Act on What You Love

One of the most important lessons I learned as a manager flipped all of my natural instincts upside-down.  I was the manager of a person I did not see eye-to-eye with at all.  Few people liked her in the organization and expressed it to me on a weekly basis.

Looking back, I know I was feeling a tremendous amount of pressure - i.e. Fear - to "fix" her, to make her behaviour better- so that their lives were easier and I wouldn't be criticized as a poor leader.  But I was green when it came to managing and she was a tough conflict to resolve.

After one particularly frustrating incident - where she had spoken inappropriately to an external partner that was there to help us with a project - and had absolutely no remorse about the incident, I was contemplating how to discipline her.  A senior manager in the organization could see me struggling and asked if I'd ever tried just taking her out for a cup of coffee and asking how things were going for her.

I thought this advice was crazy!  I was supposed to be punishing her - not treating her like a human being!  People were constantly looking down on me because I wasn't doing something about her and now I was supposed to hang out with her over a cup of coffee and pretend she hadn't done something wrong?

Well.  It took some convincing, but I highly respected this senior manager, so I summoned up my sincerity and took her advice.  Remarkably, it actually went quite well, and I learned that my employee was extremely worried that she wasn't going to be able to handle the responsibilities placed on her with this new project.  She was under her own self-imposed stress of not being good enough and fearing she was going to lose her job.  I was able to reassure her that we would work with her to make sure she understood her new role and would have adequate training available.

Things between us after that were easier.  I wouldn't say we were ever friends or that there was ever warm fuzzies between us, but we could work together without shooting eye-daggers at each other.  And that happened because I acted out of a different impulse than fear of how my performance would be judged by others.