A reader writes:
How do you manage someone when you’re not a manager?
For the last six months, I’ve been on a small team for a project. The man we work under, George, is half-retired, works less hours, and is very busy. Against his will, he’s been made a boss again due to complicated circumstances. This is temporary.
On my team there is Summer, Polly, and me. We have the same job titles, are roughly are the same age, and have similar years of experience. Polly and I are being unofficially trained in management by George, and he prefers to leave issues like day-to-day affairs, dividing tasks, and interpersonal things to us, being too busy to do those himself.
Summer was recently under an extremely unprofessional PIP. She was given no warnings until being suddenly put on it, never given clear expectations, never clearly told what was wrong, the PIP kept being extended because HR was “too busy for meetings,” and she was put on it by a man she didn’t even work under. The situation was, without going into it, racist and misogynistic. Even if she should have been on a PIP, it was badly handled.
Partway during her PIP, Summer was put on my team, away from the misogynist man (who was under HR review, though nothing came of it), with George’s support. While I was surprised by Summer’s seeming inexperience, she worked extremely hard, took corrections well, and got a lot done. Summer, Polly, and I became close work friends, and she was happy to follow our lead on the project.
However, Summer has been off her PIP for a while … and we’re seeing issues that we never saw while on it. She’s getting much less done, doesn’t tell us when she’s confused, and spends days figuring things out herself, often getting them wrong. She also spends days focusing on items that don’t matter instead of ones we have communicated do matter. She is deeply anxious when corrected even casually. The work she does do is subpar, even with tasks I’ve seen her do well before. Polly and I have to spend real time fixing her work. Summer spends much of our meetings talking about non-work related things. This was fine before, but difficult now.
Polly and I have tried to gently talk to Summer numerous times, make things easier, offer help, and commiserate when she’s stressed. We haven’t been too firm, but we definitely try. I know managers have to be firm sometimes, but … we aren’t her managers. We’re peers and friends. We have no real authority, but George wants us to handle this anyway.
Yesterday Polly and I offered some options to help Summer stay on track. There’s a big deadline soon, and we don’t have time to take on her work. Before we got more than a few sentences in, Summer calmly informed us she was having a panic attack (again), and then chatted about a small non-work issue she had for some time. After she finally agreed to a plan — which took us half an hour, when it should have been five minutes — she then proceeded to do … no work at all. She entirely missed a meeting today, ignoring our calls and Teams until hours after the workday ended.
How do Polly and I manage this? George will just tell us to figure it out. It doesn’t seem big enough for upper management/HR, especially after the PIP issue. I like Summer, and when she does put effort in she’s a good coworker, but this is becoming very stressful.
It must be lovely for George to decide to offload all his management responsibilities on to you and Polly because he “prefers” it that way, but that’s not how this works.
You don’t have the authority to manage Summer, and you’re not getting paid a manager’s salary to manage Summer.
George may have been made a manager against his will, but he is in fact Summer’s manager and you are not.
If it was working for you and Polly for a while to handle day-to-day work and task division yourselves, that’s fine — but it’s not working now. An employee on your team isn’t doing her job at an acceptable level, and the person with the actual authority to deal with it needs to.
It doesn’t matter if George “wants” you to handle it; you need to say no, because this is not your job and, because of that, you literally don’t have the tools you would need to handle it even if you wanted to (in particular, the ability to warn Summer that her performance needs to improve and to let her go if it doesn’t).
It’s unfair to you and Polly and to Summer that George has conned you into thinking this is your job. It’s not your job, and you shouldn’t attempt to do it.
So you’ve got to talk to George. The message to deliver is: “I know you’ve asked us to take some of this on ourselves, but it’s now at the point where someone with managerial authority needs to step in. Summer isn’t getting work done, makes a lot of mistakes, doesn’t take correction well, and we’re having to spend more time than we have fixing her work. The problems are serious and we need either you or HR to step in.”
If George tells you that he doesn’t have time to get involved, then go to HR. At that point both George and Summer are problems — neither of which you have the authority to deal with yourselves — and HR needs to be looped in so someone can address what’s going on. You said you don’t think it’s big enough for upper management or HR, but it’s fully appropriate for them — it’s hard to think of a situation that would be more squarely in their purview! So that’s your next step if George doesn’t step in and do his job.
The post my boss says I should manage my problem coworker, but I’m not her boss appeared first on Ask a Manager.
[Disclaimer: The content in this RSS feed is automatically fetched from external sources. All trademarks, images, and opinions belong to their respective owners. We are not responsible for the accuracy or reliability of third-party content.]
Source link
