r/managers

My direct report is hybrid and has a written agreement to go into the office (one I don’t work at) once per week. They work with the other people in this office and we’ve discussed (and they have agreed) the value of being in-person regularly. However, it’s taken many further discussions and significant prodding to get them to go in, and excuses have become a pattern (sicknesses, family issues, car trouble, etc.). Recently, I asked them to document when they’ve been going in and after some initial pushback they gave a few dates. Badge data was later checked which showed that the employee hadn’t badged in on any of those dates (or badged in at all for over a month). I’m inclined to investigate this further and discuss with HR to possibly pull IT data to see when the last time their computer connected to the in-office network was (since presumably they could claim they “tailgated” behind someone to get into the office on all these dates and that’s why there’s no badge data).

If there turns out to be objective evidence that they lied about these dates they claim they went in, how would you handle this? It sounds relatively minor but seems like a major integrity issue. Is this grounds for a PIP or immediate termination, or am I overreacting?

This is more of a confession than anything else...

A year ago I had an amazing tight knit, high performing team, however due to changes in tge business my team was broken up and I inherited a team that had been poorly managed for over 4 years, these people were lazy, rude , that felt that they were immune from processes and policies most of which were in place due to state and federal laws.

Over the last 12 months, I have had tears, tantrums and down right disrespect, all of which each team member was written up and dealt with accordingly.

Most of the team have self selected and left on their terms, but today, I terminated the most difficult one of that team, who happens to be the last of that group of people.

Now, I have done terminations in the past, and I have always felt something for the team member who was let go, however with this one, I feel oddly satisfied. Mainly due to the fact that I played a long game, and won.

I just wanted to put that out there to anyone experiencing a difficult team member or like in my case a whole team, there can be light at the end of the tunnel and it is not always a bus.

So I’m moving in a couple of weeks to the management office. They set me a desk up but I never moved because I was short staffed so needed to fill in a lot. I don’t know how I feel about it after being with the team for 3 years. I’m a bit annoyed by it as facilities aren’t as good in the management building. My dept has its own private toilets and the building is always empty so the elevator is always free. In the management building toilets are always 2 floors up or down and the elevator is always full. I will also be in a different building to my staff. I’m not sure how I can be a part of the team when I don’t see them.

Anyway it’s what my managers want and I’m getting new team members next week so there won’t be any room for me. What’s your current situation? Would you rather be with your team or other managers? Why?

I’ve been a manager in my current role for close to 4 years with the same team. One of my direct reports was inherited. He started off as a strong employee and in the last two years he’s been cynical, lazy, defensive and combative.

We are a remote organization and he shows away on teams for hour+ multiple times throughout the day. You send him a message he’ll respond and go back to say. He’ll have tasks that should be relatively quick and those end up taking days. I’ve had to add multiple meetings daily with him to touch base and make sure critical tasks are being completed. He ultimately does get his work done and done decently well however it’s like pulling teeth and at a snails pace.

Beyond that where I think the real issue lies is his attitude. He’s been combative with vendors, partners, team members and even myself. I even had one vendor tell me they stopped emailing him and only go through me due to the way he responds to them.

You ask him a simple question or follow up and he’ll respond condescendingly and in a defensive tone without answering the question at hand. I even spoke with him about his tone and how he speaks to people and he responded that he doesn’t get why people can be combative with him and he has to bite his tongue and not be combative back. It’s a completely warped reality where he thinks people are coming for him constantly where it’s the exact opposite.

He even told me that people come after him to prove his data wrong but he always proves them wrong (it’s simply people asking questions).

I’m at wits end with him, he makes the job miserable for myself and others. My boss wants me to apply the pressure on him and meet more for performance but honestly his character is a cancer and even if he performed better I wouldn’t want him around. My boss says it’s tough as an organization to get approval to let someone go so he isn’t letting me pursue that avenue.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated to improve this situation.

I inherited a couple in my team when I started at this company, my predecessor (stupidly) hired the partner of a staff member who has been with us for over 20 years. I flagged this to my management a while ago and they chose to do nothing.

She is a 10/10 performer, and he has been difficult since day 1. He has recently made a serious mistake which immediately went above my head to HR who have made the decision to fire him next week.

This conversation is coming up next week, and it’s clear he hasn’t made his partner aware of the situation and upcoming meeting.

I’m now terrified of the fallout, where both their teams will likely fall apart or I’ll receive some serious backlash from his partner (if she stays) and the rest of the team.

I’ve been in a manager role for 3 years after serving almost 8 years as an individual contributor at various levels. I expressed interest in people leadership, but I believe I was promoted mostly based on my ability to do the work well. I receive positive feedback around my people skills. I enjoy pairing the right people with the right work and coaching/developing. I go to bat for my team when it comes to helping them manage work/life balance, identifying growth opportunities, and setting boundaries. Their feedback indicates that they are happy with me as their manager. That said, I really struggle with strategy conversations. It all feels so… abstract(?) to me and like we talk in circles, but I am more than happy to put together a plan to execute once the strategy is in place. I’m struggling to understand what this means for my future career. Has anyone discovered that this wasn’t for them and asked to return to a previous role?

Hi All!

A little freaked out at the moment as this is the first time this has occurred in my career.

For context, I placed an employee on a PIP today.
Not my first time doing so, but the first time an employee has tried to make a scene.

Documentation has been provided, dates, times, constant email feedback and discussions. For several months, and PIP documents started to get finalized since the start of May.

Early this week, the Rep made mention of a potential surgery.
I provided the employee with all documents they need, to our HR Team, our documents, processes & procedures.

Their coaching plan had ended prior to that conversation, and since they did not complete it, they’d be moving on to a PIP/Package conversation.

Today after the PIP/Package conversation was had, he throws me into an email discussing that the timing of the PIP was suspect.

Advice? Help? What should I do?

Everything has been documented, it needed to get reviewed before we even got to this part.

Not new to giving pips, but certainly new to someone deciding to throw me.
Thank you,

 Had a situation recently where a strong performer on my team wanted to move internally to a role that fit her career goals better. I supported it, but leadership came back and basically told me to find a way to keep her. Not directly order me to block it, but definitely hinted that I had leverage to make her stay. I said no and now I'm wondering if that was the right call. For other managers out there, how do you navigate this when what's best for the employee goes against what leadership wants for the team? Have you ever refused a request like this and faced consequences later?

How do you guys deal with being a manager knowing yall aren’t. I understand that I need some professionalism, bust I can’t fully do it. What do you guys do?!?!

I've been working for the organization for 5+ yrs. In those years I have had to cover for the team that I will now manage. During the interview process I was told over and over how much of a problem the team is (low morale, low engagement, low productivity, inflexible, etc ). I will be setting up individual meetings with each person on the team and I want to get their "side of the story." What should I ask to help me determine if the problem is actually with them or the way they've been managed before this?

So me and my technical co-founder started a B2B SaaS business about 3 to 4 months ago. My idea, I brought in the main prospect and I do all the outreach and sales. He builds the product. We went 50/50.

Problem is he’s full time on it and I’m not. Got a day job I can’t walk away from just yet. We’ve actually got decent traction. Main prospect is at trial stage, a few others in the pipeline. But things between us are getting tense.

He’s lost confidence in me after a pricing conversation with a prospect didn’t go well. I’ll be honest, that one was on me. I’m also not going to pretend I’ve got loads of business experience. I’m learning as I go and I think that’s become a real issue for him.

His argument is he’s carrying most of the risk. Time, money, everything. I get that. But my counter is the idea came from me and without the relationships I’ve built there’s no business to risk anything on.

We both want this to work. But we’re stuck on whether 50/50 still makes sense and whether the trust is there anymore.

Anyone been through something similar? What did you do? Did you sort it out or did it fall apart?

If someone you supervise has very heavy family responsibilities, the person has plenty of PTO, and often requests a couple of hours here and there to attend responsibilities outside work, the person gets tasks done on time. How do mangers truly feel about often needing small off here and there. Would you tell the person “you need to be mindful about deadlines, should not take off on the due date and the date before”. Thanks.

I’m asking because this just happened on my team and honestly I’m still replaying the last few months in my head wondering if I completely missed the signs. This employee was the person everyone relied on. Always hit deadlines trained new hires handled difficult stakeholders without drama never caused problems. If you looked at performance alone you’d think everything was great. Then out of nowhere they put in their notice and during the exit conversation they admitted they’d been emotionally checked out for almost a year
Looking back, the signs were there, just subtle. They stopped volunteering ideas in meetings. Went from “here’s how we can improve this” to “sure, I can do that.” Still productive, still professional but the energy completely changed. Less excitement less ownership less spark. I think managers are trained to look for obvious performance problems but high performers seem way harder to read because they keep functioning even when they’re unhappy
For those of you managing teams what were the signs you noticed too late with someone valuable? And has anyone actually managed to turn it around before the employee resigned?

I manage a small dev team and recently lost a senior engineer who gave only two weeks notice. He was the go-to person for our legacy system and no one else had deep knowledge of that codebase. I'm trying to figure out how to prevent this level of disruption next time. What actual systems or processes do you use to reduce bus factor without making employees feel like you're constantly preparing for them to leave? Do you mandate documentation, enforce cross-training, or just accept that some loss is unavoidable?

Either justified or not.

That their formal complaints, lobbying the leader's boss or rallying other employees led to the leader's eventual downfall. Often after that employee has already been pushed out in retaliation but that their efforts put enough political blood in the water against that leader.

I work at a company that has what we call The Old Guard managers. Been at the company 20 years, etc.

I've noticed over my time at this company that these managers ridicule other managers behind their back not just in a private conversation with another manager but they do it in front of hourly people. I'm not talking lower level managers either, I mean mid manager or director level.

And it's not pointing out something they disagree on, it's "well I'm surprised he even knows what (insert some process or product here) is!"

I'm careful not to do this even in small conversations, but I've seen managers do it in meetings.

How common is this?

I was let go due to an unintentional safety violation. I was there for about 9 years started as a stocker and became a manger after 3 years. I am 38 and I only have a high school education and I’m unsure what steps to take to compete with people applying in today’s world. I have no problem working overnights but it’s hard to think I could be forced to start over from scratch. Any tips to continue to reach for manager positions?

I am a technical person. We are supposed to be given requirements via a business analyst, who ideally should analyze the ask by business, impact, various scenarios, and tell us the same. But he is transferring that one line business ask to us. We, as technical people, interpret it in one way. After code development, he doesn't review our outputs functionally. We assume it's okay (an unsaid lgtm), then we ask the business to verify it as well.

During the verification by business, they tell us it's wrong and something else was expected.

How should I communicate to my manager that if this continues, there will be a lot of to and fro s, which will bring unnecessary delays for simple tasks? Also, what is my manager supposed to do, ideally? ​

Hello everyone. I’m a psychology student working on a research proposal about workplace behavior in corporate settings.
Before I finalize my topic I wanted to ask people who actually work in organizations:

What’s the one people problem you observe repeatedly at work that nobody seems to have a good answer for?

Even a one line response helps. What do you wish someone would actually study?

For the last four years I have in many ways fulfilled the role of an operations manager while working for the British national health service: I have idenfitied issues with processes, written proposals, and led on embedding improvements. I have excelled at it and really enjoyed it too.

However, for the problems that requiered data analysis this was always pretty straightforward: 4 or 5 columns and less than 100 rows of clean data. If this was ever more than that, there was a data analyst I could work with to get the information I needed.

I have applied to jobs in operations management but I lack the excel pivot data, power pivot/power BI experience to secure them. One of them sent a case study with several large data sets, and it has defeated me purely on the excel skills, otherwise I have no doubt I would have secured the role.

How essential are excel skills to operational management in people’s experience? Would you recommend investing in developing my skills with excel before applying to more operation roles?

Thank you!

Edit to clear up a point that keeps coming up in comments:
I have spent around 3 days self-learning through tutorials and using AI while working on that case study. Hence how I already know that learning to analyse complex data sets (duplicates, blanks, data with errors and inconsistencies, formulas that work on excel but not DAX, etc) isn’t straightforward. Precisely the point of me asking is to find out if this particular company are very demanding or if this level of data analysis is actually pretty standard for an operational manager in customer experience or similar field. Thanks again