How do you normally react doing those tough times?

• Maybe a little short with answers to questions?
• How about frustrated when things are not going right?
• Start micro-managing your team?
• Little slow with answers to tough decisions?
• Take a day off when a key deadline is due?

Hopefully you did not say yes to any of these behaviors. These were not made up examples, I have seen them throughout my working career. I can almost put a face and a name to each of them. As I have written in past blog posts, learning from ours examples (both failure and success) can be very helpful to you in the future. I have taken those bad examples above and changed up how I perform under extremely pressure.

What I typically do is:

• Insure that the pressures that I am under are not outwardly visible to my team. I try to maintain my positive and cheerful attitude everyday that I in the office.
• Sometimes this is extremely difficult, at the very least, I communicate to my team what is going on. Letting them know the pressures and how they can help, usually is a good thing.
• Come in a bit early and stay late if needed. I always like to get in early to help me with quiet time. Helps me focus on what is important. I want my team to understand that I am here, no matter what.
• Prioritizing and delegating workloads. Work assignments may need to be shifted in order to meet some extreme deadlines. Asking the team their input on how best to accomplish this has been helpful in the past. Sometimes, a team member may have a skill in something that they don’t especially care for doing, but when times are tough – they step up and get it done.
• Pressure situations need to bring out some creative solutions – more minds working on that creative solution the better.
• Most importantly – Be myself! At the end of the day, your character and being true to yourself is what matters. If I am not happy with myself for any reason – I am the only person that can fix it.

How best do you handle those pressure moments?

• Your job is to remove roadblocks for your staff. This is one key that many managers forget. What do you really offer your staff that they can not get on their own? Roadblock remover! Sometimes the manager gets in the way. If that is true, get moving.
• Set expectations. Giving your staff the opportunity to help set expectations is very powerful. Giving them the end point, gives them vision into what needs to be done. Don’t tell them how to do it. See the first one…
• Empower them. I know this one is a lot of lip service. Truly empower them is giving them the authority, confidence and the space to get the job done. Sounds easy… Make it happen, you will be rewarded more from your staff with this one.
• Never give someone a task, you wouldn’t do. Let’s face it sometimes there are crappy tasks that need to be done.. Don’t be afraid to say that, “I know this is a crappy task. I am sorry, but I really need you to get it done.” Helps..
• Problems occur, address them ASAP. In a previous post, I wrote about conflict. Well, those problems don’t usually go away. Stand up and acknowledge there is a problem. Respectfully address it.
• Praise in public. Critique in private. If you must critique, make sure that it is about the professional part of the job. Stay away from the personal. Everything must tie to what is happening back on the job. Your behavior in this situation caused this to be missed, that to slipped or whatever happened  in their job. Setting the stage is critical.
• Let them speak (or vent). Give them the opportunity to let of some steam if necessary. Listen, you could hear something that is going on, that you were unaware of. Too many times, I have heard a managers voice and not my own. Those don’t work well.
• Respect their time. I had a manager that was late to everything. His time management was terrible. For me, I felt that my time was not important. My time and their time is important!
• Don’t be afraid to say, “I don’t know.” I don’t know everything.. The worse thing you could do is make something up. A simple, “I don’t know, but let me find out” works best.
• No surprises. Don’t blindside your staff members. A performance appraisal should not be the first time someone hears there is a problem. You should be communicating all the time. Here is more deeper thoughts in this area.
• Never micromanage. Again, another past post of mine. For me, micromanaging is the worst behavior any manager can do. Give your people room to work!
• Finding the “right” people to work in your team. Your team is key to your success. Finding the right people to work together is critical. Sometimes the person with the most experience is not the best fit for the job
• Mistakes happen, just not the same mistake over and over. No one is perfect, so when a mistake happens, learn from it and don’t let it happen again. I always use the first one is on me… Have a positive outlook and control
• Blame is useless. I have had managers that are looking for the “who” to blame. I would rather find out what happened and make sure that it doesn’t happen again. See the above one.
• You set the example of your staff to follow. Your staff is a mirror of yourself. You don’t like what you see, then you change.
• You are nothing without them. It is a funny thing, when you go on vacation or are out sick, the work gets done… If you staff is all out on vacation or sick – nothing gets done.

There probably are more to add.. Everyday as a manager is a learning experience. Take this list, use what you want and add some of your own. Either way, your staff will appreciate it.

Related articles

• New Managers – Learn This One Early(stevebellnow.com)
• Keys to Empowering Your Staff (stevebellnow.com)

Here is my better answer to, what are the key things I have learned that helped me become a better manager.

• Hire Well – To me this one usually gets completely forgotten. Building a strong team is the very first thing that I said. I meant it! How you hire for your team is a critical piece of the team puzzle. Don’t under estimate how important this step is.
• Get Out of Their Way – Once you have a solid team, give them clear goals, make sure everyone is clear about those goals, then get the hell out of their way. Touch base, keep track, but don’t hover. Treat your team like it’s made of grownups and things will be better. I have worked for micro-managers, I bet almost everyone of us have. Nothing sucks the life out of a team then a micro-manager. Don’t be one of them.
• Remove Roadblocks – One of the keys to staying getting out of their way is making sure that others stay out of the team’s way. Removing roadblocks or keeping people away from the team is a good thing. I had a manager that felt that it was important for her to step in and “help” my team. All it did was cause complete confusion to the team. Make sure that people, excess processes and bureaucracy get in your team’s way. One of the biggest things you can do for them.
• Hold Them Accountable – Not that you have to fire anyone for not achieving success. They need to understand they are responsible for the outcome – good and bad. Everyone wants to do a good job. A strong team will do a good job if you hold them responsible for their actions.
• Listen - A skill that is hard to master. Some managers think they “listen,” but they are too busy talking or multi-tasking. Being there – in the moment – is key. True listening will help you understand what is going on. Not your understanding of what is going on – but what your people are telling you is going on. Another area that I want to share is listening from your office. No not spying on your people. Just listening to the office environment (hallways, water cooler, café) – get a pulse on your team is feeling.
• Ask Stupid Questions – Maybe it is me, but I think I am truly gifted at the stupid question. I have been told many a time that their is no such thing as a stupid question, its true. Especially, when you are problem solving. Having that extra outside set of eyes (and the stupid question) can help the team step back and rethink some. It is amazing to see how sometimes that stupid question triggered a thought that ended up solving some problem. Sometimes it fails – and the team can laugh with you with your stupid question…

After rethinking the question and putting a little bit more structure to my answer.. I think this one is much better. Not that my initial, off the cuff, spur of the moment answer was too far off. This just looks better.

Related articles

• Team Processes and Procedures (stevebellnow.com)
• Monitoring Your Team (stevebellnow.com)
• What Would You Do? (stevebellnow.com)

• Hardly ever acted: there are always plenty of reasons not to make a decision, reasons to wait for more information, more options, more opinions. In my younger years, I heard the phase that there is a right decision, wrong decision and a no decision (the only real wrong one was a no decision).
• Secrecy:  Secrets make companies political, anxious and full of distrust. There really is not very many matters that must remain confidential. If it most be secret – then say so.
• Over-sensitivity:  An inability to be direct and honest with staff is a critical warning sign. Can your manager identify a problem, address it headlong and move on? If not, then the problem will continue.
• Love of procedure or process:  Well, we all know this one is something that just continues to happen. Process and procedure have their place – but, they are not the do all – there comes a time when things just have to happen.
• Have the ability to hire weak folks:  Strong leaders do not feel threatened by their staff. You want the smartest and best people to get the job done. The chain is only as strong as its weakest link – so, no hiring of weaker people.
• Focus on the small tasks:  Do managers need to know everything about everything? Micro-management 101 – enough said.

I bet there are more.. We ran out of time at lunch and had to get back to our meetings. We really had some good laughs over the examples that were shared. The one thing that was true in all of the examples were that these were managers that folks worked for in the past. Not to say that their manager today may not do or say something that makes us wonder, “what were they thinking?”. We all have found ways to get away from those incompetent managers. 

Sometimes you feel like – okay, enough already. You have tried to work very hard on developing a strong working relationship with your manager. You have done just about everything you can think of and many of the options from your friends.

Nothing seems to be getting through – what next?

Confront the situation – head on. Every once and awhile you will run into a manager that the work environment is just not very good.  My last post, I talked about how to manage your manager. You have tried all of those and nothing seems to work. Enough attempting to do some of the right things, get right to the point.

“What am I doing that just does not work for you? No matter how hard I try, I just feeling like I am not getting anywhere. Help me to understand!”

Definitely not the question or statements – you would normally make in normal circumstances – but these times are not normal. You are more than likely very miserable, unhappy and hate to come to work.

I have had to do this a couple of times in my 27 years. It happens! Was it successful? I believe more so than not. The first time that I did this – I was scared. I was working for a manager that managed by intimidation. He loved to push himself onto everyone. I had enough, so, I requested a one on one and asked point blank. To my relief, he did not fire me on the spot. He just sat there and could not come up with any answer.  After some awkward moments of silence, he spoke up and told me – that there were a few items that I did that he felt were a problem. First one, he felt that the folks on the team were going to me to direction and leadership – and they should come to him. Probably right, but his actions drove us to whoever we could find to help us. I told him, exactly why that was. The other part that caused the friction was around my aggressive nature to getting stuff done. He felt that I was too young and should be more or less taking direction from him, rather than doing it on my own. Seems like he was scared of me. I told him that all I cared about was getting the job done as best that I could and believe me – if I needed help, he would hear from me. Afterwards – the working relationship was better, but not that much. He was later replaced for a new manager!

The other time I did this was a complete disaster. The relationship did not have any trust whatsoever. We were two people with two different agenda’s, different styles and different approaches. I was more aggressive (go-getter) and my manager was a slow and methodical person. I was quick to make decisions and he wanted every piece of data. I was loud and he was quiet. When we sat down to confront the situation – we both were very good at calling out our differences – but not good at figuring out how to work together. After about 10 minutes, we just knew that this was not going to work. I decided the best situation for me, was to look for a different position. He had more team members that were more like him and worked okay together. I was the odd one, I decided that I would not be good for that team and left.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not; but you have to try. There is no reason to completely hate your job or going to work.

Do you have any other approaches – that have been effective?