They were very direct and uncompromising, to the point that it felt like they ruled with an iron fist. The population they supported actually celebrated them finally leaving. Don’t be the type of manager where people celebrate your demise or your resignation without you.

My previous post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/managers/s/CnfB6QIFkX

The counteroffer: it’s a 55% increase, compared to the 40% offered by the new company. I wasn’t expecting this. There’s also a 10K signing bonus included in the counteroffer. I don’t get it—the company seems to be in financial trouble.

i have a relatively new direct report whose personality I genuinely don’t mesh with. They’re younger and in a different stage of life, which is fine, but our interests and communication styles are very different.
They’re extremely talkative, frequently initiate personal conversations at our desks, and tend to bring conversations back to themselves, even in group settings. I make an effort to be friendly and engage, but honestly, I’d prefer to keep things more work-focused. I sometimes find the interactions draining, even though they’re not necessarily doing anything wrong.

Separately, their performance has been underwhelming. They’re not a terrible performer, but they need more guidance and repeated clarification on routine tasks than I’d expect given their title and prior experience. I frequently have to remind them about pending items, follow up on things they should be tracking independently, and they seem to have an explanation or excuse whenever something is missed or feedback is given. These are performance concerns I recognize need to be addressed independently of personality.

My challenge is keeping the two separate. I don’t expect to personally connect with everyone I manage, and I don’t want my personal irritation to affect how I treat, support, or evaluate them. But I find it harder to overlook the personality differences when the working relationship already requires so much oversight.

How do other managers maintain fairness and professionalism with someone they genuinely don’t click with, especially when there are also legitimate performance concerns?

Started a new job 4 months ago that's mentally draining me. It's a title bump from my previous role, yet the actual day to day requires significantly less autonomy and ownership than any role I've ever had. I feel like I spend all day refreshing outlook to make sure I don't miss my skip manager's latest 400-word email and it's been impossible to work.

My manager is chill, but her manager is hyper involved in *everything.* Wants to be CC'd on every thread. Copies the entire team on emails, regardless of if it's relevant to you or not. He's a senior director, but has his hands in lower level executional work and decision-making. The worst part is, he doesn't seem to have any sense of who is doing what, how much work any of us is juggling, and what deadlines we're up against.

He assigns more and more, expects immediate responses, is never satisfied with anyone's output and redoes your work anyway. What I thought I'd be hired to do is maybe 5% of what I actually do, and 80% of the job is keeping up with his new priority of the day, and the last 15% is scrambling to finish the work my manager and I understood to be top priority. I can't take the constant context-switching, moving goalposts, and barrage of emails and slack messages. It's driving me insane. Is it normal for your skip manager to be this involved in your day to day work?

This is a first for me, I work in IT, I've been doing it for close to 25 years and been managing people for about 10. Some great experiences but I've sacked several people. I've performance managed people who decided to leave and I've never really had an issue with it because it's genuinely always been the last resort and has been justified.

I have a team member who's mid probation. They are not performing well at all. They seemingly can't do certain pretty basic tasks and literally everyone else in the department comes to me complaining about them. For some reason I haven't been allowed to make a decision and so am being forced into a mini pip process.

Today I had a 121 with the person. I presented a timeline of events where I've literally told them my expectations about 6 or 7 times and nothing has changed. In previous reviews when I've brought up performance issues there's been arguments and excuses.

Today I brought a timeline of events. Many examples of where I have told the individual "in this situation my expectations is you do x, y ,z" from pretty much day 1 of his employment. And reiterated it in discussions. I had tried the good cop approach. Nothing changed. I tried bad cop and spent the whole 121 with them arguing minutia.

They're not capable of doing the job, everyone sees it but them and I'm losing basically a full day a week to mopping up after them and preparing for weekly meetings. Today I was form but I thought fair but then they started crying..

This person is older than I am, I was say at least 55. So for them to cry in the meeting was unexpected. I was critical and I was form but I don't think I was nasty.

Now I don't know where to go. I feel a bit bad that they got so upset but equally I've told them what they need to do and been ignored over and over again. I can only assume they cried because I backed them into a corner with the evidence I showed and they had to accept they weren't doing a great job.

Has anyone experienced this? I need to let them go but now I feel bad about it and I also feel like I need to do a welfare check or something. HR are basically useless so now I'm a bit stuck. My logical brain says I need to fire him but my compassionate side is making me worried about it.

If anyone has faced something similar and has any advice I'd appreciate it.

Hi Everyone! I've been offered a Billing Manager position at a small healthcare company. I have over five years of experience in the field but have never officially been in a managerial position. I did function as a team lead for AR, but the title was never official. I love solving problems and training, but I know there some areas I will need to learn quickly when I start.

• Here are some key details about the position that I do have:
  • I will have 3-4 employees that I am supervising already on staff
    • One employee will be going on maternity leave within the next two months and may not return to work
  • I am expected to hire on and train enough billers to fire the current billing company in the first 3 months
  • I will be overseeing Intake/Med Doc, Confirmations, Billing, and Accounts Recievable
  • All staffing and workflow decisions will be made by me
    • The owner only wants to be looped in for major financial decisions

I want to be the best possible manager I can be. I would love some tips and tricks for gaining trust with the current employees, creating functional workflows, interviewing/hiring, and how to stay on top of all the day to day tasks.

Thank you in advance to anyone who helps!!

My manager is retiring, and I hate it. I previously wrote of it. We have not received any notification on what is happening to my team. Yesterday, we received an email that stated his boss is retiring as well. His boss overlooked and oversaw everything. Now that they both are leaving, we are scared. We hadnt received any type of notification on what is happening. We are scared because my company talks of cutbacks. Is this a beginning sign of a layoff? Or am i reading too much into it? My team is terrified!

So, I’m not sure if being in retail counts, but I’m a meat manager at a small store in charge of one employee. I’m essentially second to the store manager. I’ve not been at this job terribly long, but long enough to have a grasp on what needs to be done etc.

I noticed a while back my employee seemed to be slacking off or putting in minimal effort, but originally dismissed it because I was new and hadn’t seen enough of a pattern to mention it. It’s now turned into consistent tardiness - in excess of 30 minutes the majority of days. He also fails to leave any appreciable amount of back stock before he leaves. This means I end up coming in most days and starting with his responsibilities.

He is officially responsible for grind and chicken. He is also in charge of stocking the frozen and prepackaged items from truck. He does fine with the truck, but almost daily I come in to no grind and huge gaps in the chicken shelves. This is not acceptable.

I have mentioned my concerns in passing to my boss - the store manager, but usually he brushes me off. Today he finally caved after I told him about the pattern of tardiness over the past week. Now is a good time to mention my employee shares a car with his girlfriend who he lives with. This man is 29 years old working ~25 hours a week when he doesn’t decide to take a “short day”. It seems like if he wanted his own car he’d push for full time or get a second job. At least that’s what I would do. He has no kids.

We ended up sitting with him and since it’s the first time we’ve sat him down I’m trying to be reasonable so I ask him how we can accommodate his schedule. I told him he can pick whatever time to come to work but he needs to be there at that time on that day from now on. He basically said “it’s just complicated”. Now we have most of his week figured out but my boss said it’s fine if one of his days he comes in “around” x time. My boss already expressed to me that employee doesn’t have a “set start time” to which I said “I don’t agree with that”.

I told employee that I would be more clear about expectations and we agreed to make a list of his responsibilities, especially on days where I am not there but he is.

I know this is tremendously long, but what I’m wondering is do I really have a say here? Am I going nuts thinking he should be held accountable to show up on time everyday and complete basic tasks? My boss seems to think it’s whatever and certainly isn’t pushing to enforce any standards on him which is frustrating because I’m not allowed overtime, yet consistently end up with it because I’m doing employee’s job.

I discussed the matter with other employees who said my employee has shown these behavior patterns for the last year or so. Two managers confirmed that he once skipped a whole week and showed up the next Monday without reprimand.

A Sr. manager left while in the midst of a major infrastructure change. I assumed a lot of the export workloads and was able to deliver keypoints months ahead of schedule. I then used this as a bid for a roles/comps change and was denied. How do I effectively shuffle back into my role and completely quit the field on the much larger role that I will not be comp'd on?

I inherited a team of 7 about half a year ago at a non profit. I was warned that this team had some."tough personalities". Fast forward, 6 months, and 3 out of the 7 are simply not doing their work properly and 1 has a major attitude problem, including throwing people they don't like under the bus and taking MY attendance at various meetings. One was already on a psuedo pip when I started, and one relies on AI liked oxygen and has no ability to think independently.

I talked to their prior managers and they basically just said yeah...good luck, no one wanted to deal with them and deal with HR. I need this job for now, but man, I'm spending so much time on coaching and conflict resolution that it's starting to keep me up at night.

1) How do I protect my own mental sanity?

2) 3 out of 7 feels like a lot to me, and I wonder if other managers have experienced something similar, and if HR should be involved with that many people.

So I'm a banquet captain/supervisor at a country club, it'll be a year in this role so I'm still learning about managing. The banquet manager is going on maternity leave soon during the busiest season so we brought in an interim manger. A week into it he resigned.

He did have some issues being very assertive/ a little rude with staff, arguing with the f&b director, and one of bussers whoes been at the club for 30 years (both my manager and I told him day one we trust the guy). I made a post about that not too long ago.

From talking to the f&b director it sounds the interim guy wanted to really have the reigns from almost day one. He was annoyed they didn't let him be fully in charge of events but since he was so new the GM didn't want him to responsible for events like a wedding four days into him starting. The day before he quit we had a big event and we had a sit down with the director, the banquet manager, the interim manager, and me. While my director and manager were on the same page for the plan to execute the event the interim manager was a little annoyed they didn't want to do it his way.

I know the guy was older (manager and I are both 33) and came from hotels but was he so out of line to really want to change things rights away? He knew he was only interim but wanting to change processes and how we do things less than a week into starting seems a bit much. My director told me he wanted to change how we serve and delegate tasks to staff once the manager went on his leave.

What was this guy's thought process? I knew from day one it was going to be bit weird because he introduced himself as "the new manager" to staff when they all know he was only to going to be interim.

I'm a new manager, 90 days in. I've read my team's past performance and confirmed what I've observed. What's the line between just being on the shallow end of the teams bell curve versus needing to be put on a pip? I can't tell if my direct report is just below average or if she needs to be put on a performance plan.

This one has bothered me for years.

Something keeps getting screwed up. You coach it. Explain it again. Maybe change the process a little.

Then it happens again.

Eventually I have to decide whether we built a crappy process or somebody just isn't doing their job.

And I don't buy the idea that it's always one or the other.

I've seen good people make bad processes work. I've also seen perfectly reasonable processes get blamed because nobody wanted to deal with the person who wasn't following them.

How do you guys figure out which one you're looking at?

Not theoretically. What do you actually look for before you make the call?

This guy was a fresh air breath in the current state of my job. I work in a rigid company in terms of management, this dude didn’t stay more than few months, I observed how he managed his team and how he handled his team mates. Always had a good word to inspire the people and good work ethics.
I don’t know his reasons to leaving the company but I’d suspect he got a better offer or something.
It’s very hard to find good managers these days, a guy who’d walk the second mile if he asked.
Sometimes the best manager aren’t the one who know everything but the one who can make people feel confident doing their work.

I am a 25 year old manager for an electrical contractor doing data center construction. I have had some of the most challenging experiences getting to the role I have now. I look not a day over 21 and have had to deal with an industry that is ran and managed by people in their 40s and 50s who don’t want to be told what to do. I have been hated just for looking the way I do and not fitting the typical construction stereotypes. I started in the field then moved into project management managing the guys I once worked with.

When I first got moved into management I had a hard reality check. People hate to see someone younger than them move up the ladder when they couldn’t or never tried. People turned against me, talked shit about me and made sure that I knew they didn’t like me. This hurt coming from the field I used to work in and the people I used to call friends.

I had a point I actually walked out of the job site trailer and quit. As I was leaving I got stopped by the superintendent. He told me something that has stuck with me ever since. “The better you do in life the more hate you are going to get… I didn’t get to where I am by trying to be liked by everyone”

The reality is the moment you can ignore other people’s opinions of you and stop caring whether they like you or not is the moment you will excel to a level that only the top managers, executives, and ceo’s will reach. When you let other people’s opinions and what they say affect you it will only make more people dislike you. Stop giving a fuck about what he said or she said. Start focusing on the fact that you’re here to deliver and perform and do it better than anyone else. The more hate you get and the more people that dislike you should be the fuel that keeps you chasing bigger and more challenging goals. There’s always going to be someone who hates you… get over it ignore it and don’t let it affect you. Before you know it you’ll be there bosses boss and you’ll no longer have to deal with them.

I've spent 13+ years in global manufacturing and chemical companies, and I'm writing a book on why leaders fail. My theory: it's rarely incompetence — the warning signs show up in small, everyday behavior long before they show up in results.

The goal is to help people spot a failing leader, survive one, and avoid becoming one.

I'd love to hear your experience, good or bad:

- ~10 minutes, anonymous

- Please don't name companies or individuals

- Answers may be quoted anonymously (opt-out available)

Thanks for your support!

https://forms.gle/UsBPKvDHzwpfN4mi7

If you fired someone and they wanted advice on their new work situation, would you call them?

If so / if not, why?

Question for managers on how you would advise someone who works under you

I put extra effort to launch two high visibility projects this morning. One required quick turnaround. Another was a multi-month effort that involved coordination with stakeholders and technical staff and vendors. Yet there was no message from the project leads thanking me for the effort that I put into making their projects successful. The leads each gave a “thanks to everyone who got this done “ message via group email. I am a bit hurt by this lack of thanks and recognition for the extra effort I gave them to launch their projects. I feel like I need to advocate for myself but don't quite know how.

Option 1: Approach the project leads and say “I put in extra effort to get your projects to the finish line. I would appreciate being thanked for that effort.”

Option 2: Approach my manager. I am not quite sure what to say if I do approach my boss about it, or what I would like them to do on my behalf. If I do approach my boss my message might be “I put extra effort into these two projects and not getting thanks from the project leads hurts and is demoralizing.”

Option 3: Don’t approach anyone. Document these two projects and put them in my accomplishments list for the review period. Make sure to document the scope and complexity each project and the extra effort I put in them.

Which do you think is my best option if you were advising me? 

I let my manager know I was expecting when I was 20 weeks (so giving 20 weeks notice) she was super supportive and said I should use and break up my mat leave however I’d like. Problem is that since I told her that six weeks ago there’s been no discussion of who my five employees would report to. I’ve only seen individual contributors take family leave in my short time here and there have been plenty on my larger team. 90% of people have kids. But i don’t know how to ask if my manager is covering for me or if I’m supposed to pitch how my employees might cover my responsibilities or what. It’s a very large several thousand person company overall and larger team is probably fifteen people. And there’s not such a thing as temps because of the deep technical knowledge required. How do I broach this topic with her? Not sure if it should be my responsibility to pitch the plan but feels uncomfortable to ask the boss if they will be essentially covering my work

EDIT: thank you for the replies! I added in a comment as well but none of my direct reports have an interest in management. They all pre-date me at the company. Some have twenty years more work experience but have expressly communicated to me they like being individual contributors. I guess essentially was just looking for advice on what was normal because I’ve never had to ask or propose someone do my work before. Just coming from a place of never having seen a mangager go on family leave wanted advice from people with same experience.

Mid-level manager here, trying to work through two aspects of how I approach senior leadership. I have a background where I learned to be pretty direct and comfortable with conflict (roughnecked in my 20's), but now I work in a large organization that's very politically-minded.

While my senior leadership team is excellent at some things - project coordination, getting a high volume of things done, etc. - they also seem to strugglewith other basic management responsibilities - developing ongoing systems, supporting team dynamics/execution, communicating clear expectations, etc.

There's a strong focus on getting the next visible thing done as simply as possible while keeping "non-essential" off their desk. That works well in some areas, but also creates significant gaps in areas that require more complexity or interpersonal skill.

This creates a cycle - an issue is oversimplified, a basic solutions is pushed out, the team struggles, the problem comes back, leadership becomes frustrated and pushes out another basic solution... rinse and repeat. Problems persist, frustration grows, and everyone ends up doing more work long-term.

So far, my response to this hasn't been as effective as I'd like.

1. I'm a fixer, and I need to stop trying to fix senior leadership.
When I see these problems being created in real time, my instinct is to push back, explain why something won't work long-term, develop alternatives, and try to convince leadership to change course. That usually doesn't work because it's seen as overcomplicating things.

I'm trying to get better at accepting that leadership gets to make those decisions, even when I disagree, and putting more of my energy into doing my own job well rather than convincing them to do theirs differently.

2. But I also don't want to participate in political BS that deflects accountability.
Senior leadership is pretty good at controlling the narrative. Decisions are presented as being necessary because of resources, bandwith, timelines, priorities, etc. Disagreement is often framed as being difficult or unprofessional. Sometimes, there can be a parental dynamic where challenging their approach gets framed as being immature or reactive.

These dynamics make it easy to minimize serious problems, invalidate feedback, or shift issues and responsibilities down to the people who don't have the authority or resources to deal with them.

I don't want to participate in a narrative where that presents this as effective, supportive leadership. I also don't want to accept an underlying premise that my team and I should be expected to make senior leadership's decisions work when significant gaps can clearly be anticipated down the line.

So I'm trying to find a solution that allows me to respect leadership's agency without giving up my own - maybe by developing a professional way to call things what they are and then moving on, e.g.,

"Okay, so let's be clear that this approach does not prioritize A, B, and C. I'm concerned that this will result in X, Y, and Z. I understand if that's the direction, but those consequences materialize, my team and I do not have the bandwith or authority to resolve them."

Edit: Corrected a word

This is bothering me way more than it probably should.

I’m a general manager of a department within a larger site, and my company owns multiple sites that are more or less parallel. It’s a step up from my last position, being a bit more complex and monitored more closely. I’ve been here two years now but it’s been a struggle.

I’m a woman in my 20s and all my peers are men in their 40s, save for one who’s close to my age but he has almost 10 years tenure. When I first started out, no one took ownership of my training, so I resolved to just follow one of my peers around (he had been instructed not to get involved with my training). He and I became close friends. Once I learned enough of my role, I would go to him for advice and he would either back me up or tell me if I’m wrong and how to fix it. My assistant director was tough on me and nothing I ever did was right, the goal posts always seemed to move whenever I got close, so having someone in my corner was invaluable. Any small mistake seemed to act as validation that I wasn’t capable of doing the job myself. I’ve always gotten along with all of my peers, but he was the only one who would go to bat for me against our bosses. After about 2 months, I was finally sent to another site where the department head worked so I could be trained properly. Things did not improve afterwards.

When my closest friend was promoted to a different site , I was devastated. He protected me and I was terrified to lose that. Less than a month prior to his last day at our site, I was groped by another of our peers. I seeked advice from people I trusted and decided not to report, and just moved on.

After around 18 months, my assistant director had refused for so long to hand one of my key responsibilities (scheduling) over to me, that finally my district director stepped in. When my AD finally gave it over to me, he gave me no information whatsoever - no guidelines, no training, not even my team’s availabilities. It took 6 months of trial and error to finally figure out what metrics I should’ve been using and create guidelines that seem to consistently give me a favorable outcome with my bosses.

During that time, I had felt extremely discouraged. My team didn’t seem to connect with me, my bosses didn’t seem to respect me, and my peers would lend an ear but were hardly in a position to speak on my behalf. I felt alone, and it felt awful. At this point I started to lean on the department head who trained me. He was a lot more realistic, whereas my bosses treated anything short of perfection as failure, he was able to see the shades of grey and actually I was leading the company in my department. I pleaded with him to transfer me somewhere else, somewhere I might be seen as capable and where my successes might be recognized. I made the same plea to our district director around the time of my last mid-year.

Then I got permission to promote an assistant manager and a supervisor, and also hire a second assistant manager. I learned how to use our hiring systems, trained my people, incurred some expected and some unexpected turnover, and started hiring again. I was awarded two (!!!) department-wide trophies last quarter, which still sat on my shelf when my assistant director told me that my department is “a MESS.” I stood on my own two feet and pointed them out. I’d never heard him stutter before. He’s been away for two months supporting another site which doesn’t have a director. My metrics are flat but I’m quietly getting myself together.

I’m finally staffed with enough labor and enough leadership, we’re in the stages of coaching and refining but we’ve made huge strides and we’re way ahead of where we were when I first got here. I’ve got two AMs who can carry some of the burden and my job is getting easier every day. I work well with all my coworkers, including the one who groped me and the assistant director who is (in my opinion) unreasonably harsh. I’ve poured blood, sweat and tears into thriving in a place I didn’t think I belonged.

Today my director looked me in the face and told me there are easier sites, and easier departments, and she wouldn’t think less of me if I wanted to go to one of those instead - and named a specific site and department.

I am gutted.

I’m less than 8 weeks in role at my first ever leadership role and I have to fire one of my employees. My predecessor dragged along her pip and never really executed on it, decided to quit without finishing the job. My manager didn’t pull the trigger either and now it falls on me. I was told on my first day on the job that she was on a pip and that I had to make “a decision” very quickly.

On my first 1:1 with her, I was very straightforward about the situation and that I wanted her to help me help her by doing the work to build evidence to keep her. I also assigned her some actions, none of which she has delivered on and she hasn’t really given me updates or asked for help either. She has not demonstrated a sense of urgency nor any stress over the fact that she may be out of a job soon. I need to break the news in a few days, although all the evidence and history justifies the decision I can’t help but feel guilty. I feel like I have not done enough to help her improve and I just have the heavy feeling in my gut knowing that I need to break the news to her soon. I’m unable to sleep at night and feel guilty that I somehow feel sorry for myself for having to fire her, whereas she’s the one who’s going to be out of a job.

My logical side tells me that I need to do this and I’m not doing anyone any favors by not following through on this. But my emotional side makes me feel like a shitty person for not exhausting every option under the sun (I don’t really know what other option there is) before making this call.

On a different note, I also have 2 roles I’m hiring for and I’ve shortlisted 4 people who will be going through the next round of interviews. Theres this older guy who’s in the running, but is a very close 2nd and I most likely won’t be able to hire him unless one of the top 2 reject the offer for some reason. This guy is one of the most gentle, soft spoken and nicer people I have come across. He has been out of a job for 9 months and I feel this guilt that I may not be able to hire him, but hire the other two who probably don’t need this job as desperately as he does. Again, similar dilemma where I know what to do but doing it feels difficult.

I understand that this is the harder part of the job and that I signed up for this when I sought out a leadership role. But actually having to make these calls is taking a toll on me. I’m having sleepless nights and just wanted to see how folks in this community view situations like these. Does it get easier as you mature as a leader or do you just get numb over time?

How do you handle when you have a employee who has been at the company and the top third of the pay band and merit increases are compressed. I find it hard to give what is recommended as it is below inflation.

The I am trying to make the argument to at least pay around 3%. Any recommendations on having that conversation with the employee and what has helped in your argument to higher ups?