Caught in the middle

I work with people ( I know a lot of us do and even the ones that work with animals also have people working with them) and I am forever amazed at how different we are. I am not sure if animals are different (as in each sheep in a herd or each monkey in a zoo) but humans? Vastly different!!!

Over the years, I have seen a number of situations scenarios where mangers ‘play games’ with their team members and leave HR grappling like a drowning clown, flapping hands to make sure no ego is ruffled. So the HR person has to implore the greatest level of ‘office diplomacy’ (even Condoleeza will be impressed sometimes and the level of diplomacy we exhibit in our day to handling of employee and relationship management in the office) to ensure that employee does not feel undervalued and without making the manager lose face or look bad in the situation. Sometimes this can be tough.

Over and over I hear leadership gurus state quite strongly that managers need to make a tough call (okay, this is really Jack’s favorite line and he highlighted quite a bit of such situations in his famous “winning” book). However, most managers shy away from making any calls at all and a regular call suddenly become a tough call. When tough call comes, they actually melt in front of it and make a mess of it.

Today an employee came into my office with loads of training information that she will like to go for and in my mind I thought “oh this is trouble”. I did not say so though so I asked if this has been discussed with the manager and I got one of those looks (oh yea, but she is not keyed in). I know that this particular unit is undergoing some serious restructuring which will end up with a possible change in ownership and while training is important, the manager is really focused or consumed by this impending change. I know that this manager expects the team member to understand and that is the bit that is quite niggling. However, both of them have not sat down to discuss how this change will affect individuals in the team in terms of project changes and development/skill needs.

What we see in HR is how things that should and could be nipped at the bud suddenly gets out of hand and become huge issues. Communication is the single most important thing in running a company/team. I know there are other components but employee problems have strong root in either lack of communication or inadequate communication. People need to talk and I am sometimes totally confused on why this is difficult between team leads and their team members. I think that this should be fairly easy if we present the honest picture at all times and show empathy in our approach.

This is not a technical piece truly, but how difficulty is it to talk to and with people that you work with? We as managers(Whoops! Actually, I am a manager, can you beat that?) underrate the ability of our team members to understand ‘serious business issues’. My experiences have shown me that when employees are carried along, they feel more involved and this greatly reduces friction and attrition.

Going back to the employee that stormed into my office with the solutions to her development needs, now I will have to ‘resolve’ this issue and the way I approach this resolution will be very important but since this is what I do so often and have done over the years, it will come fairly easily but in my early years, believe me it would have been catastrophic…Hmmm!! Who says age and experience have nothing to do with it??