the bathroom’s door saying to come out and stop hiding. Finally one of our clients asked him “you never get the runs?”
Most bosses don’t need “diarrhea” spelled out.
I know exactly what you mean. Being raised and having my first job a few hundred yards from your eastern border I might as well be from Minnesota. Working in several different departments with the same company I saw a veritable fuck-ton of those “FYI” emails. Seeing as how I was still a teenager then I might have “inspired” one myself.
Also, Nava, that story is priceless. I don’t suppose he inspected the bowl afterwards? :eek:
As a former manager (think acres of cubicles, thousands of calls per hour) I have to agree with you, except for the “drones” and “retard” parts. Our management training taught us give the our workforce every opportunity to do right before starting corrective action. The reason for that was that every single solitary corrective action (counseling, coaching, whatever you want to call it) had to be documented and put into the employee’s file, in the event things went from bad to worse. We were covering our asses in case some jackass decided to sue us because he didn’t like getting fired. So, when a pattern of behavior began to manifest itself, the first thing we did was a team-wide reminder; this kept one piece of paper out of the miscreant’s file, and reminded everybody that, yes, the standards were still in force. I came to make “reminders” party of every team meeting I held, even if there weren’t any issues (and there rarely were). In return for making me look good, I busted my ass to get my team the best equipment, training and support the company had. It was a pretty good system.
If you have to ask, “Am I doing something wrong?” my question would be, “Don’t you know?”