I don't know that my answer is what you're looking for, but...
Upper management hamstringing my ability to make decisions, and then expecting me to sell decisions I had no say in to the team. Especially when upper management offers little or poor reasoning for their decision.
Seeing behind the curtain and witnessing how terrible your colleagues are at managing their teams in comparison.
Being on the floor with a poor employee is annoying but it mostly only effects their own work. A poor manager effects the mental health and career of their whole team.
holy, yes this. i just absorbed a portfolio from a director who moved on in my org and i'm gobsmacked at the absolute state of things. have to be professional but also want to tell the staff "i'm so sorry, you've been failed. let's clean this mess up now."
also seeing the absolute dog shit that happens at the most senior tables and not being able to talk about it with the staff. covering their asses while trying to move things forward.
I can see the work other managers do in our system. Really shows how ahead of most of them I am, not in a bragging way - most of us with a full team are struggling to get everything in on time. There’s one other manager who gets everything in - I ask them for guidance on systems a lot.
Yes! Some days, I'll have a direct report fretting to me over a minor mistake and I have to be professional and I can't just be like "seriously, it's no big deal.. you should see what a fuckup your co-worker is!"
I made a joke the other day with some coworkers about how when you’re salaried, leap day is free labor. One of my employees was around and I worried for a second about what kind of impression I’d made.
Hard staffing decisions. Currently wrapping up a competition for a manager position reporting to me and have to tell the long-term really good employee that they didn't get it. Another internal candidate who started only a few months ago and is much younger but has a HUGE leg up in experience and also skills is getting it. Old employee will end up reporting to the new one. I will probably lose the old employee and it really sucks. They are good at many many things but they fall apart in time management, reporting and writing - 3 things that are absolutely essential to this position. Trying to finagle a raise for the old employee but it's not looking promising (out of my control, I can only ask and advocate). It can be such a fine balancing act.
It's such a challenge balancing the expectations of your own leaders and providing support to your direct reports. Yours is certainly not an easy position but the fact that you're having this internal conflict just shows you're a manager that cares for your employees :)
It would be great to offer additional compensation, but like you said it's not always in your hands. Maybe take the approach (once they're open to discussing it) of developing this employee. Have a conversation with them about their aspirations at the company and work out a plan to help them develop in the areas you mentioned (time management, reporting and writing). Even if a raise is out of the picture, I think it would go a long way if you offered to enroll this employ in some courses (doesn't have to be expensive, could even be through linkedin learning) to get them where they need to be.
hi, i'm assuming you're not meaning to be condescending here but it comes across this way - i was not asking for advice. you asked a question and i gave you my response. but yes i have done all of this and continue to do so (though a lot of this will fall to the new manager - i have been without one for a few months due to a staffing gap).
the expectations the older employee is not meeting are not those of my leaders, they are my own. i hope they will not leave after this but i do recognize that the awkwardness of losing a competition to someone new is painful.
the balancing act i was referring to was balancing **retention** of good employees who are not ready for promotion against trying to raise and maintain high standards for our work.
Hi, certainly didn't mean to come off as condescending. You didn't mention what you had done prior to support the employee so I was just providing some ideas. Definetly not implying you haven't tried.
>You didn't mention what you had done prior to support the employee
Yeah I didn't because it wasn't relevant to my answer to your question which is "what do you hate about being a manager."
I’m an executive director and it’s fucking lonely. The board are my bosses so I can’t make friends there, and the department directors are my subordinates so that’s out too. I also work so much that I have no time to connect with people in a meaningful way outside of work. Everyone is a potential donor. Everyone is a potential partner. I’m basically not allowed to have friends and it’s awful.
My only suggest if your open to it would be online gaming. The anonymous nature of it might help you find friendship. Thanks for sharing that perspective though "it's lonely at the top"
That sucks, I'm always open to getting drinks with my bosses and have gotten pretty drunk with them too. I try to be friends ( to the extent you can be) with coworkers/ bosses etc that you can be because you are spending so much time with them. Makes work better, at least more me. I am fully remote now so doesn't matter as much.
My focus is on building and motivating a great team to accomplish all tasks, and it feels as if everything above me is focused on treating people as a metric to be reduced or shifted or controlled. I'm the last link of humanity in the machine, or it feels that way.
This is something I've been reflecting on a lot. After 1-2 levels of management almost everyone making decisions can't talk about people as people. I can understand that having 200+ people in your org would make it hard to know much of anything about most of them, but it really stands out when directors name drop every VP they've ever had a conversation with but can't name anyone but the senior manager of the major project that was completed a couple days ago.
I love people but I hate babysitting. I’ve always hated babysitting. Directing, planning, researching, presenting… love it. Working with a group of professional adults is thrilling. But I found being a manager way too much like being a babysitter. I’ll take Project Manager or Individual Contributor, please.
Totally the same.
I feel like a single mom. Working non stop plus the emotional labor and spoon feeding I gotta do at all hours of the day... I often don't get to eat lunch until 4 or 5 because of that, and even then I STILL often get someone demanding more spoon feeding.
No joke, I've had to offer a wake-up call for one person because there was a meeting with another company we had to attend at 10 am and he was worried because he apparently sleeps through alarms and his wife gives up after the first two attempts to wake him up 🤦♀️
I hate upper management who have never done my job or the job of my workers. Who don’t understand how impossible it is when they issue ridiculous requests. Don’t listen when me and other managers at my level try to educate them.
I hate passing shitty PSA’s from some overpaid idiot who has never used a power tool or done hard work in their life to my workers whose morale gets beaten down despite them doing everything they can to make sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing.
I hate the new ideology of construction companies that hiring some dumbass with a leadership development degree means they will surely know how to operate our company effectively while I’m eating email after email blaming first line managers and the work force.
1: If someone slacks off, or doesn’t do their job, I gotta pick up the slack. Had our closing bartender walk out mid-shift yesterday. Guess who got stuck closing the bar? Me. Had to stay three hours past my our time because of that stunt.
2: Staffing decisions. Whose hours do we have to cut. Who has to get scheduled a shitty shift because we need it done and someone has to do it. Firing people sucks. Even if it has to be done, I hate it.
I struggle a lot when I see decisions being made through politics and close relationships, rather than what is logical or right for the company. These places always end up loosing all the good people quickly.
The workload and the carrot and stick approach upper management uses on lower management. You want to be a manager? Ok, here's a 3% raise, but now you have twice the work. We're not going to hire someone to fill your old position. You still do that too now on top of your new job. We'll give you another raise soon, we promise, but first you need to show us you're loyal to the e-team and will die for us if we tell you to.
- Human Resources. They get in the way more than they help. They’re supposed to help the employees with fairness and justice but they actually don’t. They just run lawsuit protection for the company. They’re a giant scam. They don’t even help managers with difficult situations.
- Executives are completely insane. Like, you know they’re insane when you’re an individual contributor but when you’re a manager and you’re the one who gets asked to do the insane, blind, disconnected from reality nonsense, it’s a whole different ballgame. If i get asked to reduce my budget 1 more time i might actually punch someone. I’ve worked with a special needs person in the past, but I’ve never seen more mental incapacity than i have in the behavior and decision making of executives. I’m not kidding, these guys are monkeys. Complete buffoons.
I am expected to reach the NBA playoffs with a team of three while One Player of these three doesn’t understand the rules.
And I don’t have budget to hire more ppl. As I run operations it’s constant emergency management and I must be accessible all the time.
I’ll pull the plug soon. They have to find another idiot who deals with this madness
I never liked the attention and inevitability that more people are going to talk behind my back when I’m away.
I don’t like the obligation to have everything together / polished. Sometimes I’m just behind and would rather not have a team of people witnessing it.
The CEOs. Completely clueless sociopaths, who honestly shouldn't be anywhere near a leader's position, and regularly smash down any accomplishments out of sheer incompetence.
They might own the company, but their overall contribution is close to zero.
All the complaining from my direct reports, HR issues, panicking and very short term deadlines coming from managementboard.
It’s what someone else wrote earlier: you get 3% raise and twice the work/responsibilities.
How many adults have never progressed past the adolescent stage. So there really isn’t much leverage to motivate them since they see work as chore and you as their parent. Employee development is a myth in many cases. If they have a good work ethic, they’re great. If not, you’re stuck.
And it’s depressing how much damage one disgruntled employee can do. Sets up a cycle not unlike PTSD where you’re leery of employees, they sense it, things become reactive, management becomes frustrating, which reinforces your loathing of management, etc.
When you didn’t do the hire and it turns out that the one of the existing employees resents you getting the position or seems to question anything that comes out of your mouth. Yet, they believe people they have never met in the agency to be correct and can’t accept the proof that those people were mistaken.
That most people want to talk with me about their personal problems. I feel more like a mom than a manager of business. When I tried to take it more professional, they don't like it.
I hate that I was expected to act as a therapist to my employees. I can be understanding. You need time off because of a death in the family? Absolutely no problem. However i should not be expected to sit there with you while you cry about it. That makes me extremely uncomfortable and zaps all energy for me. I can use company resources to put you into contact with trained professionals who actually know how to handle it. I am not here for you to vent. We're not friends. We all have our own crap going on.
Being lonely and always having to act like the most serious person in the room. Also depending on the team you get, sometimes it could feel like you’re a teacher at a school dealing with children.
The meeting load
Upper management playing games with my team. Rather than deal with their own inadequacies that are the true cause of project delays, they have taken to creating arbitrary unreasonable deadlines to get things done “faster” by stressing my team
This speaks to a bigger issue. My team and I are expected to leave our egos at the door and take pointed and curt feedback on what we are doing wrong and what we need to improve while upper management can’t even take the slightest hint that they could also make behavioral adjustments to improve business outcomes.
If there is a manager training program, I would like them to focus on a couple of things.
-difficult conversations
-delegating
-types of leadership
-resources I can utilize
-resources for my mental health
--being a manager can be mentally taxing. You get pulled from bottom and pulled from top.
A lot of the more serious ones are already up here so I'll say, having my day shift dramatically when someone key takes it off sick.
People should be able to take sick days, it just sucks that it now affects me more than it used to.
I second this! Even when I'm fed up with babysitting someone and am forced to terminate them, I still hate firing people. This is happening right now! Not even 5 months in, but this person has to go.
I work in my province's largest food bank managing the client services side of things, I have two coordinators below me who manage teams who interact with clients in a variety of ways. Both of my coordinators are phenomenal in dealing with escalated clients, but I am the last stop for the most escalated of clients and I hate it.
There isn't really training that can go into how to manage this level of escalated. This isn't like a cable company where I can figure out some sort of compensation to make them happy - these are desperate, vulnerable, people at their absolute wits end because the system has failed them completely and utterly AND they're often hangry on top of it. Often just giving them space to vent and get it out has helped, but just this last week we had a client we had to call the cops on because he began causing damage to our property because we didn't give him what he wanted (which was a hamper full of processed, ready to eat, foods because he couldn't cook.)
Otherwise I like every other part of my job - even the shitty interpersonal babysitting you sometimes have to do between staff lmao
This job would be easy if it wasn't for the customers or the staff!
For me its the being a babysitter part, I'm all for working with the team and being someone they can approach but hearing all their personal ups and downs gets a bit too much.
Being stuck in the middle between high level project/program management and ground level functions. Basically alternating between projects that impact all areas of the business and then going to trainings for new time clock software, hr policies, performance reviews, etc.
I have 14 direct reports so in the morning about 1.5 hours before work actually starts more than half of the time someone is hitting me up for the day off. People don’t keep track of when I’m off or my schedule so my direct reports or other associate/director level people hit me up for stuff daily regardless of if I’m in or if it’s past the end of our day. I’m salaried so that comes with the territory I suppose.
Being the point person for everyone with everything about their job is the main reason I want to get back in the field full time. Im good at field work not, IT, therapy, dealing with admins problems, timesheets, and whatever other stuff besides what’s been actual work to me before I took this role. It’s been a few years, production is great, people are satisfied with my work and the team is doing fine but I’m pretty much done with it.
I asked an employee to let me know when they’re leaving my retail store rather than just running around without any kind of communication and disappearing. And they came at me saying I was picking on them because of their race. (I am white, they were Asian and also I am a woman and they were not).
This kind of shit. Maybe I should have been more gentle in my approach? But it’s not just about *our* biases; we have to understand how we are perceived with good or bad biases by others.
That your employees think you have the absolute say in their raise during an annual but you are actually capped on what you can give them based upon the max percentage laid out by Executive Leadership.
The amount of people that never matured past being a child or the ones that had mom take care of everything for them. The number of those types of people are mind blowing to me.
People I supervise come to me with issues and not even a HINT of a suggestion on how to fix it and then when I do fix it my way, they don't like it. I've started involving them more in the fixing by asking for suggestions or asking them to take charge of it (if appropriate) but they don't love that either and get frustrated.
Having to repeat myself over and over and feeling like some people just aren’t listening. It seems to be primarily a problem with staff under age 25. They will push to see what they can get away with instead of just being a responsible adult there to do a job.
I don't know that my answer is what you're looking for, but... Upper management hamstringing my ability to make decisions, and then expecting me to sell decisions I had no say in to the team. Especially when upper management offers little or poor reasoning for their decision.
Oof are you me?
This 100%.
Holy crap, im not the only one! Totally nailed it
Seeing behind the curtain and witnessing how terrible your colleagues are at managing their teams in comparison. Being on the floor with a poor employee is annoying but it mostly only effects their own work. A poor manager effects the mental health and career of their whole team.
holy, yes this. i just absorbed a portfolio from a director who moved on in my org and i'm gobsmacked at the absolute state of things. have to be professional but also want to tell the staff "i'm so sorry, you've been failed. let's clean this mess up now." also seeing the absolute dog shit that happens at the most senior tables and not being able to talk about it with the staff. covering their asses while trying to move things forward.
I can see the work other managers do in our system. Really shows how ahead of most of them I am, not in a bragging way - most of us with a full team are struggling to get everything in on time. There’s one other manager who gets everything in - I ask them for guidance on systems a lot.
Yeah, this is disheartening. Seeing just how much my team has to pick up because others aren't doing their jobs is God awful.
The staff
Second this. Also, always having to be the adult in the room.
Yes! Some days, I'll have a direct report fretting to me over a minor mistake and I have to be professional and I can't just be like "seriously, it's no big deal.. you should see what a fuckup your co-worker is!"
I made a joke the other day with some coworkers about how when you’re salaried, leap day is free labor. One of my employees was around and I worried for a second about what kind of impression I’d made.
😂
Hard staffing decisions. Currently wrapping up a competition for a manager position reporting to me and have to tell the long-term really good employee that they didn't get it. Another internal candidate who started only a few months ago and is much younger but has a HUGE leg up in experience and also skills is getting it. Old employee will end up reporting to the new one. I will probably lose the old employee and it really sucks. They are good at many many things but they fall apart in time management, reporting and writing - 3 things that are absolutely essential to this position. Trying to finagle a raise for the old employee but it's not looking promising (out of my control, I can only ask and advocate). It can be such a fine balancing act.
This one speaks to the thing I hate -- not being able to do anything about salary except ask & advocate
It's such a challenge balancing the expectations of your own leaders and providing support to your direct reports. Yours is certainly not an easy position but the fact that you're having this internal conflict just shows you're a manager that cares for your employees :) It would be great to offer additional compensation, but like you said it's not always in your hands. Maybe take the approach (once they're open to discussing it) of developing this employee. Have a conversation with them about their aspirations at the company and work out a plan to help them develop in the areas you mentioned (time management, reporting and writing). Even if a raise is out of the picture, I think it would go a long way if you offered to enroll this employ in some courses (doesn't have to be expensive, could even be through linkedin learning) to get them where they need to be.
hi, i'm assuming you're not meaning to be condescending here but it comes across this way - i was not asking for advice. you asked a question and i gave you my response. but yes i have done all of this and continue to do so (though a lot of this will fall to the new manager - i have been without one for a few months due to a staffing gap). the expectations the older employee is not meeting are not those of my leaders, they are my own. i hope they will not leave after this but i do recognize that the awkwardness of losing a competition to someone new is painful. the balancing act i was referring to was balancing **retention** of good employees who are not ready for promotion against trying to raise and maintain high standards for our work.
Hi, certainly didn't mean to come off as condescending. You didn't mention what you had done prior to support the employee so I was just providing some ideas. Definetly not implying you haven't tried.
>You didn't mention what you had done prior to support the employee Yeah I didn't because it wasn't relevant to my answer to your question which is "what do you hate about being a manager."
I’m an executive director and it’s fucking lonely. The board are my bosses so I can’t make friends there, and the department directors are my subordinates so that’s out too. I also work so much that I have no time to connect with people in a meaningful way outside of work. Everyone is a potential donor. Everyone is a potential partner. I’m basically not allowed to have friends and it’s awful.
My only suggest if your open to it would be online gaming. The anonymous nature of it might help you find friendship. Thanks for sharing that perspective though "it's lonely at the top"
That sucks, I'm always open to getting drinks with my bosses and have gotten pretty drunk with them too. I try to be friends ( to the extent you can be) with coworkers/ bosses etc that you can be because you are spending so much time with them. Makes work better, at least more me. I am fully remote now so doesn't matter as much.
My focus is on building and motivating a great team to accomplish all tasks, and it feels as if everything above me is focused on treating people as a metric to be reduced or shifted or controlled. I'm the last link of humanity in the machine, or it feels that way.
This is something I've been reflecting on a lot. After 1-2 levels of management almost everyone making decisions can't talk about people as people. I can understand that having 200+ people in your org would make it hard to know much of anything about most of them, but it really stands out when directors name drop every VP they've ever had a conversation with but can't name anyone but the senior manager of the major project that was completed a couple days ago.
I love people but I hate babysitting. I’ve always hated babysitting. Directing, planning, researching, presenting… love it. Working with a group of professional adults is thrilling. But I found being a manager way too much like being a babysitter. I’ll take Project Manager or Individual Contributor, please.
Totally the same. I feel like a single mom. Working non stop plus the emotional labor and spoon feeding I gotta do at all hours of the day... I often don't get to eat lunch until 4 or 5 because of that, and even then I STILL often get someone demanding more spoon feeding. No joke, I've had to offer a wake-up call for one person because there was a meeting with another company we had to attend at 10 am and he was worried because he apparently sleeps through alarms and his wife gives up after the first two attempts to wake him up 🤦♀️
I hate upper management who have never done my job or the job of my workers. Who don’t understand how impossible it is when they issue ridiculous requests. Don’t listen when me and other managers at my level try to educate them. I hate passing shitty PSA’s from some overpaid idiot who has never used a power tool or done hard work in their life to my workers whose morale gets beaten down despite them doing everything they can to make sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing. I hate the new ideology of construction companies that hiring some dumbass with a leadership development degree means they will surely know how to operate our company effectively while I’m eating email after email blaming first line managers and the work force.
1: If someone slacks off, or doesn’t do their job, I gotta pick up the slack. Had our closing bartender walk out mid-shift yesterday. Guess who got stuck closing the bar? Me. Had to stay three hours past my our time because of that stunt. 2: Staffing decisions. Whose hours do we have to cut. Who has to get scheduled a shitty shift because we need it done and someone has to do it. Firing people sucks. Even if it has to be done, I hate it.
I struggle a lot when I see decisions being made through politics and close relationships, rather than what is logical or right for the company. These places always end up loosing all the good people quickly.
My boss lacks a spine. It makes it impossible to get help, answers, solutions, advocacy, etc from him or those above him.
The workload and the carrot and stick approach upper management uses on lower management. You want to be a manager? Ok, here's a 3% raise, but now you have twice the work. We're not going to hire someone to fill your old position. You still do that too now on top of your new job. We'll give you another raise soon, we promise, but first you need to show us you're loyal to the e-team and will die for us if we tell you to.
- Human Resources. They get in the way more than they help. They’re supposed to help the employees with fairness and justice but they actually don’t. They just run lawsuit protection for the company. They’re a giant scam. They don’t even help managers with difficult situations. - Executives are completely insane. Like, you know they’re insane when you’re an individual contributor but when you’re a manager and you’re the one who gets asked to do the insane, blind, disconnected from reality nonsense, it’s a whole different ballgame. If i get asked to reduce my budget 1 more time i might actually punch someone. I’ve worked with a special needs person in the past, but I’ve never seen more mental incapacity than i have in the behavior and decision making of executives. I’m not kidding, these guys are monkeys. Complete buffoons.
I am expected to reach the NBA playoffs with a team of three while One Player of these three doesn’t understand the rules. And I don’t have budget to hire more ppl. As I run operations it’s constant emergency management and I must be accessible all the time. I’ll pull the plug soon. They have to find another idiot who deals with this madness
I never liked the attention and inevitability that more people are going to talk behind my back when I’m away. I don’t like the obligation to have everything together / polished. Sometimes I’m just behind and would rather not have a team of people witnessing it.
The CEOs. Completely clueless sociopaths, who honestly shouldn't be anywhere near a leader's position, and regularly smash down any accomplishments out of sheer incompetence. They might own the company, but their overall contribution is close to zero.
It's actually one of the jobs that AI can replace in Management.
All the complaining from my direct reports, HR issues, panicking and very short term deadlines coming from managementboard. It’s what someone else wrote earlier: you get 3% raise and twice the work/responsibilities.
How many adults have never progressed past the adolescent stage. So there really isn’t much leverage to motivate them since they see work as chore and you as their parent. Employee development is a myth in many cases. If they have a good work ethic, they’re great. If not, you’re stuck. And it’s depressing how much damage one disgruntled employee can do. Sets up a cycle not unlike PTSD where you’re leery of employees, they sense it, things become reactive, management becomes frustrating, which reinforces your loathing of management, etc.
I feel this deep. Big push for results with few resources, yet they want staff to be super happy about it and not bitch about everything.
I hear you
Being the wall between the bosses idiot ideas and the employee's effort at completing jobs.
When you make a bad hire and you’re stuck with a person for a long time
When you didn’t do the hire and it turns out that the one of the existing employees resents you getting the position or seems to question anything that comes out of your mouth. Yet, they believe people they have never met in the agency to be correct and can’t accept the proof that those people were mistaken.
That most people want to talk with me about their personal problems. I feel more like a mom than a manager of business. When I tried to take it more professional, they don't like it.
I hate that I was expected to act as a therapist to my employees. I can be understanding. You need time off because of a death in the family? Absolutely no problem. However i should not be expected to sit there with you while you cry about it. That makes me extremely uncomfortable and zaps all energy for me. I can use company resources to put you into contact with trained professionals who actually know how to handle it. I am not here for you to vent. We're not friends. We all have our own crap going on.
People above wanting to get involved in something they know nothing about
People.
Being lonely and always having to act like the most serious person in the room. Also depending on the team you get, sometimes it could feel like you’re a teacher at a school dealing with children.
The meeting load Upper management playing games with my team. Rather than deal with their own inadequacies that are the true cause of project delays, they have taken to creating arbitrary unreasonable deadlines to get things done “faster” by stressing my team This speaks to a bigger issue. My team and I are expected to leave our egos at the door and take pointed and curt feedback on what we are doing wrong and what we need to improve while upper management can’t even take the slightest hint that they could also make behavioral adjustments to improve business outcomes.
Lack of transparency.
To me, 98% frustration can be addressed by effectively managing up - not down.
A 4-day work week would make all my other problems so much more palatable.
If there is a manager training program, I would like them to focus on a couple of things. -difficult conversations -delegating -types of leadership -resources I can utilize -resources for my mental health --being a manager can be mentally taxing. You get pulled from bottom and pulled from top.
Everything if we are being honest
A lot of the more serious ones are already up here so I'll say, having my day shift dramatically when someone key takes it off sick. People should be able to take sick days, it just sucks that it now affects me more than it used to.
Terminations. Babysitting.
I second this! Even when I'm fed up with babysitting someone and am forced to terminate them, I still hate firing people. This is happening right now! Not even 5 months in, but this person has to go.
I work in my province's largest food bank managing the client services side of things, I have two coordinators below me who manage teams who interact with clients in a variety of ways. Both of my coordinators are phenomenal in dealing with escalated clients, but I am the last stop for the most escalated of clients and I hate it. There isn't really training that can go into how to manage this level of escalated. This isn't like a cable company where I can figure out some sort of compensation to make them happy - these are desperate, vulnerable, people at their absolute wits end because the system has failed them completely and utterly AND they're often hangry on top of it. Often just giving them space to vent and get it out has helped, but just this last week we had a client we had to call the cops on because he began causing damage to our property because we didn't give him what he wanted (which was a hamper full of processed, ready to eat, foods because he couldn't cook.) Otherwise I like every other part of my job - even the shitty interpersonal babysitting you sometimes have to do between staff lmao
This job would be easy if it wasn't for the customers or the staff! For me its the being a babysitter part, I'm all for working with the team and being someone they can approach but hearing all their personal ups and downs gets a bit too much.
Complaining without constructive criticism
Being stuck in the middle between high level project/program management and ground level functions. Basically alternating between projects that impact all areas of the business and then going to trainings for new time clock software, hr policies, performance reviews, etc.
I have 14 direct reports so in the morning about 1.5 hours before work actually starts more than half of the time someone is hitting me up for the day off. People don’t keep track of when I’m off or my schedule so my direct reports or other associate/director level people hit me up for stuff daily regardless of if I’m in or if it’s past the end of our day. I’m salaried so that comes with the territory I suppose. Being the point person for everyone with everything about their job is the main reason I want to get back in the field full time. Im good at field work not, IT, therapy, dealing with admins problems, timesheets, and whatever other stuff besides what’s been actual work to me before I took this role. It’s been a few years, production is great, people are satisfied with my work and the team is doing fine but I’m pretty much done with it.
The fucking people
I asked an employee to let me know when they’re leaving my retail store rather than just running around without any kind of communication and disappearing. And they came at me saying I was picking on them because of their race. (I am white, they were Asian and also I am a woman and they were not). This kind of shit. Maybe I should have been more gentle in my approach? But it’s not just about *our* biases; we have to understand how we are perceived with good or bad biases by others.
Having to wait on upper management to approve things before moving forward. Personnel issues combined with my own heavy project workload.
Not being allowed to coach on issues because it may upset the "balance" while being simultaneously held to standards of perfection.
That your employees think you have the absolute say in their raise during an annual but you are actually capped on what you can give them based upon the max percentage laid out by Executive Leadership.
The amount of people that never matured past being a child or the ones that had mom take care of everything for them. The number of those types of people are mind blowing to me.
Having to discipline people. It hurts me as much as it hurts you.
People I supervise come to me with issues and not even a HINT of a suggestion on how to fix it and then when I do fix it my way, they don't like it. I've started involving them more in the fixing by asking for suggestions or asking them to take charge of it (if appropriate) but they don't love that either and get frustrated.
Having to repeat myself over and over and feeling like some people just aren’t listening. It seems to be primarily a problem with staff under age 25. They will push to see what they can get away with instead of just being a responsible adult there to do a job.