Sins of Staff Management

If you keep having trouble with employees, you may want to consider whether YOU are the problem.

Not everyone who is hired as a manager has the skill set necessary to be a good manager. Most aren’t trained. If they are promoted, it is assumed they know the company and the work that needs to be done well enough to manage other people doing it.  This isn’t necessarily the case.

Management is about communication and we humans are notoriously bad at communicating. It isn’t necessarily our fault. We are all prone to making assumptions. One of the things we assume is that what is obvious to us is obvious to others as well.

When I first became a manager and conducted trainings, I quickly realized that the best way to figure out what I thought was obvious but that wasn’t obvious was to do a training.  There is nothing quite like watching a group of newly trained people do it all wrong because you forgot to mention something vitally important in the training. It’s a humbling experience. Or rather it should be. 

Since then, I have pretty much assumed that if an employee is doing something wrong, it’s probably because I failed to communicate something important to them. I’m rarely wrong.  The problem is almost always me. 

And it’s precisely because I recognize my responsibility to the problem that when I have a failure to communicate problem that I am able to help correct that problem and the problems that result from my failure to communicate by helping my employees learn what it is I failed to teach them the first time. In other words, I use pretty much every single failure of mine as a learning experience, for me, so that I don’t repeat that same mistake again. 

I also like to think my willingness to take responsibility for my communication failures helps my staff work with me to fix the problem. I’m not blaming them. The mistake is mine. Now, they can help me fix the problem and we can all do better as a result.

If you want to learn what the most common staff management communication sins are and how to avoid them – take my online course: The 7 Sins of Staff Management https://humanistlearning.com/?p=2248  - it’s only ½ hour long and it is worth your time.