We have a manager who is struggling to get a new employee up to speed. We’re afraid we might fail this new employee by letting the manager make training mistakes at the employee’s expense, but we don’t want to step in and undercut the manager’s authority. What should we do? P.S. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen new employees under this manager fail.
Thoughts of the day: Turnover can be costly. Many managers lack training on how to make the transition to management. Identify the kinds of mistakes your manager is making. Set up a structure to work with the manager on what she or he has to learn.
Make sure both you and the manager recognize the cost of turnover. Training eats up profits as the manager is diverted from making his or her full contribution while the
employee learns the job, does things inefficiently and makes mistakes, which have to be corrected. Repeating training basics with another employee because the last one didn’t cut it, just prolongs the agony.
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One set of mistakes that early-stage managers make is to set the bar too high ”“”“ expecting too much too soon and not delegating enough. These mistakes go hand in hand. The employee is asked to do something, makes a mistake and the manager who wasn’t comfortable delegating, pulls back and stops delegating.
Teach your manager that something less than perfection is okay. Focus on making progress.
Mistakes are okay – it’s how people learn.
Stay out of the problem and let the employee fix the mess that he or she just created so that more learning takes place.
Teach each employee it’s not okay to keep repeating mistakes ”“ progress has to be made.
Discuss with the manager that there’s a difference between being someone’s friend and being their manager. It can be a tricky balance for inexperienced managers. They need to know about what motivates the people working for them without getting caught up in personal drama.
Check on the manager’s basic communication skills. Managers need to be able to provide corrective feedback in a way that the employee can hear it and act upon it.
Set up structure for the manager.
Training plan for the employee to follow: expectations for the new employee, what the employee should be asked to do and how fast should he or she learn to do new things.
Weekly reviews between manager and new employee: what went right, what went wrong, what to try next.
Weekly meeting between you and the manager: what the employee did well, where improvement is needed. Ask for facts and specific examples. Agree on what to do next.
Hearing what is happening in the manager-employee meeting can be crucial to evaluating where training problems may be coming from. Periodically sit in on meetings the manager is having with the new employee. Just be careful not to get in the way or appear to take over from the manager. If you have things to add, make notes and share them afterwards with the manager, don’t interrupt during the meeting with the employee.
Talk with your manager about his or her responsibility for insuring the employee succeeds. She can have one hiring failure, maybe a second one. But if employees are failing time after time, that’s probably the manager’s problem not the employees”™ problem. That’s something the manager has to fix in order to continue to grow in your company.
Suggest classes and books. Lay out a training plan for the manager. Make it clear there”™s as much to learn as a manager as the new employee, in order for both of them to succeed.
Looking for a good book? “Ten Mistakes a Manager Should Avoid” by Aditi Chopra.
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Andi Gray is president of Strategy Leaders Inc., strategyleaders.com, a business-consulting firm that specializes in helping entrepreneurial firms grow. She can be reached by phone at (877) 238-3535. Do you have a question for Andi? Please send it to her, via email at AskAndi@StrategyLeaders.com or by mail to Andi Gray, Strategy Leaders Inc., 5 Crossways, Chappaqua, NY 10514. Visit AskAndi.com for an entire library of Ask Andi articles.
