NESFMA – The Manager’s Dilemma

July 5, 2023 | New England Sports Field Management Association | PODCAST

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NEW ENGLAND BLADE — Neal Glatt, GrowTheBench.com

“We have a dilemma” is how one of my employees, ten days into managing her first direct report ever, started the conversation. The issue was that there were some concerns about the work her new employee, who started with the company only ten days previously, had just submitted. It wasn’t that the work was wrong or necessarily bad, but it was certainly a bit different than the typical work we do.

Much to my manager’s credit, she told me that she wanted to give feedback but was concerned about how it would be received. Should she encourage the initiative, excitement, and action of the new employee by accepting the work as it was submitted? Or should she enforce the quality standards of work at our company by correcting the new employee?

In fact, every manager faces this dilemma on the job. How can an employee’s engagement be increased while providing constructive criticism? A manager who picks one or the other usually has mediocre team prone to expensive employee turnover. Yet often trying to pick a middle-of-the-road approach leads to neither objective being realized.

There are three pitfalls managers are subject to which leads to this situation. By taking action, they can avoid the problem and engage high-performing employees who produce great work.

Lack of Training

The reason employees typically don’t perform to the standards expected is because they simply were never taught effectively. Training isn’t something that happens once but rather must be ongoing. The best organizations and teams realize that in a rapidly changing business environment there must be continuous learning from trainers who can add new value.

My first-time manager recognized this issue immediately and told me that while she had trained her new employee on how to technically create the work, she had been planning to have a conversation around the quality and specifics in the coming days. This absolutely explains why the work done wasn’t exactly what had been expected. More training would have prevented the dilemma in the first place.

Lack of Time

Unfortunately, the demand of most workers today is to do more work in less time. For both employees and managers, finding the time to adequately train while meeting all their other daily obligations is difficult. Yet by expecting production too soon, it leads to greater issues than extending deadlines would have. Most managers realize only when it’s too late that by not slowing down, they lose employee engagement and limit the potential of future production forever.

Our new employee was so excited to get started working that my first-time manager gave her the green light to get started. Yet if she had extended more time for the project, she could have easily allowed the new employee to create a draft and meet for a scheduled review discussion where feedback would have been expected and easily received. If those expectations were in place, and the time constraints lifted, she would not have landed in the current predicament.

Lack of Trust

The type of critical feedback that managers often want to deliver is never an issue when their employees trust them implicitly. People greatly care about the intentions of those who give them feedback and these intentions become known from competence, consistency, and character demonstrated throughout a relationship. Managers can build more trust through frequent and transparent conversations which back up consistency between values, intentions, and outcomes.

For my first-time manager, I could deliver a criticism via text with no negative engagement ramifications because there is a high level of trust built over years of working together. But her dilemma was caused because it’s impossible to have this level of confidence in another person after only ten days on the job. As a result, this issue became a true dilemma and navigating the conversation successfully required care and expertise.

In the end, my first-time manager succeeded in achieving both outcomes of employee engagement and high quality, a testament to her sharp intuition as well as the care she has for both the company and her direct report. But this result was only possible with much effort and time because the manager’s dilemma is not an easy one to navigate. Most of all, she learned a valuable lesson that will help her plan for the training, time, and trust, to avoid these situations in the future.

Neal Glatt is the Managing Partner of GrowTheBench, an online training platform for the green industry. You can learn more about him and his solutions at NealGlatt.com.