Work

I've not been in quite the same situation as I work in a large organisation which has a lot of processes in place for performance management, and sets out what line managers are meant to do. And I'd have struggled a lot more with managing people without this.

Where I work everyone has a set of objectives which are formally reviewed every 6 months, and line managers have 1 to 1 conversations with staff every month to discuss progress with this. I don't like conflict at all, so having a set time scheduled each month with the person I was managing, and set of objectives to refer to I found much easier to address issues with performance. I also tended to approach it indirectly by asking how they thought they had been progressing towards an objective. Work priorities don't change too much from week to week where I work so monthly conversations I found was a good frequency, but once a week or fortnight, or longer periods might work better in your situation. Having team meetings where you review progress towards team objectives is another approach that might  work.

It might be easier to take a lighter touch to managing other people's time and workload. I tended to only set priorities and deadlines for completing A, B, and C, and leave it to individuals to manage their own time/workload - and tell them to ask me if they are unsure what they should be doing next. If I felt someone wasn't on track to complete any of these tasks, I usually ask for a progress update. And if somebody isn't able to complete all the tasks, I usually save that conversation until a scheduled monthly conversation, not least to give me lots of time to work out what I'm going to say to them.

For tasks that people don't like doing, I've found dividing the task up equally between between all team members (usually including myself), at least stops people thinking it's unfair - or having a rota so that a different team member does it each day. And again asking for progress updates, or reviewing in 1 to 1 conversations if I thought they weren't pulling their weight. The "I'm busy" excuse seems really unlogical to me - if somebody is genuinely busy then I'll ask them to treat the new task I'm giving them as a higher priority than whatever else they are doing. The only time I've had somebody refusing to do something, we reached an agreement to remove some lower priority tasks from their workload and that at least removed the excuse of being too busy.

I've not been in quite the same situation as I work in a large organisation which has a lot of processes in place for performance management, and sets out what line managers are meant to do. And I'd have struggled a lot more with managing people without this.

Where I work everyone has a set of objectives which are formally reviewed every 6 months, and line managers have 1 to 1 conversations with staff every month to discuss progress with this. I don't like conflict at all, so having a set time scheduled each month with the person I was managing, and set of objectives to refer to I found much easier to address issues with performance. I also tended to approach it indirectly by asking how they thought they had been progressing towards an objective. Work priorities don't change too much from week to week where I work so monthly conversations I found was a good frequency, but once a week or fortnight, or longer periods might work better in your situation. Having team meetings where you review progress towards team objectives is another approach that might  work.

It might be easier to take a lighter touch to managing other people's time and workload. I tended to only set priorities and deadlines for completing A, B, and C, and leave it to individuals to manage their own time/workload - and tell them to ask me if they are unsure what they should be doing next. If I felt someone wasn't on track to complete any of these tasks, I usually ask for a progress update. And if somebody isn't able to complete all the tasks, I usually save that conversation until a scheduled monthly conversation, not least to give me lots of time to work out what I'm going to say to them.

For tasks that people don't like doing, I've found dividing the task up equally between between all team members (usually including myself), at least stops people thinking it's unfair - or having a rota so that a different team member does it each day. And again asking for progress updates, or reviewing in 1 to 1 conversations if I thought they weren't pulling their weight. The "I'm busy" excuse seems really unlogical to me - if somebody is genuinely busy then I'll ask them to treat the new task I'm giving them as a higher priority than whatever else they are doing. The only time I've had somebody refusing to do something, we reached an agreement to remove some lower priority tasks from their workload and that at least removed the excuse of being too busy.