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. Truth was, she was checking me out because she’d been “nudged,” and told I might be helpful with her true problem  – managing people at work.

 For many years, she’d been the “trusty right arm” to her boss, a remarkable woman who’d been in her job fourteen years, and then abruptly had to leave due to Breast Cancer.  My client was the obvious choice for the battlefield promotion, but the truth was she wasn’t prepared for what the job really was: lion tamer.

Replacing that boss would have been hard under any circumstances, but my client somehow hadn’t been paying attention – while still, actually helping her boss succeed.  She tended to react off the top of her head, had trouble owning mistakes and apologizing, and some of the people she was alienating were not just the obvious, “usual suspects,” but were some of her most ardent early supporters and natural allies.

It turned out there were some problems at home. Her essentially good marriage was being strained by disagreements with her husband about handling their youngest daughter, who’d just bombed out of her Freshman year at college (costing a lot of un-refundable money) was now unemployed, and sleeping-in most mornings.

From the EAP standpoint, taking up the “home front” part was fairly straightforward – a meeting with my client and her husband, focusing on the need for both of them to stay on the same page, be both understanding AND jointly focused with their daughter, stay concrete, create strategies with timelines, but – above all – to commit to consistent follow-through.

Meanwhile back at the workplace, as so often happens, events were racing ahead.  A mini-delegation had already gone over my client’s head, to her boss – essentially conveying unhappiness and anger at what it was like to deal with her.  To my client’s eternal credit, her reaction was more hurt than anger, defiance, or disdain – the far more common reactions I see from others in roughly similar situations.

With that as our point of departure she was able to fess up to how “anxious” she’s been - ”not just recently” - but nearly all of her life.  She realized that watching her boss had been like being front row center for a virtuoso performance she took for granted . She admired it, and was gratified to be associated with her boss’s “success,” but in hindsight now realized she had “no clue” how her boss had pulled it all off.  My client was wired differently, and just couldn’t “ever put up with so much nonsense” without getting judgmental, upset, and unable to hold it all “in my anxiety-laden head.”

To make a long story short, our coaching focused on listening skills – especially including listening to herself – managing feelings, learning to not be afraid to not know something, and developing a slightly more collaborative approach.Simply having someone – not her direct supervisor – with whom she could speak from the heart about situations she hadn’t prepared for, but were now “on top of me,” made a huge difference.

She became more relaxed, which was sensed in the workplace almost immediately. I actually got a grateful, handwritten note from one of my client’s co-workers saying that the atmosphere was 100% better since my client had come to see me, and that others in the office were also very appreciative of the changes, and wanted her to tell me so.

Post script:

It turns out that the person who wrote the note had also been an EAP client, and was the one who’d lobbied heavily that her colleague make an appointment to see me. Behind the scenes at work she’d also been a voice of moderation and patience, which had helped steer things away from a total wreck.

I wish I could say they all lived happily ever after, but it seldom quite works that way. Things were better, and the entire office undoubtedly benefited from the small but real changes my client achieved. But it wasn’t a total metamorphosis, and the truth was she never really got comfortable managing such a busy, relentlessly boisterous operation.  And by the way, her own direct supervisor watched it all happen without saying a thing, or being any help at all. 

She weathered the storm with dignity, picked her moment, and then slid sideways into a smaller, quieter department just shy of the second anniversary of her promotion. Of course, part of what makes it memorable was the “thank you” note – they obviously don’t come very often.

 But that case highlights how helping a supervisor has a direct impact on the people affected by that supervisor. Many good, competent people need a safe place where they can talk and think about their real problems supervising live people.

Coaching works.

“When am I guilty of micro-managing? What’s a reasonable way to sort that out?” I’ve been asked that one many times by managers who aren’t sure whether they’re coming on too strong, or not coming on strongly enough. Often what’s going on at the time that question is being posed is that a manager has had some sort of run-in with an employee, the term “micro-managing” has been tossed into the discussion, and the manager isn’t quite sure how to react.

All the textbooks say micro-managing isn’t good – that it impedes employee initiative, generates resentment, and indicates a “controlling” temperament. And, as far as it goes, that’s right. In a healthy environment, with an even distribution of reasonable people, micro-managing is both unnecessary and disrespectful. It can actually reduce employee productivity.

The problem is that in the real world it tends to overlook, or at least sidestep, the issue of accountability. 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, the motivation is huge 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.

Which is why many have learned from bitter experience to be vigilant, and lock onto potential problems early and often. And that takes us back to the beginning. What’s a reasonable level of checking in and monitoring, when does it morph into micro-managing – and who decides?

If, where you’re working, the workplace culture isn’t essentially healthy, the sad truth is you’re on your own – sorry – which then means it boils down to trial and error, and the hope that a huge “error” doesn’t occur before enough “trials” allow the manager to scope out and adapt to what’s really true – how surreal it gets – when the buck stops in that workplace.