Managers, take note. (Or experience high turnover rates, get shoddy reviews, and wonder why your job isn't fun any more.)

May 16, 2007

Thursday Thirteen 93::29: Bad! Bad! No, no, no, no, no!

I'm doing well /NOT/. For every 3 hours of laying on my back, sometimes on ice packs, I have about 20-30 minutes of time that I can stand up, walk about, or sit down and geek. People. Twenty to thirty minutes. This is very, very, very bad. I have IWS. I haven't even actually gotten to visit the sites for last week's T13. I'm heartily bummed. (And my 30 minutes are almost up...I can feel the pain sneaking back.)

As I remarked over at she's place, I've learned something at every contract gig I've worked. Sadly, many of these things fall into the category of “what not to do”. Yes, my professional career has consisted quite heavily of learning from others' mistakes. Here are just a few of the things I have been through from some nightmarish managers:

1. When giving instructions for a somewhat complex task that must be carried out exactingly, do not only give verbal instructions. Back them up with written (or emailed) instructions. This will work even better if you provide the written instructions on the same day as the verbal instructions. This will work exceedingly well if those original, verbal instructions are correct.
2. Being a leader means a certain bit of isolation. Your only true peers are other managers at your same level. This means that your topics of conversation are a bit limited, even if you're “best friends” with one or more of your employees. No matter how good you feel your rapport is with others among your team, do not verbally demean one worker to another. This goes double if you demean a regular employee — one whose knowledge and duties are neither documented nor easily handled by yourself — to a contractor — who, despite being highly competent, is neither mission-critical nor irreplaceable. That's not only an HR nightmare, that's tactically foolish.
3. When training a new employee, allow new employee to handle tasks from start to finish once they've demonstrated a knowledge of the overall procedure and concepts. Stepping in to finish the job robs the employee of learning opportunities, effectively lengthens the time that they'll be unable to assume their duties independently, and takes your time away from your duties.
4. When you don't know how to do something, say so. When you need assistance, ask for it. When you're in over your head, speak up. Implying that you have knowledge which you actually don't, or allowing others to assume that you have a much higher skill level than you actually do, will only come back around to bite you in the backside.
5. The above does not mean that it's acceptable to be a twitterpate. If you don't have knowledge, don't just ask someone else to do the task for you; learn how to do the task so that next time you won't have to ask.
6. If you've consistently, pointedly had your employees document procedures and job tasks, do not attempt to perform those tasks without consulting the documentation. Especially do not do this when you haven't performed these procedures in over three years and know that things have changed considerably since the last time you tried this. And especially don't have us clean up the mess you make, as if the fault is ours rather than yours.
7. Learn to delegate. Bored team members will do things like check email, surf the web, or knit tea cosies...and will become rather upset if you get pissed at them for not doing anything if, in fact, you never inform them that there's something to be done. (It's even worse if you don't actually have anything for them to do, yet still get torqued at them for checking personal email when they have no work.) If you're afraid to delegate because you fear your employees are unable to handle the tasks, then train your employees in those specific tasks. If they can't learn to your satisfaction, either you've got issues, or you're trying to teach rocket science to a janitor. (Which, if you're at MIT, might not be that much of a stretch.)
8. When you delegate a task, let it stay delegated. Don't come back two hours, two days, or two weeks later and say, “Never mind, I'll finish that” unless the person to whom you delegated the task is hopelessly incompetent or hopelessly deluged. You will end up with passive-aggressive employees who leave undesirable tasks undone in the knowledge that, sooner or later, you'll come and do them yourself.
9. Being a manager can mean dealing with incomplete or conflicting information. Part of the job of a manager, however, is to keep such problems away from their team. If you delegate a task to someone, give them complete and correct information as you have it at the time. Then step the hell back and let the person do the job. Don't come and change the task requirements list every hour. You'll only annoy your subordinate, look foolish, and feel very harried. (And chances are high that you won't have a good end result to pass on to the original requestor.)
10. When the weather turns extremely warm, nay even sweatshop-hot, do not say to any employee, “Tomorrow, you wear shorts!” (Unless shorts are part of the uniform and said employee wore something else to work that day. Otherwise...seriously. Keep this one behind your teeth.)
11. Do not quote the prison camp commander from Bridge on the River Kwai in performance interviews. The phrase “Be happy in your work” is not only pointlessly uninformative, people born after 1960 have seen that movie — several times. (We had to see Sir Alec Guiness in a role other than Obi Wan Kenobi.)
12. Do not give impromptu performance reviews at Togos. Especially do not give impromptu reviews that are negative, demeaning, belittling, and borderline insulting. (And if you do, do not have the unmitigated gall to say, afterward, “I'm so glad we had this chance to talk.” [And if you do, don't be surprised if you read about it on the blog of that employee's co-worker a few years hence.] Eye-dee-10-tee.)
13. When giving directions to your employees, don't tell them not to take notes. You're just hampering their efficiency for no good reason. What, you say? You're afraid that someone's going to write something down that contradicts something you'll say later and it will make you look foolish? Well, then, don't give verbal directions...or rehearse your 'speech' to make sure you've gotten everything right.

So what have you learned to avoid, from watching others' office follies? Keep names out of it — never mind Big Brother, Google's indexing you.

Other Participants

• A Blog of 2 Witches with the language of flowers
• J's Thoughts and Musings with random thoughts on blogging
• The Median Sib with reasons why she wants a new computer
• Knitting and Losing with items from her to-do list
• Tennessee Text Wrestling with famous authors and their cats
• a metamorphoself of gabrielle with personal numerology
• Chicken-Scratch with ways to conserve energy
• Cooking by the Seat of my Pants with things he could do with less of
• Jon Tillman with books on his reading list
• deweymonster with replies to memes with which she was tagged (and it added up to 13...how convenient :D )
• A little piece of me with trivia and complaints about her ear infection
• tinalina time with some of her favorite male actors
• The Gal Herself with tips on tipping (handy knowledge)
• Blue Star Chronicles examines concerns about making money with your blog
• Word Quilts remembering when...
• Mum's Kitchen Table with amusing answers from school exams
• What the Muffin? with classes she plans to take this fall when she starts college
• This Eclectic Life with excuses for this week's list not being more scintillating
• Wild Dasies with choices and consequences
• Angelle Trieste with why writing a book is like baking a cake
• Blog That Mommy! with 'have you ever's
• Old Man Hancock with things her husband will make a beeline for, when he comes home from deployment in two days

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