Work

Hello NAS64395

I fully recognise the Hell of managing people that you’ve described! I’ve done it in the past but was totally winging it and definitely relied on the processes to dictate the objectives and priorities. Now that I am older and going through menopause-mania I am even more deskilled at this and hence even more clueless.

I do wonder if having a morning ‘huddle’ might help though. If you have a list of things that need doing everyday you could make the team decide amongst them who’s going to do what and write that up on a whiteboard so basically you are just supervising them making the decisions. If you completely step back from deciding who does what then they have to do all the decision making and sign their names against who’s going to do what. It might even get them to work better as a team.

The other thing to try might be divide and conquer. Give them each a task they have to achieve alongside the day job duties with a deadline so they suddenly have some pressure to do something on their own. With individual objectives they might just have to buckle down and you might find it brings more structure to the team because they’ll have to structure their work to achieve their individual objectives.

I recently had to ‘pull someone up’ on tardiness and had to write down what I needed to say before I did it. I wrote down questions that would be supportive too: is there anything you need from me to help you? Does your work need to be structured in a different way to help you? How do you think you could improve? Is there anything causing you problems that I might be able to help with? If I hadn’t done that I would have come across too aggressive and alienating because actually I just wanted to know what was so difficult about turning up on time, not being on his mobile phone the whole time and disappearing for half an hour 10 times a day???

Before I did this I also asked a friend how they would approach the conversation (I couldn’t even think how to start it). I find I did this more and more these days, often asking my neuro-typical husband how to tackle something or what his take on a situation is.

Setting formal objectives helps and having a structured conversation at regular 1:1s also helps.

Having SMART objectives (Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time bound) might help for each staff member and using a basic form to record different parts of the conversation: Review objectives, what did you do this week? What are your next steps? Updates from me. Concerns from you. Anything else you need to raise (annual leave, training, etc)

Echoing advice from others on here: Basically when in doubt put a structure in that works for you - it might never ‘feel’ like you know what you are doing but the structures and processes you put in place could do the management job for you.

I wish you luck my friend. Let us know how it goes. 

Hello NAS64395

I fully recognise the Hell of managing people that you’ve described! I’ve done it in the past but was totally winging it and definitely relied on the processes to dictate the objectives and priorities. Now that I am older and going through menopause-mania I am even more deskilled at this and hence even more clueless.

I do wonder if having a morning ‘huddle’ might help though. If you have a list of things that need doing everyday you could make the team decide amongst them who’s going to do what and write that up on a whiteboard so basically you are just supervising them making the decisions. If you completely step back from deciding who does what then they have to do all the decision making and sign their names against who’s going to do what. It might even get them to work better as a team.

The other thing to try might be divide and conquer. Give them each a task they have to achieve alongside the day job duties with a deadline so they suddenly have some pressure to do something on their own. With individual objectives they might just have to buckle down and you might find it brings more structure to the team because they’ll have to structure their work to achieve their individual objectives.

I recently had to ‘pull someone up’ on tardiness and had to write down what I needed to say before I did it. I wrote down questions that would be supportive too: is there anything you need from me to help you? Does your work need to be structured in a different way to help you? How do you think you could improve? Is there anything causing you problems that I might be able to help with? If I hadn’t done that I would have come across too aggressive and alienating because actually I just wanted to know what was so difficult about turning up on time, not being on his mobile phone the whole time and disappearing for half an hour 10 times a day???

Before I did this I also asked a friend how they would approach the conversation (I couldn’t even think how to start it). I find I did this more and more these days, often asking my neuro-typical husband how to tackle something or what his take on a situation is.

Setting formal objectives helps and having a structured conversation at regular 1:1s also helps.

Having SMART objectives (Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time bound) might help for each staff member and using a basic form to record different parts of the conversation: Review objectives, what did you do this week? What are your next steps? Updates from me. Concerns from you. Anything else you need to raise (annual leave, training, etc)

Echoing advice from others on here: Basically when in doubt put a structure in that works for you - it might never ‘feel’ like you know what you are doing but the structures and processes you put in place could do the management job for you.

I wish you luck my friend. Let us know how it goes.