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I had posted this before, then I deleted it because it was a touchy subject and I felt a bit bitchy venting about my frustrations – but lately I’ve realized that if we allow ourselves to vent, then give the situation some time and distance and look back on how we felt after we have cooled down, we can actually learn a lot from reflecting on how we reacted. So i’ve decided to re-post it exactly how i originally wrote it, and now that i am in a completely different place in my career (i started a new job with a new organization in a different city) – i can look back on this experience through a different lens and learn how i could have handled it differently and maybe been more supportive or tolerant. i think a lot of time when employees act up or get really defensive about taking criticism that is intended to be constructive, it stems from their own insecurities and fears, so trying to understand that as a supervisor and going one step further to ask “why” will help me to be a better learning coach in the future. i think this employee might have been frustrated because he wasn’t meeting my expectations, but i had a hard time making my expectations clear to him since he blew up at me any time i tried to communicate with him. i still need to mull this one over a bit to figure out a way i could have gotten my expectations across to him without offending him… but it’s true that he can’t meet them if he is not aware of them. I’m going to let this situation sit for a little while still, and come back to it in a little while and figure out a way i could do things differently when i encounter a similar situation in the future.

Discipline problems

so i’m not sure if this post will be constructive for me or if i just need to vent, but i’ve become very frustrated with one of my employees and i cannot find a way to win.

basically we started off on the wrong foot from the get-go – he came back from a vacation a few weeks after i had started managing the department. i had made a few changes, considering the feedback of the other employees, and he was instantly very critical. this frustrated me since i had asked around and the people with the most experience had made the suggestions. he has a short fuse, so instead of approaching me in a calm and constructive tone, he was yelling and swearing. i am not used to being yelled at so i found this difficult to deal with. i tried to explain to him that i had consulted the other employees first, but he wouldn’t listen without interrupting me.

that week, the employee disobeyed many of the rules and basically refused to cooperate with any of the expectations. he showed up late, constantly surfed the internet during work, and showed up without wearing his uniform to standard. they are all small things, and i know i am being nit-picky (actually, he told me i was being nit-picky) but i think a general refusal to comply with expectations speaks volumes about your work ethic and attitude towards the workplace.

every time i tried approaching him about his behaviour he got extremely defensive and lipped me off. he either told me that it was a stupid rule and that i was being too uptight (but the rules are made by the organization – i am just trying to be consistent with the other departments and company policy) or that i was wasting my time and that i should focus my energy on more important things than discipline issues with him (he told me it wasn’t a big deal and that i needed to learn how to prioritize). i started with things one at a time, hoping to be able to get him on board with the expectations by the end of the summer, but eventually my “choose your battles” voice kicked in and i started to let things slide. i think that it is bad that i let things slide because this is an employee whose example others copy, but he had such a hot fuse and temper that it was like walking on eggshells trying to approach him about his behaviour.

i went to my boss for advice about how to deal with him and my boss didn’t really offer much in the way of support. he listened empathetically, and he offered an “i know people can be tough” and “yes, i’ve worked with him before, he is hard to get along with” but i think he didn’t want to seem to choose sides and he chose to remain neutral – which is very professional of him. at the same time i would have appreciated some support, though i’m not sure what he could have done.

so anyways the summer went on with unresolved discipline problems because i did not know how to get this employee to cooperate. i tried many different strategies – i tried being super nice, but he didn’t take me seriously, and i tried being super assertive, which takes a lot of energy and usually ends up making him more angry and lose his temper. i also tried giving written feedback about the expectations in the communications book and on the staff bulletin board to avoid making him feel on the spot, but he also did not seem to read these things (which is another part of his job… grrr!! then when i asked him to read them from now on he got angry and stormed out of the room!!!).

he left at the end of the summer and i asked him to stop by the office to deliver his keys and sign his employee evaluation. he completely dodged me on his last day and he told some employees that he would come back later to do it but he never did it. i ran into him downtown in the city that evening and he told me he would not sign any evaluation that i wrote for him because he did not think i was a good supervisor and that i wasn’t qualified to give him an evaluation. he basically refused to sign it – he refused to read it! and he told me that he was going to talk to my boss about me. i’m sure he will say that i can’t “prioritize” because i was concerned about “little things” that weren’t important like punctuality.

i’m stuck on this one. usually when i have a negative interaction with another person i try and find a way i could learn from it and i try and figure out what i could do differently next time. i can’t figure out how i could have handled things differently. i think part of it is because i wasn’t aware of the types of problems i would run into until i had already encountered them, so i couldn’t exactly make my expectations clear from the get-go. looking back, part of me just thinks that this employee wanted credit for the things he DID do right, instead of me zeroing in on the behavioural problems. when someone is so outright defiant, it is a real challenge to see past the temper and the refusal to cooperate and look for his strengths! part of me thinks that he didn’t deserve any credit! i did try and find some strengths for his end of season evaluation, because i always try and make evaluations and constructive, supportive and encouraging as possible, but he didn’t even read i
t so he had no idea!!

this is really frustrating, and now that it is over the best i can do is learn from it but i’m not sure what i’m supposed to be learning!! i also had a lot of staff complaints about this employee as well, and in between dealing with the discipline problems, listening to him criticize the decisions that were made and listen to other employees complain about him, he took up a lot of my valuable time and energy that i could have put into “prioritizing”!!

some days were so bad that i just went home burnt out and frustrated and had a good cry for 2 hours. when i went to ask my boss for advice, i didn’t want to let on how bad it actually was because i didn’t want him to think i had a weakness as a supervisor and that i couldn’t control my employees. i am a bit embarassed about this but i wasn’t tough enough and i didn’t have the energy to be super assertive with him every day. plus i don’t really like having to act that way – it makes me feel like a bitch – plus it didn’t really seem to make any difference anyways. he just did whatever he wanted anyways. i’ve never had this type of problem before because in my previous supervising roles i was also in charge of hiring and firing, so i could avoid these types of confrontations by hiring people that i liked!

I recently found out that Remember the Milk, an online to-do list tracker, has a Firefox plug-in to integrate it with Gmail. So, I switched to Remember the Milk for my personal to-do list and added due dates, which I didn’t use on my previous to-do tool. I found it made me somewhat more productive because I tend to leave Gmail open most of the day (and thus, RTM) and my most urgent to-do items stayed at the front of my mind.

But – it meant I started spending more time at work thinking about all of my personal to-do items, which didn’t especially help my work productivity. At least it didn’t significantly hurt it, either.

So, I just decided to put my work to-do list into RTM as well, and to sort my to-do items into lists (i.e. work and home). Now I can set RTM only to show “work” items when I’m at work and “home” items when I’m at home. It’s actually been fairly helpful so far in boosting my productivity over some of the other to-do methods I’ve used in the past.

I imagine I’d get the same effect if I had my to-do list alongside my work email, like in Outlook. But we use Eudora, so that doesn’t work. Besides, I like the interface and it’s nice to be able to access my to-do list from multiple computers. And I can add personal to-do items even when I’m looking at my work to-do items, which helps me get my mind off of personal matters and back to work!

Now that I’m ready to change jobs I need to reflect on things and figure out the best way to learn from my “struggles.”

TO DO:

1. Make a de-briefing list of challenges and proposed solutions from my current job so that when I meet with my boss I have concrete and constructive points to bring up so that we can all learn and move forward.

2. Email the manager some brief bullet points about concerns I want to bring up (mini agenda for the meeting) so that she has a heads up and facility photographs.

I think that now that the summer is coming to a close, I need to sit down and reflect on my strengths and weaknesses as a supervisor so that I can figure out how to learn from it. Or mostly my weaknesses and figure out how to work on them.

1. prioritizing? sometimes i get caught up in the details. i am a details person which is great in some tasks but a lot of days i need to be a big picture person and instead of focusing on little projects i need to figure out how they fit in and how much benefit they will actually provide. i need to ask myself whether or not the energy invested will really pay off and whether the little project is worth it in the first place.

2. this spills into time management. i am really good at making to do lists and choosing priorities, but you know those low priority tasks that get postponed day after day and never really seem to get done unless you deliberately move them to the top of the list? i need to ask myself this: should they really be on the list at all? do they really need to get done? sometimes i try and do too much and i need to make better decisions about what is actually worth my time and energy.

3. i am a pleaser. i try and make everyone happy, and i have learned this year that the more you say yes to and the more you deliver, the more people ask of you. i think learning when to say no or when to decide that something isn’t worth your time (yes, you will make someone happy but is the benefit going to be worth it?) is a skill that comes with experience.

4. sometimes i am reflective. i think this is a good thing in some scenarios, but i like to roll things around in my head and sometimes mull over decisions carefully before i make them. this is hard to do when you are in a dynamic working environment and things are going on around you all of the time. if you don’t have the privacy of your own office how can you take the time to make good decisions in front of others without looking lazy? this is a really hard thing that i have learned this year – making decisions takes time and energy but it appears to other people that you are not doing any work. you know the phrase “oh, managers don’t do anything?” well, now i empathize! just because they are not moving around doesn’t mean the gears are not turning! i ended up just bringing a lot of mental work home with me this year – it is hard to justify contemplating things when you are paid hourly.

5. i can be a real details person, which makes me slightly intolerent of non-details persons. okay, i’ll admit it, i’m anal. and when staff are in charge of numbers and getting reports and forms filled out properly and putting the right dates on things, i get frustrated. is it worth my time to call them out on it? should i be more tolerant? am i too uptight? should i let more things slide? i let a lot of things slide this year – i guess i am working on “choose my battles” – because if i picked on every little detail it would be a full time job. but again i need to learn when to let things bother me and when to just let them go. and i need to working on learning to trust people – sometimes i feel the need to double-check everything!!! but at the same time, when i do, i find tons of mistakes!!! i guess this goes back to needing to be more of a “big picture” person – i need to realize when the details are going to have a big impact and when they aren’t. as hard as it is to let the little things slide, sometimes being a perfectionist can be inefficient.

Since I’m cutting back to half time in a few weeks, I’ve been wrapping up a few things and getting ready to pass them on to other people. In a way it’s nice, but after putting lots of hard work into something, it can be hard to hand it off to someone else.

One thing in particular that has been hard for me: I’ve been leading a team of about 7 people in preparation for a proposal, but I’ve now given up that role.

I was originally the appropriate choice for team leader, but eventually the focus of the team changed. I was still expected to carry on despite my comparative lack of experience in the area, and I’d like to think I did a pretty good job (I put a lot of effort into it!) It was both stressful and rewarding.

However, certain other folks at my company felt my continued leadership of the team would be inappropriate. (I agree that the proposal will be better with more experienced leadership.) So, I’ve been replaced. At least it was a graceful transition – there’s no implication that I performed inadequately. Plus I have the outward excuse of my pregnancy & reduced time availability which helps me save face. But still, it hurts after all the effort I’ve put in.

The upside is, the new team leader has been impressed with my efforts so far, seems to respect my opinion greatly, and still wants me to be an integral part of the team. So, I still have some “authority” with the team, without the stress of as much responsibility.

Last week was super-busy preparing for an all-day review, and this week was super-busy dealing with the aftermath and another review of sorts.

I managed to get through the week by having a list of all my tasks on my cubicle’s whiteboard, listed by day (and in fact, the rough order I expected to work on them). I crossed off each thing as I did it. It was a good feeling, and I got a lot done.

I think part of my recent problem with motivation happens when I’m not sure exactly what I need to do next. My job can be nebulous like that sometimes. I didn’t have that particular problem this week, and I had plenty of motivation. But unfortunately the volume and urgency of the work made me a little depressed mid-week. It’s hard to find a good balance.

feeling engaged at work. And of course when I’m not engaged I don’t do my best work. I’m in a job where I do have a lot of control over my responsibilities, so it’s mostly my own fault. I seem to be having trouble getting out of this rut.

I really need to discuss this with some folks at work, but between vacations and their other responsibilities they have seemed largely inaccessible lately. Plus, I haven’t felt super motivated to make the effort to fix the problem. I guess I’ve been pretty preoccupied with the pregnancy, and how/when I’m going to tell them about that…