eight out of ten things in your job are doing very, very well.
Everyone's happy with it.
I've heard things from people outside of this group,
that that stuff you work on is phenomenal.
But, here's a couple of things we need to work on, and
let's spend the next couple of months trying to course correct those things.
And I think the challenge is, in a manager,
is that while they're different personality types with employees,
different managers have different personality types too.
So, one of the mistakes I feel like I made early on in my career is that I always
wanted to be everyone's best friend.
I wanted my employees to love me and think that I was the best thing ever, and for
a while it worked out very well.
And what happens with that is, now you're friends with all your employees and
something happens.
Someone outside of the group says something about someone on your team that
needs correcting, and now you've built up this relationship as their friend and
you have to go back and tell them this kind of hard-to-tell news.
And I think that can be a challenge.
And I think there is a fine line between being everyone's best friend, but
also being this coach in a way.
Letting them know that they need things to work on, and
I think that can be in particularly challenging.
One thing about that is, if you don't let people know what they need to correct
early on, things can kind of faster and they can manifest to a point where it
becomes a long-term issue that's much harder to course correct.
And you don't want that to come up in someone's review only.
You want to,
going back to what I was talking about previously with communication,
really over-communicate, let people know how well they're doing on a regular basis.
I think that helps with everyone knowing what they're working towards,
that they're doing a good job, that their efforts are appreciated.
But then also taking some of that time to coach them and really
work on bringing out the best aspects of what they do on a day to day basis.
One instance where I had to provide constructive feedback or
positive positive criticism, and it was particularly difficult,
was with a business or marketing analyst that I had at my team several years ago.
He was a phenomenal analyst, gave really good analytical insight into everything,
every aspect of the business.
And I know that everyone outside of the marketing group really appreciated
the work he did, and
he was able to really create these reports that everyone was able to understand.
But aside from that, he was kind of difficult to work with.
He was just a difficult personality.
And I think other people outside of the team who didn't know him so
well had these kind of misconceptions of how he was.
And I think his emails to people outside the team, and
sometimes other communication aspects in medians and
such, kind of made him come across as a little aggressive.
And I had a couple of incidents where people talked to me about it.
And they were feeling a little bit like he was attacking them.
Or, [LAUGH] being a little aggressive like I said.
And I think I had to come up with a way to break that down to him.
And let him know that he needed to improve upon his communication style.
And what I did, and I think this goes back to me wanting to initially be friends with
everyone, is I took it from a friendly standpoint.
I sat down with him, discussed everything that he does positive.
All the positive contributions that he has toward the organization.
I let him know, and this was the truth, that all of the analytical analysis, or
the analysis that he provided, was some of the best that I've ever seen.
And he had a really good talent of breaking that down in a way that other
people outside the group who don't necessarily spend their days looking
at data were able to actually understand it.
But aside from that, he had some areas of improvement to work with, and I think that
had to do with his communication style, so I let him know about that.
I didn't pinpoint people.
I didn't say so and so said this, or, I heard this from so and so.
I just let him know that when you send emails out,
they don't necessarily carry through the emotion of the typer or the sender.
So, if he could soften up his approach with emails, even add
thanks at the bottom of the emails or thank you, that might help quite a bit.
And I think, with some of the bigger projects he was working on,
especially with the people that had the issues with him,
I didn't want to micromanage too much.
But, if I knew that he was working with those people,
I would kind of ask him to send me the email first.
And then I would kind of help him massage the text a little bit.
I wanted to have him share those communications with me so
I could help him work on his communication style with those other parties.
And it actually helped out quite a bit because he started to learn that if he
started using things like, hi so and
so, here's the message, thank you, blah blah blah.
It worked in his favor a lot, and
people responded much more favorably to his requests or his emails.
So I think we were able to kind of nip that one in the bud a little bit.
He still was a phenomenal analyst, and then he started improving upon his
communication skills with people inside the organization.
So, in closing, I think, as a manager,
a couple of things I find to be very challenging, but also kind
of rewarding to work with, are communication with your team and really
making sure that those communication channels are open, free-flowing.
That everyone knows what everyone else is working on.
And mitigating the inner department frustrations that
can kind of come from different personality types.
And two, providing positive criticism or
constructive feedback to employees and the challenges that can come from that.
Thank you very much, and good luck in your educational journey.