Workplace Drama

How often does your staff create distractions with an avalanche of finger-pointing and accusations? You may find yourself at a loss of words contemplating the right way to approach the situation. Or worse, you may blow up adding fuel to the fire.

It’s up to the leader to cut off this behavior as it ramps up, because frequent incidences are bad for your organization’s health. Often, the right hand doesn’t know what the left is saying or doing; and that is where the problems begin.

Jump In or Hold Back?

When is the best time for a manager to jump in and redirect an employee’s actions? If there was an easy answer, we’d be able to magically click an app that could predict the perfect moment. Nice idea, but not happening!

Managers often struggle with this timing. If they start too soon, they become micromanagers. If they wait too long, they may be too late, and the employee may have made a big mistake. As each situation is different, you need to decide based on the actual circumstances.

The Office Whisperer

Every organization has its gossipers. Usually, it’s an innocent part of organizational life – you see Joan in the break room and one thing leads to another, including a little buzz about what’s happening in the marketing department.

Other times, though, there are certain people who feel it’s their personal mission to find out everything that’s going on. They will do whatever they can to “dig for dirt” even where no dirt exists.

Accountability for Others

Managers often ask how to hold their employees accountable. This is a difficult question to answer, because one of the biggest variables is your organizational culture. Some cultures support their people when it comes to accountability issues, while others cast blame.

If your culture is focused on learning and growth, you tend to tie accountability with learning and professional development. For example, if Sarah misses an important deadline, the manager will discuss what happened to create that result. Sarah may have had a good reason but didn’t communicate it ahead of time.

Navigating Organizational Change

People often say that they welcome change, but you don’t need to dig too far below the surface to realize that many people actually resist it. They outwardly support change while internally fear how it will affect them.

This frequently occurs during an organizational or management change, which can be tricky. The new regime doesn’t do things the same way as the outgoing people. And nor should they!

Random Acts of Kindness

Generosity is far more than a charitable donation you make or the amount of a birthday gift to a family member. Every day is an opportunity to be generous and to offer it in modest ways to enhance other people’s lives.

“That’s what I consider true generosity:
You give your all and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.”
– Simone de Beauvoir

Do You Have a Strong Bench?

The OMICRON variant of COVID is hitting different parts of the country in waves. New York City, for example, has suffered quite a bit as the level of contagion has been higher and more aggressive than previous waves of the virus.

To illustrate, at the end of December a third of the New York City Fire Department was out on leave because of the volume of people who had contracted the virus.

What’s the Alternative?

Leaders are faced with all sorts of decisions daily; some are innocuous, others significant. Most decisions are made primarily on autopilot. You’ve done something a million times, a similar situation arises, and you act on it quickly without giving it much thought.

Other decisions, however, take a lot more effort especially because they are out of your day-to-day comfort zone. This could be a decision to hire or fire a key employee or to embark on capital expenditures that are higher than you’ve authorized in the past.

A Toast for the New Year!

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard this dozens of times in the past few weeks, “I can’t wait until this year is over.” It’s not surprising given our current environment.

What with the severely contagious Omicron variant crushing massive swaths of the population or rushing to complete year-end deadlines or worrying about inflation, challenges like these have accumulated quickly and definitively.

What Does Your Team Really Think?

Without question, improving communication is a perennial workplace challenge. Although communication has always been an issue, it is amplified in this quasi-post-pandemic environment when you consider video meetings, adapting to new technology, managing priorities with limited information, and constant fatigue about the uncertainty ahead.

Layer on the fact that people’s attention span has diminished substantially, what with multitasking, email and text overload, and anxiety over not having enough time.

Leadership is a Mindset

Category: Managing People