It is a very lonely world out there for managers. I became a manager of a dialysis facility in august 2010.
I was promoted from within, not the best way to start out in your new role! why-because everybody has certain expectations of you which you cannot live up to. You start out with the best possible rationale which quickly turns into realization that in the big bad world of management that 'behind the scenes' is not as it seems when trying to look in.
Everything and I mean everything works very slowly, to get even the simplest task takes for ever to implement. To get a huge project under way takes forever and ever amen
An example of this is when you know an employee is not performing at their job description you cannot just fire them! (this is not what i want to do just for the record this is just an example-and not a very good one!)
No matter what we read on here 'normally' and if you work for a company who is actually cares about their employees there are huge hoops to jump through to fire somebody.
In my company you have to have a paper trail it starts with
- a first negative anecdotal
- a second negative anecdotal
- a step one corrective action
- a step two corrective action
- a step three corrective action
- suspension pending investigation
- termination
If you don't have all your ducks in a row then you cannot ... I repeat, cannot fire/discipline an employee.
You can however depending on the severity of the issue progress the employee through the steps faster and if a danger to a pt then jump to suspension pending investigation.
This whole process can take 6 months which is a long time when there are severe concerns about an employee. Everything has to go through human resources and approved once you get into the step actions. HR will advise how to proceed and will consult with lawyers.
Why you ask-this is to protect the company from litigation and also as I learned recently help to reduce the unemployment payouts!
Meanwhile the bad behavior continues and the other staff think that an unproductive, mean, non-compliant work colleague is getting away with behaving badly or has poor performance! they think if he/she can do it then so can I.
They start to lose faith in you as a manager because 'there is no point in going to see her she does nothing'. When in reality you are working your butt off to try and improve bad situations.
It takes 100's of hours sometimes to get one piece of work completed because of the red tape and the hoops.
You cannot tell the rest of the staff what you are doing as this would not be fair, so you have to smile and hope they will one day have the results needed.
When I first became a manager I would stress every night that i had not completed my work. s an RN I hardly ever left work for somebody to complete I went home in the evening satisfied I had done what was expected! now I left piles of work half completed and something to look forward to when i got back in the next day. Now 8 months on I no longer have nightmares about uncompleted work, it is all part of the job description.
My day is never boring and never predictable, I do however miss the patients because I really never have any time to work on the floor I know my skills are going rusty I know I could not perform as a nurse in the same level I did before because I am now a paper pusher, a therapist, a sounding board, I am a boss, but am bossed from a higher level, a financial expert, a scheduler, a kindergarten teacher, a referee, a swing door, a borrower, a lender, a sponge, an executioner and a friend when somebody needs a shoulder.
I read threads on managers and I have to ask am I like that? do i do that? And what is the bigger picture?
It is such a huge topic and I would like to deal with each role individually.
Nothing and I mean nothing is as you see it! A poor performance which has a impact on a team may not be just that the staff member is trying to be troublesome or nasty or not able to complete a task!
We all have the problem that we tell an 'ugly story" about somebody else to justify why they are behaving in such a way, and we already have that story in our heads, if we just asked or discussed we may find out the true picture and it will probably be different that what we had told ourselves.
Many times I have staff telling me a story about another staff member sometimes I just listen and other times I ask the other person to come see me in the 'dungeon'-because if you pop in my office, it is ok but if I ask you to come into the office and see me, then I become the executioner immediately!
When you ask what is going on and if everything is ok, then a quite different story emerges.
A huge lesson I learned early on as a manager was to hear all sides of the story and not act before you have considered both! another huge lesson I have learned is, if an employee is having an issue with another employee I ask questions like, "What do you think the solution is?"
I am encouraging the staff to come to me with solutions not just problems. After all, nobody woke up and made me god! I don't know everything and I don't have all the answers I am just a person like you!
Added 4/14/2011
I would like to add when starting this blog article I was trying to reassure people that you cannot just get fired in good companies-but it does look like I am trigger happy when I re-read! So I apologise that was not my intention.
However, I did need to correct some very bad behaviour which needed immediate action very soon into my job and that how I know how hard it is to make sure things are dealt with fairly and correctly.
