Good Supervisor, Good Person – Employee Problem

by Shaun November 13, 2009

Begin with a situation that happens all the time: for whatever reason, an employee has trouble managing his or her feelings, it spills out, and begins affecting customer service. You’re the supervisor. Like any supervisor, you were looking forward to teamwork, cooperation, creativity, mutual support, and you were hoping you’d hardly ever have an unpleasant [...]

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Employee Regret

by Shaun March 4, 2009

  I laughed out loud when I first heard the term “tattoo regret,” but I know first-hand that, in a human workplace, there’s a threshold moment when a manager realizes he’s got employee regret.  An employee isn’t working out – but it’s not funny, and not easy to fix. The actual problem might be the employee’s [...]

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A Good Case

by Shaun February 9, 2009

One of my favorite examples illustrating the many benefits of “coaching” a line supervisor happened also because of the flexibility provided by a good Employee Assistance Program (EAP.) A supervisor who had recently become the Office Manager of a very busy State bureau came to see me – supposedly – about a personal problem at home. [...]

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Workplace Coaching? Affirmative

by Shaun February 9, 2009

The thing I like best about coaching is how straightforward it is: either our sessions are useful in a tangible way, or they’re not. If they’re not, the sessions should stop. Sometimes it’s crystal clear why the sessions are helping. The interactions are stimulating, validating, liberating, or something that feels right. Sometimes it’s less obvious, [...]

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Parallel Universes

by Shaun February 9, 2009

When I read business articles, I often get the feeling that the work world I see isn‘t quite what those folks are thinking of when they write about the workplace. The problems they focus on always somehow seem the same – either non-strategic thinking or poor communication, or both. As I read, in my minds eye [...]

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“We Can Do This” management

by Shaun February 9, 2009

Every once in awhile I dream of coming up with some phrase that’s so memorable and evocative, I can copywrite it. Then it would get picked up out there somehow, create some “buzz,”, generate a ton ideas and comments – as well as a bestselling book. So far, no luck. But I was leafing through some [...]

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The Monkeys on Hawthorne’s Back

by Shaun November 19, 2008

I can see how managers can come to resent, or at least view negatively, an employee’s need to be reassured, reinforced, praised, validated, or “checked-in” with and communicated with, so constantly. Since managers are usually squeezed for time themselves, their ideal employee is a self-starter who takes initiative, works fast and efficiently, doesn’t make mistakes, doesn’t need hand-holding and – above all – doesn’t take up managerial time.

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A Professional: “On a Desert Island”

by Shaun November 19, 2008

 I vividly recall the anguish as she told me her story. She’d happily followed her husband here to Maine for his exciting appointment as statewide director of a huge program. She’d vacated her position as Special Ed. Department Chair at a highly-regarded public high school, where she was well known in her region as well as the [...]

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Good Old Girls

by Shaun November 19, 2008

In hindsight, it was probably true that Serena wasn’t a ton of fun to be around, but still …   The small office she worked in was virtually all women – with the exception of one customer service guy and one of the two salesmen who came around three or four times a month at [...]

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The “Micro-Managing” Accusation

by Shaun September 28, 2008

In many workplaces, the key quality that makes someone a manager is his or her willingness to step up and take responsibility for the satisfactory completion of the work product. Since these managers know that their own job performance is being closely monitored, there’s a huge motivation to be right on top of real and imagined problems – in fact, failure to anticipate and act on “preventable” situations is one of the main reasons managers lose their jobs.

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