New manager, old wisdom (prompt: manager)
One of the hardest things about being a new manager coming in to replace the one that left after a business disaster is inheriting traumatized staff. The first thing you have to do is hear them out.
"See, I tried to tell Old Manager that it should have been done this way ..."
"You would not believe the mess you have to clean up, New Manager... and look out for Ms. So-and-So because she created half the mess with her gossiping, Negative-Nelly self ..."
"Has anybody told you yet about where the bodies are buried... and those books have been cooked so hard that they basically are charcoal..."
"I'm sorry... from what we heard I thought you were just a little older than you are ..."
On and on and on. No one was yet willing to consider themselves as agents of change instead of agents of keeping the previous madness going. I had read all the files. I knew about the bodies, the books, and the personalities. The easiest thing would have been to fire them all.
But instead, there was some ancient wisdom I wanted to apply first. These were people, not chattel. They had value. They had knowledge that we would all need to succeed. They had families and communities counting on them to turn this place around and keep their paycheck coming. Nothing in the files suggested any of them were inherently unemployable. It would depend on how each of them responded to the ancient wisdom.
So I bought donuts and coffee and salad and chicken and asked all the surviving staff to come my office after we got it cleaned up. Different staff members brought flowers and things to brighten things up, and I noticed that even though they still seemed hesitant and afraid, there was just a little hope coming in with the last rays of the afternoon sun.
Yet they tensed up the moment I opened my mouth. What was I going to demand of them in order to turn this place around? They had already been hurt, abused, taken for granted -- what was next? I saw faces that told me people were ready to go into fight or flight mode, no matter what I said.
So, I started with the most ancient managerial wisdom I knew.
"Thank you all for being here, in spite of everything that has happened. I appreciate the effort all of you have made and the work you have done so we have a place left to turn around. THANK YOU."
Today, we are the best in our industry by every metric my team cares about. I keep applying the ancient managerial wisdom, and I must say it works well.
Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash
This is an Invitation to join #ccc for Guaranteed 👍 Daily Income 💵 and Payout 💸 for Newbies (2.0) 🐟 🐜 🐛 in #ccc 👣 and Follow 👣 the Honor Code 🏅 - the Creed (Conditions and Limits Inside)
AND
the latest update <<< please click to read.
Congratulations @deeanndmathews! You have completed the following achievement on the Steem blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
You can view your badges on your Steem Board and compare to others on the Steem Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOP
Whooaaa.. that's amazing @deeanndmathews 😉 it must be hard to work with those who already had a stigma in their head about everything around.
I really hope that you can build a good team to move forward step by step and remember to do that on step at a time. I pray for your effort and positive energy you try to share towards your teammates😉
This wasn't actually me; this is sort of a composite of the two best new managers I know, and some situations they had to clean up, and how they dealt with it... one was very young, and the other inherited a terrible mess. Both of them applied the ancient wisdom to their surviving staff, and are on their way to their happy ending (I pray)!
Thank you so much for reading!
Oh my... Love this freewrite. And this is awesome for the first freewrite. I super duper love the ancient managerial wisdom too. I learn something new today. =)
It is weekend and that just means you get to choose any prompt you want from the table in this post.
OR
If you are up to some challenge to weave 3 prompts, each 5 minutes into 15-minutes freewrite, you can click here.. You may be surprise how each prompt leads to another story using the next prompt.
Have fun writing!
This is the philosophy of two of the best managers I know, combined... it DOES seem to work!
Thank you so much for reading!