As a general rule, managers are promoted to their positions because they know how to get thing done – they learn quickly, overcome obstacles, complete projects on time, and often do all of this with little supervision or oversight. So, when it’s time to find a new manager, who better for the job than someone who makes things happen?

If these managers have a consistent, predictable weakness, what might it be? In my experience, the answer is most likely patience. These capable taskmasters are quite often long on activities and short on time; find it hard to delegate important responsibilities; and generally feel the need to be directing most tasks. After all, that “Just Do It” reputation they have created was a primary factor in their promotion to management.

People Issues Usually Include Emotions

Unfortunately, not all work problems are task problems, and this can present a unique challenge to managers: how to efficiently manage employee issues?

Employee issues come in all shapes and sizes: poor performance, lack of cooperation, inadequate communication, attitude problems, personal problems, and so on. Because these are people problems, they rarely come without the side effects produced by the emotional side of people: enthusiasm, impatience, fear, resentment, excitement, hurt feelings, worry, disappointment, and more.

The problem here is that is impossible to be efficient with emotions. Managers can’t just troubleshoot the problem and come up with a new process or a new solution. Of course, they often try to do exactly that (ignoring the emotional fallout), but the results are fairly predictable – the employee feels used or disregarded and the disengagement process begins.

Effective leaders understand that employees are human and have emotions that must be acknowledged and/or addressed, a process that takes an investment of time. In fact, the leadership concept of emotional intelligence relates to the ability to manage one’s own emotions and the emotions of the people you lead. However, investing time in your employees – to listen, to explain, to train and develop, and to deal with personal issues – rarely leads to efficiency.

Instead, the most important objective, in dealing with people, is to be effective.

1. Focus – engage the employee
2. Listen – don’t fix (not at first)
3. Clarify your understanding
4. Ask for input
5. Create clear expectations
6. Clarify their understanding

By the way, the time you invest in dealing with the issue now probably prevents you from wasting a whole lot of time you would have needed to revisit the problem/issue later (in many cases, more than once).

You might be more efficient than you think…

Tagged as: Emotion, employee issues