Sal Paradise wrote:
Not shifting the blame - if you are the manager and someone in your team screws up it is you who has to carry the can.
Don't agree. If you clearly outline expectations and someone f***s up by doing the opposite of what you have told them then it's their fault. I hire people at a particular level, many of them have PhD's and/or years of experience in research or customer service roles. There are certain expectations, when you give people responsibility they have to accept it. If they are not happy to do so then they should say at the time and then we'll discuss more training and ways to support them (usully by me getting involved). If something is beyond their capability there are several levels of more senior company executives whose job it is to take these things forward and intervene. If they blunder on and make mistakes when they know they should be getting help then it's their fault and they take the blame.
The main issue is that some managers like to make small f*** ups appear like big ones. I have seldom, if ever seen a single c*** up by anyone in my team that caused us real issues as a company. Most problems are blown out of proportion needlessly.
I have current issues with one guy who simply doesn't understand the meaning of paperwork. He's been like that since we hired him nearly 4 years ago and I've done everything I can to explain to him why what he does is not acceptable. He hasn't changed, despite apology after apology and promise after promise. The difficulty is that his main function is to support customers and a sales team, which he does spectacularly well. He's dilligent, willing to go anywhere anytime, technically excellent and his customers love him. So I don't blow the paperwork thing out of proportion because it does not effect $1 of the sales figure. In the past I've had to hassle him regularly about paperwork and every year I set his performance objectives to improve it (I know he does a good job, the rest of the team know he does a good job, but unless he actually bloody documents it our US colleagues, some of whom only look at reports logged on our internal system, may not). This year we have moved to a new database/calender/contact management system called SFDC (the most widely used in the sales industry) and we are monitoring metrics on everything. We can't do that unless people fill out their calender entries correctly using the specific fields we have written. This guy doesn't do it. His entries are hopeless - when he bothers.
He's had my foot up his backside twice this year already and he's now trying to get out of the office as much as possible so we can't sit down and do his performance review - where he'll get kicked again.
Is that his fault? Yes. He knows what to do, everyone else is making the effort, he won't do it. Fake ignorance is no defence.
