On Being a Tough Manager « The Smooth Project Manager

Blog
About

On Being a Tough Manager

I’m currently undergoing some huge stress at work because of a project extremely vital to the company. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very smooth today when I imposed a 2 hour deadline on one of the employees to finish something. The employee responded, by email, when the 2 hours elapsed, that he didn’t know how to do it and that he’s sorry. Now that employee, in particular, is very hard working and loyal and he loves working with me, but he just can’t handle pressure (this is not the first time). I ended up doing the task myself and finishing late. I hate working late.

Was I too tough on that person or was he too soft? And who’s the one who wasn’t able to handle the pressure, was it him, or me? He’s just a developer after all…

6 Comments »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Hi,

Good luck with your new blog and appreciate the stories from the heart .

Interesting question. Ad hoc requests – is it due to poor planning? Not knowing more about the context, I feel more sympathetic to your developer.

Usually, when I get a lot of tight time lines on ad-hoc requests, I point to the quote on my white board that says:
“Your failure to plan, does not make it my emergency. Thank you for understanding.”

For me, that usually keeps the firefighting down to a minimum because like you, I too hate working late. Also lets the requester know subtly that, maybe s/he better go back to do some homework first before walking in my door or firing off an email to me asking me to jump quickly.

OTOH, sometimes, there’s not much you can do, and the request must be done so need to evaluate helping the person know what the priorities are so they don’t fail to deliver.

People management is a tough one!

Cheers,

Comment by Lui Sieh — July 30, 2008 #

Reply
Hi Lui,

Although I’m very good at criticizing myself, I wouldn’t classify what happened as poor planning. I’m a Functional/Project Manager hybrid, it was the functional manager who gave him the task, and it was the functional manager who told him to stop everything else and do this task.

In my times, the first question I was asked in the interview was: “Are you able to work under stress?”.

Now all I have is softies.

Comment by smoothmanager — July 30, 2008 #

Reply
A few thoughts:

- If a task is really that important, perhaps presenting it to your employee in person would have been a better idea. That way you could gauge his reaction, provide more direction if necessary, and perhaps save time (yours and his) in the end.

- Is it true that your employee didn’t know how to do the task? Shouldn’t you, as his manager, know what he is capable of? Maybe he really dropped the ball, or maybe you should have provided him more information or assistance, or even assigned it to someone else.

- You say “he loves working with me,” and then you say “He’s just a developer…” Those two statements don’t line up – if my manager thought of me as “just a ,” you can bet I would NOT love working for him.

Comment by svec — July 31, 2008 #

Reply
Oops, regarding my first thought in my previous comment: I thought you had made the initial request via email, but it was only your employee’s response that was email, sorry about that.

Comment by svec — July 31, 2008 #

Reply
Hi smoothmanager,

Ah, well, that sure changes things a bit. Sounds like a performance management issue.

On the topic of softies, where I just came from, we have a term for the Gen Y folks – call them the Strawberry Generation because they’re beautiful on the outside, but a bit soft when you squeeze them. So managing them is difficult because tough love isn’t a helpful technique. I am really perplexed with the 20 something people… The younger ones are called the Peach Generation and you can imagine what that means!

Comment by Lui Sieh — July 31, 2008 #

Reply
Svec,

I don’t show the person that s/he’s just a resource, but when it comes down to it, everyone is (a resource) and everyone is replaceable. I learned it the hard way not to get emotionally attached to my team.

Liu, I can’t tell you how much I sympathize.

Comment by smoothmanager — August 1, 2008 #

Reply

Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.

The Smooth Project Manager