There is always time for Thank You

I know that even as I sit three feet away from a person who just sent me an email, there is always time for me together write or say the words “thank you” via email or my actual mouth, every time they do good work. There is no excuse not to say it. It is not wrong to praise. Saying “thank you” also opens up the possibility for giving feedback (both positive and negative) on projects, because the person feels acknowledged and valued. I seriously want to make a study of saying it as much as possible as a boss. 

This Isn’t Temping: Millenial Workers Unite!

Oh, man, you guys. I just had a good old-fashioned complain-a-thon with some people I will not further describe or identify, out of deference/privacy.

I have had this conversation many times before, but never with so many sharp, decisive young people who are so totally not interested in being mismanaged. They have some very high expectations. The refrains I heard most often was a desire to not be micromanaged and a desire to be allowed to “take ownership” over their work.

It was fascinating. These young women are too smart to be treated like underlings who are treated as totally replaceable (and openly told they will have opportunity to advance). It’s so interesting (and heartbreaking) to see how much they want to contribute, and how little they feel heard. They have ideas and are really passionate about sharing them. But the frustration they feel at not being allowed to implement new ideas is extraordinary. Their desire to produce work that is not edited or approved by (a chain of) other people is extreme.

They are also keenly aware of the “brand” of the organization they work for. They see organizational dysfunction as deleterious to that brand and to their careers. They see themselves as untapped resources that are being ignored and wasted, and they do not feel that they can have a positive impact on organizational culture.

This little “focus group” was so fascinating. Oh, wow, I am going to be thinking about this for a while. This is why we can’t always have lunch at our desks, you learn too much when you go outside the office.

 

Pro Tips: Nobody Can Read Minds

I am being perfectly serious when I say that the management flaw that I observe the most often is that managers believe that their employees are psychic.

Mind reading, while awesome in theory  is not only impossible, but impractical. Let’s focus our energies elsewhere, such as on instantaneous site-to-site transportation.

In the meantime, let’s focus on productive, healthy practices for improving communications. There are many resources out there that I have read about, there are a million different tactics for healthy, open, efficient communications. Everything depends on developing systems that people will really use and that are clear and easily accessible.

I don’t have value judgments about the efficacy and usefullness of : daily meetings, weekly meetings, morning email check-ins, using g-chat, to-do lists with task assignments, and the like. I think they could all work, in the right context.

What I have a problem with is: hoarding information and tasks, expecting that people have information that you have not shared out, people who are afraid of technology (either because they won’t learn a new tool or because they think  a robot will take their job), people who manage by manipulating rather than by communicating openly, people who communicate in an unclear manner, people who lie, people who are indecisive, and people who manage through creating competition rather than collaboration.

Seriously, we have to learn how to communicate better. Nobody can read minds, and to expect this is disrespectful to your staff and maybe a little bit crazy.

Thoughts & Reading for the Day

If a manager is so busy that they don’t have time to prioritize and delegate, then the support staff for that manager cannot be held responsible when things go off the rails.

When you need help, ask for it, and be specific about the task you need done. Help isn’t helping if you just stand around waiting for instructions.

An assistant isn’t someone who just watches you work.

To Read:

Stress at the Office

The best fake twitter account ever

Life Meets Art, Jersey Shore Edition

This Isn’t Temping: I am in trouble

Here are something that are happening at my temp job that are making me feel really uncomfortable. As you know, I worked at home last week on a variety of projects, using remote access from the server. Apparently, this is not okay, despite the fact that I was given permission to stay home and the walk-bus-walk commute would have taken three hours.

I received several emails over the weekend (sent to my work email account) reminding me just how crucial is was that I arrive at work on Monday, which was never a question, and only contingent on the 4/5 train sunning in to Manhattan again, which it is:

•  “Also, we will be full staff in the office on Monday.  Pretty much everyone made it in on Thursday and Friday.”
•  “Just wanted to say I am looking forward to seeing you in the office in the morning.  It’s a BIG week for us!”
• And this, which was sent on Sunday night: “Glad to have you back in the office!”

And then, just now, my boss’s boss’s boss threw “Hey , I haven’t seen you in a week!” at me as she walked through the office. Seriously?

This is activating my intense guilt and feelings of shame and anger that I have about:

1) not being so committed to this job that I would come in during a partial MTA shutdown;

2) that I am a temp and I am angry and incredulous that this kind of passive-aggressive pressure is being put on me  when I get paid by someone else by the hour;

3) that I am a temp, period. I hate being an administrative assistant;

4) that all they want is for me to be here, and be present, even though I have very little to do.

Honestly, I am upset, but I know I need to not take any of this personally and just move on with a smile on my face.

This would be a lot easier to do if I wasn’t being asked to plan another girl’s birthday party (whose birthday is the same as mine). I feel really gross right now. I need to work through this, and, again, not take it personally. But I don’t know if I know how to do that.

I wish I was spending the day volunteering, helping with the recovery.

Workaholism, Observed

Yesterday, I observed some workaholic behavior. Not hard-core, as I have been exposed to in the past, but a discrete moment of insanity within a typically normal place. For me, the hallmark of this issue is the inability to see how conditions (that you sometimes create) at work affect you and your colleagues, including overwork, the inability to manage time effectively, stress, and illness. I don’t think it’s the same as being an addict, but there are similarities. I have certainly posted about workaholic behaviors and workplaces before. But when I saw this type of behavior coming at me yesterday, it made me feel uncomfortable, so I feel compelled to write about it a little bit.

In the office yesterday afternoon, there was a burning smell, which I identified, because I am a hero. When people finally agreed with me that something was amiss (as I jokingly said “I refuse to die in this place” even though it was not a joke), one of the mid-level managers, who had dismissed me as thinking that someone’s lunch smelled weird, “took charge.” She literally took my building pass from me, and marched everyone out to the elevator and downstairs. This was kind of in violation of the fire protocol we had learned a few weeks ago, but whatever. It was mostly just funny that she took charge in such an overbearing way, having previously dismissed my concerns as an overreaction. (This middle manager has told me long stories about her own experiences with abusive managers, including a women who has her illegally fired from a job in the corporate sector. She is also an artist.)

Anyway, we found out a few minutes later that the burning smell was actually a fluorescent bulb that was burning out and therefore melting the casing that connects the bulb to its source of electricity. We all were allowed to go back upstairs. The office in which I work smelled very strongly of burnt plastic and chemicals, while the outer ring of private offices were less badly affected. The middle manager closed the door to her office (which she shares with other staff), while those of us in the middle office were left with this nasty smell. It was 4pm, and I usually leave at 5pm. The smell was making me uncomfortable, so I went into the middle manager’s office.

“Could you close the door? I don’t want the smell to come in here!” said the middle manager, laughing.

“The smell is still really bad in the center office, so if it’s okay, I think I am going to go home.”

“Uhhhhhh, are you done with all your projects for the day? I mean, what are you working on?” she replied, in a semi-shrill tone.

“I am doing some on-going research for Jennifer,” I said, referencing this research project that is supposed to be done by the middle of November. “I completed the mailing that you asked me to do this morning.”

“Jennifer, is it okay if she leaves?” asked the middle manager.

“Sure, of course,” said Jennifer.

So, while she recognized that the smell was gross, and she didn’t want it in her office, she was unable to recognize that it was gross and overwhelming to other people. She also took a strangely accusatory tone with me, as if I was shirking my duties (as a temp?!) by leaving 60 minutes early on a Tuesday. I have never left that office with a project unfinished, I have met every deadline they have set for me, and I have never been reprimanded for late or incomplete work. Like, what?

I mentioned that I was leaving to our mutual boss, and she literally said “of course!” and then waved me out of the office. People in another branch of the office referenced the “hullabaloo” (great word) and gently asked if a project that I was working on for them was done, despite the commotion. The other employees who worked in the center office with me left to get fresh air without asking permission (while the new person literally said she was afraid to leave because she didn’t want to get in trouble).

Now, I know that we all deal with stress differently, but this kind of myopia is, to me, a symptom of workaholism that I find really distasteful. Similarly, I get upset when people come to work sick, or when there is competition over who stays latest in the office. I was also kind of grossed out by this person’s attempt to deputize another person into her irritation that I wanted to leave early.

Now, this episode was very mild, and also discrete, which is why I think it’s an interesting example of workaholic behavior. It’s not wrapped up in a deadline, or a dramatic series of events, or a work culture. It was one person unable to recognize or sympathize with an unhealthy situation that adversely affected other people in the office.

And while I know that I am overly sensitive to issues like these, I also felt uncomfortable, said so, and then stuck to my guns when I was challenged, and left the office. So, I think that shows (small) progress.

Anyway, everything in the office is totally normal this morning, including a new bulb. I’m glad I know that they smell so gross when they burn out. I also got home in time to go for a run last night, which felt great. I ran two miles faster than I have in a long time, which I credit to yoga and lots of stretching.

Aha! Another Management Pet Peeve Discovered!

This really is a learning process.

So, you know how I have said that  I try not to take this temping thing very seriously, and that I am working on de-personalizing the work and the attendant criticism? It’s hard to un-learn all these years of being hyper-responsible, and hyper-sensitive.

Yesterday, I realized something new and really interesting. A pet peeve, if you will, about when systems go wrong. I was charged with sending out an important email to a list of people, but I felt in my gut that the list was not up to date. It turns out it was way, way far out of date. This is in part because there is no centralized database, in part because of employee turnover, and in part because of inconsistent systems. But all of a sudden, I felt like it was my fault.

You know why? Because the supervisor asked me if the list was up to date, and I said “I don’t know.” I didn’t make the list, I am not charged with the upkeep of the list, I have never been asked to update the list. I would have no way of knowing. But I hated that I didn’t know.

So we updated the list, and every new error or discrepancy was flagged with “Did you have a so and so?” or “Did you have this organization?” or “Are the groups from 2011 in this list?” Every time, I had to say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”

It was all the language. By the end of this weird exercise, the supervisor said, “this is not you, this is someone else’s mistake, I am so glad we caught this.”

But this is a funny thing–new employees are often held responsible for the errors of past employees, whether they had anything to do with the project or system that is causing the problem. 99% of the time, it’s a past employee (either through oversight, error or Senioritis) who has caused or left a problem for the new person. But then the new employee is responsible for the mistakes that result. When you inherit a mess, it can take months or years to discover and rectify all these errors. (I had a boss who would say “you must” or “you have to” while she was training me to do a task, as if I had been doing it wrong, and she was going to teach me to do whatever it was correctly. But really, it was my predecessor who had done it wrong, or other staff who were doing it wrong, and I was the one responsible for doing it right going forward.) The problem is that the work was done poorly, but there is also a problem of communicating that the work was not done poorly by me, but my someone else. In any case, it is my personal belief that employees should be rewarded for uncovering problems, errors and inefficiencies, even if those problems were of their own creation.

Anyway, somehow I deserve some cake. That’s the moral of this story.

 

Giving Feedback

I have been thinking about how to give feedback in a positive way. Ever since my sad tantrum over the “this is terrible” comment from Friday, I have been trying to think of ways that I would offer critique, being honest without being overly harsh.

Here it goes:

Preconditions:

As a manager, the most important thing I can do to ensure a positive outcomes on a project is to set clear goals. If the project is a document, or a gala for 1,000 people, both the manager and the team need to know what success looks and feels like, and how it will be measured.

Part of this is to set a clear timeline for the project. Not everything can be finished ASAP. Helping the team to understand what work is urgent and what work is less time sensitive will ensure that the crucial work gets done quickly, while longer term projects can be just that.

Some Elements of a Feedback Process:

1) Instead of offering value judgement (like “this is terrible”), ask your team member if this document is accomplishing its intended objective. I like asking “Is this working?” or “Is this doing what we need it to?” I had an old boss who would look at a grant report and say, “So, what story are we telling?” It helps to depersonalize the critique by making the outcome about the audience, not the creator.

2) Set clear benchmarks, and then judge the given set of tasks on that benchmark. For example,  if I had known that the document I was making needed to be in its final format, I would have tried harder to make it look nice. My understanding was that it was a mock-up for content only, because I am not versed in the various graphical formats that this company uses, and i had been working on content only up to that point.

3) Ask your employee what they need from you to move forward on the project, and then try to give it to them. Even if you don’t know what the final outcome will exactly be, you need to give some guidance. It’s not “let me do this for you,” but rather “what information or decisions do you need from me in order to take your next set of actions?” I think this is the difference between micromanagement and regular management.

My views on this process are heavily influenced by what I am going to start calling my “negative learnings” from these ten years of work in the nonprofit world. But also, mostly, by the The Management Center’s amazing and effective management tips and tools that are all available on their website. As I continue this process of self-guidance, I use their techniques a lot, including the best “To-Do List” ever.

But I also wonder if my approach to work like this is too much driven by content, and not enough by form. I was reminded recently of how much of a problem this was when I wrote my masters thesis–all ideas and no structure, until the very last set of drafts.

Kindred Spirits

This guy might be my Internet soulmate. Well, maybe if he worked at an NGO. Nope, but he’s still relatively hilarious, and he likes management science and Dr. Dre.

This Isn’t Temping: How *not* to start the morning

In the pantheon of bad bosses, my current ones don’t figure prominently, most of the time. But this morning, I was given some “feedback” on a document I has drafted hastily last night. The joy of temping is that I don’t care about any of this work. But it doesn’t mean I am immune to comments like:

“So, this is a mess, obviously.”

In all honesty, sure, that is probably true. But also, I received this assignment at 4:00pm from someone who was too busy to offer any instructions. This is the third draft of this document, which I have created in letter form, in “graphical one-sheet” form, and in “info sheet” form.  And I am not a graphic designer. Ugh.

I really wish that in the workplace, it was possible to just call someone out for being unnecessarily rude. I would feel so much better if I could just say, “all of your feedback on this document is great, I feel like I have a much clearer picture of what you want from this document; your remark at the beginning of this meeting about the document being a mess was totally unnecessary and hurt my feelings.” But the majority of workplaces and managers do not welcome this kind of honesty.

I used to struggle with this problem constantly at work. I was often the person who took the “first stab” at large, difficult projects–of course they were going to be messy and bad. But we would at least have something to work from. I would be derided mercilessly, both to my face and behind my back, and then I would be told to praise the final outcome as “so much better” than my own first draft. There was one day in particular that I left early, rather than listen to my boss edit my work out loud on the phone with another colleague.

Now, I know I am too sensitive when it comes to this stuff. But I also think that 1) there is value is writing the first draft, and 2) being openly derisive of a subordinate’s work is completely unnecessary and erodes morale.

So, back to my document. Ugh. Friday.