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Take a look at stories from our Women Who Can to learn from their experiences in common situations. If there's a situation we should cover in future interviews tell us about it.
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Your situation |
Her Situation |
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I have recently inherited someone from another group. He resents working for me because he was expecting to be the manager of the group. He is disrupting my team meetings
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I had an employee who was a person that liked to drum to his own beat and do what he wanted to do. When I took over my boss’s job, some people didn’t think that was what should have happened. There was definitely an attitude of ‘You might be my manager, but I don’t need to treat you as my manager’ and getting updates on work was like pulling teeth. I found that this guy was having meetings with my manager and above on a fairly regular basis, so I had to start working with my manager to make sure he and I were giving this employee the same message. The senior management of this organization was not mature and I found I was trying to coach them on how to handle the situation to help manage this employee down to me. Eventually this employee wanted to leave but it took a long time and increased my challenge with him as he was no longer spending time on his projects and review time was coming so I had to handle a performance issue. I found it challenging and wish it could have gone better. I should have had more confidence in the 1:1 meetings and tackled the situation of him not being comfortable with me as manager and nip the behavior in the bud but I was trying to take the route to avoid conflict. I am now more confident and I will call out what’s wrong and have more open and honest conversations, I feel I’ve grown in that area.
Principal User Experience Manager
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I think someone on my team isn't happy but I'm hoping he'll snap out of it as I'm busy and don't want to 'open a can of worms'
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"...If you think there's a problem, there is. If your instincts say there's something wrong, there is, and the longer you wait to tackle it, the worse it gets. I'm so tired of having to relearn that lesson... If you think one of your employees is unhappy, you can be assured that he is. If you don't go talk to him about it, it's only going to get worse because he's going to tell five other people outside the company or inside the company."
Wendy Lea, CEO at Get Satisfaction,
from A leader's Test: Balancing Drive and Compassion, New York Times |
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I'm want to do the right thing for the business but I care about the people on my team too. I'm stressed
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"I have this strong fire and this drive and this vision, but I also care a lot about people. It's really hard [to strkie a balance], and on some days I just wish I could rip out that part that cares so deeply. I've had to teach myself the difference between empathy and compassion, because when you are too empathic, you lose yourself. I have had to teach myself to be simply compassionate, so that I can hear the problems one of my employees is having and not myself and try to be them. That allows me to lead more effectively.
Wendy Lea, CEO at Get Satisfaction,
from A leader's Test: Balancing Drive and Compassion, New York Times |
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There was a reorg and I now manage my old team and a new team. The teams use to compete and now need to work as one team.
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I learned so much during this experience, and was lucky I had a great boss helping me through it. I wanted to help everyone be friends and get along, but that wasn’t going to happen. First I made sure key people who were favorable to the vision of the new team were secure, then I had them secure the more junior key people. I then focused on key people who were unhappy with the move to bring them onside. This left a few people who were unhappy and resistant to see connect with last. They realized they either needed to sign up to stay in the team or choose to look elsewhere. It took more than 6 months to get the team orking well and on a new vision, but I think if I’d allowed the unhappy people to take my attention first we wouldn’t have ended up with the cohesive group we did.
Consultant
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Someone on my team, who everyone likes, isn't delivering the quality of work required. Whenever I have performance conversations with them, I get the sense the whole group knows about it and think I'm a mean boss.
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It took me a while to understand that being liked and being good at my manager’s job didn’t always go hand-in-hand. When I moved from having a team of 7 people to a team of 18 people I had to learn that I couldn’t be best friends/liked by everyone. I’d like to think I worked on having great relationships as I worked on the business goals, but eventually I realized I had to be confident of my business goals and objectives first, and not adapt the goals to make the team happy and make them like me. Having the trust of my manager really helped. My over active people-sensitive side didn’t make it easy initially, but I did get through it, and keep the respect of the team – they looked to me first to make good business decisions not to be their friend.
Consultant
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